In 2019 and 2023, The Times' Astead Herndon interviewed presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Vice President Harris. Yesterday in The Times' "On Politics" newsletter, its host, Jess Bidgood, asked Herndon for his impressions of Harris as an interviewee. Below I'm providing segments of Herndon remarks while omitting Bidgood's questions; it's only the journalist's general observations that are of interest.
I thought this might be a kind of helpful guide to watching tonight's CNN bash with Harris and running mate Tim Walz. I was about to write my own justification of this exercise until I noticed CNN had done it for me. "[She] will be hoping ... to avoid the types of unforced errors that plagued her first presidential bid in 2019, as well as her early days as vice president."
This retrospective might be helpful in gauging your assessment of her success or failure in avoiding past blunders; you'll be re-familiarized with specifics. Some of Herndon's observations are neutral, e.g., hearing Harris speak as though she's grilling Brett Kavanaugh, or her insistence that race and gender were irrelevant to Biden's VP strategy. But it's how viewers interpret Harris' style and responses that will matter. Here's Herndon.
"In both those interviews, I was trying to sift through platitudes to try to find a specific vision or a story that she was telling about herself, because it wasn’t really clear."
"I asked her if she liked her [veep] job, and she said she did — but that she didn’t like doing this. I was putting her in a position to self-reflect, and to articulate her own story of growth and change. I thought she would want to tell a story on that front, and was surprised that she did not."
"She does not view herself with labels and feels confined by those boxes.... I don’t think she loses any sleep over whether you think she’s a moderate or progressive. I think she thinks, 'I’m a person who makes big and hard decisions, with all the evidence in front of me.' That’s what’s mattered most as a prosecutor and attorney general, and I think that’s how she views political leadership."
"Some of the tone of the interviews feels like the Senate hearing version of Harris — which is something lots of Democrats love."
"Skepticism is what she has overcome in the last month, by showing that she’s an improved candidate who can get people excited, and then showing that some of the questions people have about her ideology are not as important as what she does represent."
"A portion of the interview that she didn’t engage in was when I asked her about her own identity and its role in her selection as Joe Biden’s vice president. She essentially said that it didn’t matter why she was chosen — it only mattered that she was chosen. And that’s really turned out to be true.... Whether race or gender had anything to do with that selection initially is now sort of a moot point."
"I want to know what becomes a priority under a Harris administration that wasn’t prioritized during Biden’s. The labels aren’t important, but labels are proxies for a story you’re telling the country about yourself.... Even if that is a rejection of traditional boxes, like race and gender and ideology, I would want her to explain why rejecting those is important to her."
Ugh! Seriously? Gods, I hate the pundit class! They always ask such stupid questions! It is the idiots in the media that are making a big deal out of race or gender, not her! And if she dares to say even one word about race or gender, the jackasses in the media, especially the supercharged jackasses in the right wing media cesspool will jump all over it and accuse her of being the one playing the "race" and "woman" cards. Enough already!
Posted by: Anne J | August 29, 2024 at 09:29 AM