Members of the establishment media are very unhappy about Vice President Kamala Harris’s failure to provide policy specifics during each of her only three interviews since joining the race.
Several outlets slammed Harris in September for delivering only vague solutions to problems unchecked and, in some cases, fueled by the Biden-Harris administration.Harris is caught in a catch-22: She cannot campaign on policies to fix crime, inflation, and border security without undermining the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, but she must tout the administration’s policies to validate her record and candidacy.
The conundrum is likely why Harris does not give policy prescriptions and instead repeats scripted lines and slogans that appear evasive. A near-majority (48 percent) of Americans believe Harris just says what she thinks people want to hear, an Economist/YouGov poll found Wednesday, while only 36 percent say Harris says what she believes.
The media have noticed Harris’s evasiveness.
CNN’s Stephen Collinson titled an article, “Harris isn’t giving the specifics some undecided voters say they want.” He slammed Harris as “either unwilling or unable to spell out a comprehensive blueprint for exactly what she would do as the 47th president,” noting that she “mostly stuck to broad themes and headlines” at a gathering on Tuesday with the National Association of Black Journalists.
Politico’s Holly Otterbein, Lauren Egan, and Brittany Gibson roasted Harris for sticking to “her script” during the gathering. “[S]he did not break much ground or stray far from her talking points during the near hour-long conversation,” they wrote. “Harris did little to draw any distance from President Joe Biden’s administration.”
The Hill’s Alex Gangitano mocked Harris for failing to go “into detail on plans to fix the immigration system, fight climate change, curb gun violence and expand access to health care” and pointed out that she “also has not done very many interviews, and when she has, she’s pivoted to general statements on policy.”
Politico Playbook’s Eugine Daniels, Rachael Bade, and Ryan Lizza — known as allies of the establishment — admitted that Harris “resisted efforts to pin her down on key subjects, even growing testy at a couple of points at being interrupted when she lapsed into stump-speech talking points.”
“She wouldn’t say, for instance, if she would expand abortion rights beyond the parameters of Roe or identify any particular policy where she would differ from President JOE BIDEN on Gaza,” they wrote.
“The Harris-Walz ticket is on pace to do fewer interviews and press conferences than any major party’s presidential pairing in modern U.S. history,” Axios’s Alex Thompson and Torey Van Oot reported in an article titled, “The Harris-Walz media strategy: Hide from the press.”
The media’s focus on Harris’s lack of interviews comes as the Harris campaign seeks to conduct more interviews in the future, potentially with CBS News’s 60 Minutes, the New York Times reported, but the Harris campaign would prefer hosts who do not press Harris on her record.
Harris has only performed three television interviews since joining the race. “Every big news network has a standing request with the Harris campaign for an interview,” according to the Times.
“Axios asked Harris’ campaign whether she was available for a five- to 10-minute interview to discuss her position on immigration,” Thompson posted on X Wednesday. “A campaign spokesperson declined.”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.
