The hype preceding Kamala Harris’ first and utterly unremarkable “sit-down” interview as a 2024 presidential candidate is a reminder that nobody running against Donald Trump is ever graded fairly. Imagine arguing that Harris, an elected district attorney, attorney general of California, U.S. senator and incumbent vice president, should treat an interview with a CNN reporter as a high-stakes affair; that is, that she could say something that made her appear less qualified than Trump.
Imagine arguing that Harris, an attorney general of California, U.S. senator and vice president, should treat an interview with a CNN reporter as a high-stakes affair.
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, apparently believing Trump’s ticket needed even more misogyny, suggested in a social media post Thursday that Harris would be incapable of holding her own. It is as it has ever been since Trump has been on the political stage: We watch to see if anything Trump says isn’t a lie, and we watch to see if other politicians say anything that’s the least bit false. In an ideal world, nobody would have been sitting on the edge of their seats wondering if Harris would sound knowledgeable or prepared for an interview — if only because she could never sound less knowledgeable or less prepared than her opponent so often does.
The interest in the CNN sit-down was elevated, though, in large part because the media had made it such a big issue that she hadn’t done such an interview in the first place. And along with the suggestions that a candidate is deliberately avoiding the media come the suggestions that she’s afraid of the media. Harris exhibited no such fear Thursday. She came across as the typical politician — and I mean that in every sense. She directly answered the questions that she thought would benefit her candidacy, and she was deliberately evasive on specifics.
To her credit, I think that the American media has wrongly contributed to what I’ll call the fetishization of a president’s first day in office. No, the vice president didn’t give a convincing answer when asked what she’d do “day one,” and yes, CNN’s Dana Bash asked the question again in a bid to try to force her to answer it. But the bigger problem isn’t so much that Harris didn’t give a straight answer; it’s an absurd question — even if it’s one that political journalists have come to think they have to ask.
In setting the stage for the interview, recorded at Kim’s Café in Savannah, Georgia, CNN showed a clip of Trump saying of Harris, “She’s not a smart person.” That’s the same tack Vance took in his social media post that likened Harris to a young beauty contestant completely overwhelmed by an interview question. It’s hard to know exactly what part of that attack on Harris’ smarts we should assign to sexism and which part we should assign to racism. But there’s no denying the presence of both. Former President Barack Obama, president of the Harvard Law Review and a “senior lecturer” in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, was one of the most cerebral presidents we’ve seen, and, yet, there were billboards and bumper stickers that, referring to the country where his father was born, read, “Somewhere in Kenya, a village is missing its idiot.”
Harris doesn’t want to get trapped in questions about identity.
But Harris, as my colleague Zeeshan Aleem recently pointed out, doesn’t want to get trapped in questions about identity. We saw that when she addressed Bash’s question about Trump’s lying and saying she only recently described herself as Black. She told Bash, “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.” Nor did she focus on race and sex when asked about the viral photo of her grandniece watching her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. She said she wants to be the president for everybody.
Her opponents are going to work hard, though, to reduce her to those elements of her identity. And slyly suggest that because of those elements she’s not up to the task.
But they’re the ones seemingly not up to the task, seeing as how they set a bar so low that she couldn’t help but sail right over it.
In response to the interview, Trump described it as “BORING!!!”
He wasn’t wrong about that. But I think Harris is banking on voters’ choosing boring over the drama — no, let’s be real and call it the chaos — that Trump inevitably brings.