BYRON YORK: So many don’t want to know so much about Kamala Harris.
During the Sept. 10 debate with Trump, Harris stirred a lot of curiosity when she revealed she is a gun owner. Many observers didn’t know that and wanted to learn more. What kind of gun? How long has Harris had it? Does she shoot it? Has she ever used it? Neither Harris nor her staff offered any further details. Then, during her town hall with Oprah Winfrey, when Winfrey said she had not known that Harris owned a gun, Harris replied, “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot, sorry,” and then broke into laughter. Harris added, “Probably should not have said that, but my staff will deal with that later.”
Then, on Friday, a member of Harris’s staff, campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod, appeared on CNN. Anchor Jim Acosta had some basic questions about the gun. “You are on Kamala Harris’s staff — can you give us some more information?” Acosta said to Elrod. “I’m just curious from a biographical background, what do we know about this firearm that she owns and when did she get it?”
Elrod confirmed that Harris owns a gun and then said, “I can’t really comment more than that” beyond saying that Harris “staunchly supports the Second Amendment.”
After that, I posted that Harris “keeps saying she is a gun owner but won’t say anything about the gun or gun she owns. Her staff won’t, either.” The reaction on X was instant and hostile — and from another journalist. “What f***ing business is it of yours?” said the journalist Keith Olbermann. Then, from the longtime journalist and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis came the comment, “So f***ing what?” And then followed the X observers, who added things like “It’s none of your damn business” and “Who cares? It’s her business.”
The point of all this is to shed some light on Harris’s continuing refusal to reveal precisely where she stands on a number of issues important to voters. Why should she? She has a group of journalists on her side who actively do not want her to answer more questions, do not want her to be transparent on important issues, do not want her to undergo the scrutiny that until now has been routine for major party candidates. They are willing to defend her decision not to talk aggressively. When it comes to where Harris stands, they don’t want to know. And so far, she’s not telling them — or us.
Obama famously wrote in The Audacity of Hope that “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” It helped enormously that he was on his first presidential bid, and that he had the showmanship and chops to really sell what Obama biographer David Garrow called “the composite character” that Team Barry had carefully crafted. Kamala has run for the White House once already, and prior to that was a prominent California politician, making her an infinitely better-known quantity politically, and thus her party’s operatives with bylines are forced to play dumb to help get her over the finish line.