RICHARD GOLDBERG: “Let’s have an honest conversation about what happened last night in Michigan and what’s going on right now with the @VP team’s clean-up attempt:”
She was not on a teleprompter. She was not hiding behind a press release or a surrogate. It was Harris being confronted by a radical pro-Hamas group asking her to consider an arms embargo on Israel. When confronted with radicals in her face, she said she’s open to it.
This is not the first time this has happened. Flashback: September 2021. Harris visits a school, and a kid goes off about Israel. Her response? “Your truth cannot be suppressed, and it must be heard.”
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They were her words — not a carefully crafted statement or post on X by a surrogate. It has happened before. They reinforce what we’ve seen for months as Harris became much more publicly hostile to Israel than Biden.
Only Kamala Harris can speak to what she said. Not Phil Gordon. Not a Jewish liaison. Not a communications director. Kamala Harris. Until she stands for a press conference and takes questions on it, her words in Michigan stand — no one else’s.
It’s impossible to imagine this headline from CNN if the parties were reversed:
Buried lede: Replacement for Democrat presidential candidate who can’t get through softball interviews yet another presidential candidate who can’t get through softball interviews!
And as Jim Treacher has said:
UPDATE: Note that Harris’s strategy is working for her so far. Philip Klein writes that “The Coddling of Kamala Is Taking Left-Wing Bias to a New Stratosphere,” adding that “I was a conservative journalist during the Obama era, and I have to say, even he had periods of negative coverage. I cannot recall anything like what we are now witnessing:”
Politico’s Playbook has a story out today, titled “Why Harris Isn’t Taking Questions,” that once again is a meta-analysis of how amazing her campaign is and how there’s no sense in messing with a winning streak. It notes that she has been informally chatting with reporters on her plane off the record, which, Dave Weigel surmises, is why we haven’t been hearing more complaints about access. This makes campaign reporters look even worse. Essentially, it means that access is all about their own insecurities rather than about actually doing their jobs and informing the public by asking a candidate for the presidency to answer challenging questions about her positions on important issues.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of the media comes from the Harris campaign itself.
“What is the incentive for her [to take more questions]?” Politico quotes somebody close to the campaign as saying. “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out.”
Exactly. If you can get away with scripted events and the media are happily behaving as a mere extension of your public-relations team, why bother?
As Treacher wrote today, the MSM side of the DNC-MSM are happy to go along with their folie à deux. “Nobody wants to be the reporter who gave us more President Trump. That’s all it is. They don’t care that we know they’re lying. Some of them, I suspect, actually enjoy that part. Anything that makes your enemy angry is good, and lying to them works every time.”