BYRON YORK: Will CNN interview be Harris’s last?
After her instant ascension to the Democratic nomination, Vice President Kamala Harris waited more than five weeks to do an interview with the press. Now, she has done a single interview, a mostly friendly session with CNN that consisted of 27 minutes of questions and answers. Now that it’s done, a debate awaits a week from Tuesday, and a couple of weeks after that, early voting starts in some states and then ramps up across the nation. Will Harris feel the need to do another interview in that time? “It’s possible her campaign will figure this is the last interview she needs to do from here to November,” wrote the Wall Street Journal editorial board. It might be right.
As for the CNN talk, “she was methodical and risk-averse in the 27-minute interview, performing like a top seed in the early rounds of the U.S. Open tennis tournament trying to hold serve, survive, and advance to the next round,” the New York Times wrote. It wasn’t that hard to do. While interviewer Dana Bash asked a few probing questions, with an occasional follow-up, they weren’t the sort of follow-ups designed to really dig down to the crux of an issue.
Still, since this is literally the only time Harris has taken a series of questions as a presidential candidate, it’s worth looking closely at what she said about the three issues polls show are the most important to voters in the 2024 elections. Those issues are inflation, immigration, and abortion.
Box ticked, and now it’s time to play prevent defense, as the MSM-DNC believes Kamala to be ahead, and just need to run out the clock — and it’s a strategy that could well work.