OLD AND BUSTED: The 18 Minute Gap.
The New Hotness? Too Bad to Check: CNN’s Big Kamala-Walz Interview Will Be … 18 Minutes?
In all, the joint interview in Savannah with her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz – their first since becoming the Democratic presidential ticket – provided one of the clearest looks into Harris’ positions and her plans for the presidency.
“How should voters look at some of the changes that you’ve made?” Bash asked Harris. “Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information? Is it because you were running for president in a Democratic primary? And should they feel comfortable and confident that what you’re saying now is going to be your policy moving forward?” …
“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” she said. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed – and I have worked on it – that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”
Apparently, Harris used the same exact sentence to explain her border and immigration policy reversals too:
And she pointed to her record as California attorney general, when she prosecuted gangs accused of cross border trafficking, as an indication of her values on immigration.
“My values have not changed. So that is the reality of it. And four years of being vice president, I’ll tell you, one of the aspects, to your point, is traveling the country extensively,” she said, pointing to her 17 visits to Georgia since becoming vice president. “I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems.”
If your values haven’t changed, then … your policies won’t reflect your values? Or is it that your earlier policies didn’t reflect your values? While this isn’t quite a word salad — it’s at least cognizably coherent — it’s also utterly void of substance. It’s not an explanation of a reasoned process by which a candidate has concluded that earlier positions should be abandoned for better policies. It reveals nothing at all about reversing just one policy, let alone an entire agenda of policy positions that Harris took publicly in 2019 and in 2020, including on CNN.
If that’s the quality of the conversation, small wonder CNN will only run 18 minutes of it — although that has still not yet been confirmed. The practice of taping an interview for editing and later airing is common, but the refusal to release a full transcript seems very odd for a news organization. This is the major-party ticket defending an incumbency; anything they say that’s not specifically off the record should be reported, especially given the lack of media access to this ticket ever since it launched.
In addition to the plentiful word salads, a spectacular Kamala Kinsley gaffe:
“I’ve got 68 days to go with this election, so I’m not putting the cart before the horse. But…I think it’s really important. I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion. I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who was a Republican.”
“Was a Republican.”