Kamala Harris Snubs Media in First Week as Presumptive Nominee — Does ‘Drag Race’ Before One-on-One Interviews

Vice President Kamala Harris listens during a virtual tour of the Community Vaccination Ce
Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson

Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to sit for one-on-one interview after becoming the Democrat party’s de facto nominee last week.

Harris’s lack of media accessibility suggests she might run a similar campaign to President Joe Biden, who seldomly held solo press conferences and rarely sat for live interviews.

WATCH — YAF Attendee: Calling Kamala Harris “Brat” is the Best Tactic the Left Has:

Matt Perdie / Breitbart News

It also indicates Harris might be concerned about answering questions related to her radical record. GovTrack’s scorecard ranked her as the most liberal senator in 2019, further left than socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), leading writers of the New York Times to rate Harris as the least electable of ten possible Democrat nominees. More is here on Harris’s radical record.

Despite avoiding the media, the vice president appeared on Friday’s episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, and a video of the show, in which she claimed that “our rights and freedoms under attack,” went viral.

“Each day, we are seeing our rights and freedoms under attack, including the right of everyone to be who they are, love who they love, openly and with pride,” the 59-year-old vice president told the Drag Race cast.

Harris has shied away from the press in recent years after numerous gaffes as vice president. Harris is infamous for spouting odd phrases and explanations for simple ideas. In 2022, for example, she marveled over Venn diagrams. Another time she rambled about the “significance of the passage of time.” When asked in 2021 by NBC News’s Lester Holt if she traveled to the border to inspect the southern invasion, she replied that she had not been to Europe yet.

WATCH — Cotton: Harris Is a “San Francisco Liberal Who Cannot Keep This Country Safe”:

Harris is reportedly working to prevent mistakes. Since 2022, Harris began working on a plan to “develop better and more personal relationships with parts of the news media that set the agenda for Washington,” ensuring that “reporters from nonwhite media outlets were invited to all of her events and had access to her,” Semafor’s Max Tani reported Monday:

But since early 2022, the vice president has worked to develop better and more personal relationships with parts of the news media that set the agenda for Washington. Publicly, she’s become the more accessible alternative to her stage-managed boss, sitting for on-the-record media interviews with numerous outlets. Privately, she’s been more willing to mix it up with journalists assigned to cover her.

She’s invited a parade of prominent television anchors and media executives to dine with her at the Naval Observatory, given personal tours of her garden to journalists from diverse backgrounds, and shaped trips to do media appearances with the outlets serving Democratic-leaning groups the White House refers to as “coalition media.”

Former staffers told Semafor that Harris took particular care to ensure reporters from nonwhite media outlets were invited to all of her events and had access to her. She also fostered personal relationships with publishers of Black local media outlets, including Danny Bakewell Sr., the publisher of LA Sentinel; Hardy Brown, the founder of the weekly Black Voice News; and Amelia Ashley-Ward, the publisher of the Sun-Reporter, San Francisco’s oldest Black newspaper.

Additional media personalities that Harris reportedly cultivates are MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart, CNN’s Bakari Sellers, TikTok star and Harris’s niece Meena Harris, and radio host Charlamagne tha God.

WATCH — Michigan Auto Worker: “America’s Done for” if Harris Wins:

Harris’s relationship with the media will likely be tested, as her so-called “honeymoon” phase winds down. The media so far applauded Harris’s candidacy in the wake of Democrat fears about Biden’s political viability, but Harris will need to convince voters, not the media, of her presidential viability. “Harris and emerging campaign brain trust share the view that shifting the fundamentals of the race will be difficult with a calcified electorate and fragmented media environment,” Politico Playbook reported Monday.

Only 39 percent of registered independents say Harris is “qualified” to be president, an Economist/YouGov poll found last week. And among the 54 percent of registered voters who believe there was a “cover-up of Biden’s health,” 92 percent say Harris was “involved,” at least a little, in the cover-up.

Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.

Authored by Wendell Husebø via Breitbart July 29th 2024