After avoiding a penetrating interview with a journalist for the first month of her sudden presidential campaign, first What was particularly striking on Thursday was how routine it seemed.
CNN’s Dana Bash spoke with Harris and her running mate Tim Walz at a restaurant in Georgia. She asked her about some of the issues she’s changed her position on, the historic nature of her candidacy, what she’ll do on her first day in office, and whether she’ll invite a Republican to join her cabinet (she said yes).
What Bash didn’t ask – and the Democratic candidate didn’t volunteer – is why the took so long to sign up for an interview and ask if she would run again.
Without any interview snippets or extended press conferences as a candidate to pick apart, Republican Donald Trump and his campaign had turned Harris’s failure to handle journalists into an issue in itself. She had promised to rectify that by the end of August, and she did just in time.
In the interview, recorded earlier Thursday at Kim’s Cafe in Savannah, Georgia, Bash occasionally pressed Harris when the vice president didn’t answer a question directly. For example, she asked four times what prompted Harris to change her stance on fracking — a controversial way to extract natural gas from the landscape — from her brief 2020 presidential bid.
“How should voters view some of the policy changes?” Bash asked, wondering if the experience had set Harris on a different path. “Should they have complete confidence that what you say now is going to be the policy going forward?”
Bash asked Harris twice if she would do anything differently, such as withholding military aid to Israel, to help reach a Middle East peace deal. Harris stressed the importance of a deal but offered no new details about how to reach one.
When Bash sought a response to Trump, suggesting that Harris was merely recently emphasized her black roots, the vice president quickly waved it away. “Next question,” she said.
CNN political analyst David Axelrod suggested that by not doing interviews earlier, Harris had raised the stakes in what is usually a typical test facing presidential candidates. But after the Bash aired, Axelrod said she “did what she had to do.”
“What she needed to do was be the same person she was on the stage for the past month,” said Axelrod, a former aide to Obama when he was in the White House. He predicted that the interview would ultimately make little difference to the campaign.
To create a personal connection with viewers, Bash asked Walz what he thought of his son’s emotional reaction to this speech at the Democratic Party convention. He also asked for a memorable photo of Harris’ niece from behind as she watched her aunt deliver her speech to the Democrats.
By including Walz in the interview, Harris joined a tradition that has been followed by Donald Trump and Mike Pence, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and Biden and Harris themselves. But the decision was notable for her lack of solo interviews and the compressed nature of her campaign.
Republicans complained that she was using Walz as a crutch, someone to smooth over his boss’s difficult moments and only take up time he could have used to ask Harris questions.
“This is yet another insult from Harris’ campaign to American voters,” the Wall Street Journal said. in an editorial Thursday.
In the end, Bash asked Walz only four questions, one of which was a follow-up. The vice presidential nominee did not engage in the discussion or add anything to Harris’s answers.
This was Bash’s second high-profile moment this campaign. The Inside Politics host moderated the debate between Trump and President Biden in June, an event where reporters were overshadowed by Biden’s poor performance, ultimately leading to his give up his re-election bid.
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.