It’s been three weeks since Kamala Harris said she wanted to schedule a major interview before the end of August; last night, she met that pledge. As successful as her campaign has been at generating momentum since she became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, her failure to engage in robust questioning so far has become, if not a major issue, at least A Thing.
In one sense, then, the fact of the interview mattered more for Harris than its content – so long as she didn’t make any headline-grabbing howlers. While she had a few tricky moments on CNN, she cleared that bar: as David Smith sets out in this analysis, the interview was “radically normal … She turned a much-hyped first interview as nominee into a soon-to-be-forgotten pit stop along the campaign trail”. Here’s what else we learned.
Policy – and changing her mind
In seeking to appeal to the progressive voters of the Democratic base during her unsuccessful run at the presidency in 2019, Harris committed to a number of positions that are a problem for her more centrist campaign today. That was a theme of the CNN interview. Three times, Harris said that her values have not changed – but she also suggested that four years of being vice-president, “travelling the country extensively”, and seeking to “build consensus” had shaped where she stands today.
In 2019, she said that she would implement a federal ban on fracking – an important issue in the must-win state of Pennsylvania, one of the world’s biggest sources of natural gas. “As vice-president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking,” she told CNN, adding: “What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
On similar questions about immigration and her U-turn on decriminalising border crossings, she said she would “enforce our laws as president going forward”. Meanwhile, on the Israel-Gaza conflict, she trod the same line as in her speech at the Democratic national convention, saying she was “unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defence” but noting that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, and we have got to get a deal done”.
She waffled a bit when asked what she would do on day one, pointing to general policy priorities rather than any specific action. But there were no glaring errors, and her implicit distancing from her more progressive positions from 2019 will have left few viewers convinced by Republican claims that she is a leftwing radical.
Her view of Biden’s competence
The other inevitable feature of this interview was a question about the president’s ability to do his job. “You insisted that President Biden is extraordinarily strong,” Dana Bash said. “Given where we are now, do you have any regrets about what you told the American people?”
“No, not at all,” Harris replied. She said that “he has the intelligence, the commitment, and the judgment and disposition that I think the American people rightly deserve in their president”. Nor did she distance herself from his policies – which would be tricky, obviously – or even really set out a contrast with her own plans for the next four years.
At the same time, she found a formulation that maintained her loyalty but cast herself as the candidate of the future, and the Biden-Trump wars as a relic of the past: it was time to “turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies,” she said.
Then she deftly focused that point as a criticism of Trump’s impact on American discourse: “I’m talking about an era that started about a decade ago where there is some suggestion, warped I believe it to be, that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down instead of … who you lift up.”
Little interest in questions about race and gender
One of the most striking features of the interview was Harris’ steadfast refusal to engage in questions about her status as a history-making candidate – whether in terms of Trump’s bigoted claim that she “was Indian all the way and then all of sudden she became a Black woman”, or in dwelling on her campaign as a powerful symbol of American progress.
Asked about Trump’s comments, she said: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.” “That’s it?” Bash said. “That’s it,” Harris replied. And when Bash concluded the interview by asking what her gender and race mean in the campaign, she said vaguely that it was “humbling”, but noted: “I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”
That feels emblematic of her campaign’s wider approach: let others talk about the unprecedented nature of her candidacy, and tell voters that all she’s interested in is improving their lives.
A supporting role for Tim Walz
For most of the interview, Tim Walz was basically a mascot: understandably, Bash focused her questioning on the candidate for president, and he wisely did not interrupt Harris or elaborate on her answers.
The questions that were directed at Walz were about claims of misleading statements in the past – and about the viral video of his son Gus proudly shouting “that’s my dad!” during his speech at the Democratic national convention.
Walz didn’t really give a satisfying answer to the criticism he has faced for saying that he carried weapons in war even though he was never deployed in a war zone, saying merely that “my grammar is not always correct”.
In talking about his family and that video of his son, Walz provided probably the most human moments of the interview. “I’m grateful for so many reasons to be on this ticket,” he said. “But that moment … was just such a visceral, emotional moment that I’m just grateful I got to experience it. And I’m so proud of him.”
The Trump campaign’s reaction
You will be shocked to learn that Trump and Vance did not cover themselves in glory in their response: even before the interview aired in full, Trump said that Harris “rambled incoherently”. (He clearly hasn’t been watching his own rallies.) And Vance posted a blatantly sexist message on X, comparing Harris to a Miss Team America contestant who infamously garbled her answer to a question about Americans not knowing about geography.
After the interview aired, the Trump campaign statement criticised Harris for not “addressing the crime crisis in this nation”. (Crime has in fact mostly fallen under Biden.) They also said she “spent a mere three minutes and 25 seconds talking about the economy and two minutes and 36 seconds talking about immigration”.
If that is a pretty weird way to analyse an interview in which CNN chose the topics and which had a half-hour time limit, it does key into a sense that the abbreviated campaign has limited discussion of Harris’ agenda. The next big chance to discuss it will be on 10 September, when the two candidates meet for a debate in Pennsylvania.
