During the lead-in to CNN’s much anticipated interview with Vice-President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz, which the network showed on Thursday night, the correspondent and anchor Dana Bash described what would follow as a “defining moment” in the race for the White House. That was a bit of hype for what was otherwise an illuminating piece of television, the stakes for which had been raised by the Harris campaign’s tardiness in agreeing to an on-the-record interview with a mainstream media outlet. As Fox News had been constantly reminding its viewers, more than a month had passed since Joe Biden had dropped out of the race.
In the first part of the interview, which took place at Kim’s Café in Savannah, Georgia, Bash calmly pressed Harris on two matters that many political commentators regard as potential weaknesses for her: the Biden Administration’s economic record and Harris’s changing stances over the years on some contentious policy issues. The Vice-President acknowledged that “prices, in particular for groceries, are still too high,” and she mentioned her proposals to expand the child tax credit and subsidize first-time home buyers. She also listed a number of the Administration’s achievements, including capping the cost of insulin for seniors at thirty-five dollars a month, creating eight hundred thousand manufacturing jobs, and making the U.S. economy less dependent on global supply chains for basic needs. “I’ll say that that’s good work,” she said. “There’s more to do, but that’s good work.”
Indeed, it is, and Harris’s eagerness to defend the underrated Biden economic record was commendable. Reacting to the charges of inconsistency on policy issues, she said, “I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is: my values have not changed.” But she also emphasized the commitments she is making now. Pointing to the Administration’s hefty investments in green energy, she said she had come to realize that “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean-energy economy without banning fracking.” When Bash asked her about raising her hand at a 2019 Democratic primary debate to support decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings, she replied, “I believe there should be consequences. We have laws that have to be followed and enforced that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally.”
Both of these statements—which will disappoint, even enrage, some Democratic activists—reflected a straightforward political calculus. In the critical electoral state of Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign is trying to make fracking a pivotal issue, and polls suggest that voters nationwide consider the issue of immigration and the southern border secondary only to the economy. Harris and her advisers clearly believe that being accused of flip-flopping is a lesser threat to her campaign than giving her opponent the ammunition to brand her as a radical. They may well be right. Many voters have a jaundiced opinion of politicians to begin with and hardly expect them to display the constancy of a Carthusian monk. Moreover, there is no flip-flopper more unabashed than Trump, a former Democrat who donated to Harris’s 2011 and 2013 campaigns in California. Earlier this year, he boasted, “We broke Roe v. Wade.” Now he is claiming that a second Trump Administration would “be great for women and reproductive rights.”
Bash didn’t ask Harris about abortion. She did ask whether Harris would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, and the Vice-President answered in the affirmative. The idea isn’t without precedent. In 1997, Bill Clinton appointed William S. Cohen, a Republican senator from Vermont, as Defense Secretary. George W. Bush picked Norman Mineta, a California Democrat, as his Secretary of Transportation. In 2009, Barack Obama appointed two Republicans to his first cabinet: Ray LaHood, a former Illinois congressman, who also became Transportation Secretary, and the former C.I.A. boss Robert M. Gates, who stayed on from the Bush Administration as Defense Secretary. (Obama also nominated the Republican senator Judd Gregg for Commerce Secretary, but Gregg withdrew his name.)
In each of these instances, the circumstances were different, but there was a common intent to reassure moderate voters and seize the middle ground. The Harris campaign surely has the same thing in mind. It also wants to highlight the schisms in the Republican Party and remind voters how many of Trump’s supposed colleagues, and former staffers, have warned about the dangers of electing him to a second term. (Earlier this week, H. R. McMaster, the retired Army lieutenant general who was Trump’s national-security adviser from 2017 to 2018, called his former boss “an extremely disruptive person” and said he wouldn’t serve under him again.)
Stripping things down to essentials: Harris is running on the same platform that Biden ran on in 2020, as an antidote to the Trump insanity. The Trump camp wants to turn the election into a referendum on inflation and immigration. Within this basic framework, both candidates have to negotiate the historic norms of American elections, which encompass a willingness to engage with the press and with each other in televised debates.
After the unprecedented drama of the June Presidential debate, Biden’s subsequent withdrawal, and elation among Democrats about the emergence of the Harris-Walz candidacy, Thursday’s interview indicated that the 2024 campaign is now shifting onto this more familiar terrain. It came as a series of new polls confirmed that Harris is still gaining momentum and Trump is struggling to counter her rise. A survey of battleground states from the Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll showed Harris slightly ahead in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina, and with widening leads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (Arizona was tied.) Earlier in the week, a Fox News survey also showed Harris leading in Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona—three places where Trump had been running well ahead of Biden.
Harris’s unflustered performance at Kim’s Café will have reassured Democrats that she is unlikely to trip. Arguably, her most astute answer was her shortest, and it came in response to a question about Trump’s effort, last month, to play the race card against her. “He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity,” Bash said. “Yeah,” Harris replied. “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.” Bash: “That’s it?” Harris: “That’s it.”
In these few words, Harris demonstrated a determination to not get distracted by Trump’s gibes and antics which she will certainly need to draw upon between now and November. In recent days, the former President has staged a political photo op at Arlington National Cemetery and reposted on his social-media account QAnon slogans and sexist, misogynistic remarks about the Vice-President. He’s flailing about. On Thursday night, toward the end of the CNN broadcast, he pronounced the Harris-Walz interview “BORING!!!” If that was the best he could come up with, it was a surefire indication that his opponent hadn’t stumbled. ♦
