Kamala Harris, the Un-Questioned and Un-Questionable Democratic candidate
Vice President and Democratic nominee for President Kamala Harris is giving the press the silent treatment. Will that be her campaign strategy? Next question, please.
“The press has questions for Vice President Kamala Harris,” writes Michael M. Grynbaum in the New York Times, “She isn’t giving a whole lot of answers.”
Actually, she’s not giving any answers because she’s not letting anyone ask her any questions. “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies” might be the new Harris campaign slogan. “Kamala Harris is all but telling Americans they’ll have to elect her to find out what she really believes,” cries a Wall Street Journal editorial, “as the Vice President ducks interviews and the media give her a free ride.”
Since deposing President Biden last month, Harris has continued the Biden-era tradition of no unscripted interviews with the press—not even the friendly press. We saw what happened when Biden did—and Harris has a bit of train-wreck history when she does. I have mentioned before her disastrous 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, where she went off the rails trying to defend the Administration’s border policies (notice I didn’t call her “border czar”). Afterwards she didn’t give an interview for over a year.
“In the nearly three weeks since President Biden withdrew his candidacy, catapulting Ms. Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket,” Grynbaum observes, “the vice president has shown little eagerness to meet journalists in unscripted settings. She has not granted an interview or held a news conference.” New candidate, sadly, same old no story.
While Harris has been busy ducking the press, former President Trump was back at Mar-a-Largo duking it out with them. Earlier this week he gave yet another combative, open-ended, classic Trump, press conference that featured him berating the press for asking “stupid” questions. “Trump’s appearance put attention back on him,” noted the Washington Post, “where he prefers it. Some Democrats said they would welcome him doing news conferences more frequently.” They should be careful what they wish for.
Say what you will about Trump, but you can’t criticize him for hiding from the press—only for not. Just in the last week alone he’s sat down for a controversial—and one where he knew was in hostile territory—interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (where he questioned whether Kamala Harris was actually Black) and gave that stream-of-consciousness press conference at Mar-a-Largo.
But what about the Democrat’s own candidate? Is their strategy to let Trump talk himself out of the Presidency while Harris gives the press and the American people the silent treatment? One only has to listen to former President Clinton’s media advisor, the bombastic James Carville, for a clue. “Where is it written,” Carville asked reporters from the New York Times, “that you have to sit down for a press interview?” Really? From the party that preaches transparency and freedom of the press, which might mean actually talking to the press?
Some in the media aren’t buying it. “The chief indication that the Harris team knows what it’s doing,” writes LA Times columnist Jonah Golberg, “may be its effort to keep the candidate herself under wraps.” The insinuation is, of course, that Harris can’t be trusted off-script.
While playing keep-away from the press might be good campaign strategy, Harris is still the Vice President—and second-in-command in an administration where there are real questions about the President’s ability to capably fulfill his duties. “It is disturbing,” Golberg cautions, “that even as Americans and our allies harbor serious concerns about whether the president is up to an increasingly fraught geopolitical and economic moment, his constitutional understudy has done so little to reassure the public.”
If Harris won’t answer questions from reporters, how will the press, and voters, be getting information about her, her policies, and her plans if elected? Simple, we can just take her word for it. “The vice president’s top priority is earning the support of the voters who will decide this election,” the Times reported a spokesman for Harris saying, adding that the campaign was ‘being strategic, creative and expeditious’ in using TV ads, rallies, local organizers, ‘and of course interviews that reach our target voters’.”
Hmm, “interviews that reach our target voters?” That sounds suspiciously like a “non-interview” interview with only friendly press. And still, Grynbaum notes, “He did not say when such an interview might take place.”
Will we learn about Harris only through tweets and posts? Will she feel the public’s pulse by retweets and likes? It’s not just speculation. “Ms. Harris this week tweeted a photo of her sitting next to President Biden in the White House situation room discussing the Middle East,” noted the Wall Street Journal editorial, “The point is to suggest she’s a co-pilot on Biden foreign policy.” For all we know they could have been discussing what the President had for breakfast. If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d rather have the thousand words.
“The world is more dangerous than it’s been in decades,” the Journal editorial continues, “and Americans deserve to know how the woman aiming to be Commander in Chief Harris would confront these threats.” And what about domestic issues like the economy, and Harris’ favorite subject, the border? Will she pick up where Biden left off? Will she chart her own course? Besides saying “what he [Biden] said,” what does SHE say? These are just some of the questions that reporters want to ask—and answers that voters want to hear.
When Harris ran, however briefly, for President in the 2020 Democratic Primary (she dropped out even before the Iowa caucuses), she advocated a progressive agenda that even Democrats rejected. Since then she’s played a quiet second-fiddle to President Biden, who was already playing a barely audible second fiddle. We know who Harris was in 2020, but who is she now? There has been speculation that by picking a bona-fide progressive in Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, it will free her to drift towards the political center. But since she refuses to be interviewed, who knows who the 2024 Kamala Harris is? Does Kamala?
It may be at least a month before we know. Harris and Trump announced Thursday that they have agreed to three debates—the first will be September 10, and Harris said Friday that she won’t agree to any press interviews until at least after the Democratic convention on August 19. “I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month,” she told the New York Times.
Avoiding the press is nothing new for some Presidents and Presidential candidates, though Biden and Harris have pushed it to its very limit. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Biden hadn’t had even one press conference in 2024 until after the disastrous debate performance. During the 1976 Presidential election Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter, for example, taunted (in Jimmy Carter’s polite, Southern, way) then President Gerald Ford for hiding in the White House’s Rose Garden issuing press releases and performing ceremonial duties while Carter campaigned across the country answering reporters questions. It was dubbed, not surprisingly, the “Rose Garden Strategy.”
Will Harris’ campaign strategy be a Rose Garden Strategy by another name? Rather than hiding out in the Rose Garden, will Harris’ 2024 campaign be known for hiding behind tweets and posts—or behind photos with Joe Biden? Presidents, or a party’s current Presidential nominee, are usually considered the head of their party. Will Harris be both the Democrat’s Unquestioned and the Unquestionable leader?