It's clear why they have tried to keep her away from interviews. But they've also evidently made the calculation that her bubble-wrapped, engagement-avoidance strategy is no longer serving her interests. As CNN reported a few days ago, Democrats are grappling with an "unsettling feeling spreading among Democrats that the vice president is not — or at least, not yet — where she needs to be to win in just over four weeks." Politico gave voice to Democratic anxieties about Harris' light schedule late last week, noting that "Democratic operatives, including some of Kamala Harris’ own staffers, are growing increasingly concerned about her relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press almost entirely." More details:
In interviews with POLITICO, nearly two dozen Democrats described Harris as running a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the race they fear could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day stretch...They’re also growing more distressed that a campaign insisting Harris is the “underdog” is running like she’s protecting a lead. While the plan is for Harris’ travel to ramp up in October, the vice president has spent more than a third of days since the Democratic National Convention receiving briefings from staff and conducting internal meetings, or without any scheduled public events, according to a POLITICO review of her travel...Of the remaining days, the vice president spent just a little more than half of them holding rallies, policy-focused speeches, events with labor unions and other in-person, public-facing events, including stops at small businesses, in swing states. And she has spent nearly half of her post-DNC days in Washington.
Amid the handwringing, and with Team Harris apparently only being responsive to criticism of their approach showing up in the media, we are now being treated to a Kamala "media blitz," which mostly entails friendly interviews with media figures who publicly support her candidacy (Stephen Colbert, Howard Stern, the women of The View). One notable exception was her sit-down with 60 Minutes' Bill Whitaker, which was by far the most probing interview she's done during this presidential campaign. Most notably, unlike others, Whitaker actually asked follow-up questions -- sometimes several of them on the same subject, and particularly when Harris was avoiding the questions he'd asked. Harris typically offered the same vague, memorized lines we've heard before on major topics. But when he swooped in with soft-spoken, respectful, firm follow-up questions, her vapidity and vacuousness was laid bare. Take this exchange on the Middle East. She starts with a flurry of familiar talking points about Israel's defensive conflict against terrorists, but when Whitaker points out that Israel doesn't seem to be listening to her administration's admonitions anymore, she uncorks an empty pile of words:
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Kamala: "The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region."pic.twitter.com/uOdPDSC2dz
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 6, 2024
On her economic "plans," such as they exist, Whitaker asked how she intends to pay for any of the "investments" she's touted (setting aside the multi-trillion-dollar orgy of new spending she's co-sponsored on the Green New Deal and so-called 'Medicare For All'). Again, a well-placed follow-up or two widens her eyes and sends her into a stammering mess:
Kamala: "My plan is about saying when you invest in small businesses, you invest in the middle class."
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 7, 2024
CBS: "The question was how are you going to pay for it."
Kamala: "I'm going to make sure the richest among us pay their fair share in taxes."
CBS: "But we're dealing with the… pic.twitter.com/HVrKYm2iqQ
Then there's the exchange on illegal immigration and the border crisis. There's much to say about this, but first, just watch:
Bill Whitaker presses Vice President Kamala Harris on President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers as part of a policy shift on border crossings, and on whether the Biden administration should have taken those steps sooner. https://t.co/l85soF5tG7 pic.twitter.com/XNnCKNnaWS
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 8, 2024
Whitaker: "You recently visited the southern border and-- embraced President Biden's recent crackdown on asylum seekers. And that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that's the right answer now, why didn't your administration take those steps in 2021?"
Harris: "The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up. Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with the border security bill. Well, guess what happened? Donald Trump got word that this bill was afoot and could be passed and he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem, so he told his buddies in Congress, 'Kill the bill. Don't let it move forward.'"
Whitaker: "But I've been covering the border for-- for years. And so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration."
Harris: "Correct. Correct."
Whitaker: "But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?"
Harris: "It's a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions."
Whitaker: "What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?"
Harris: "I think-- the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, okay?"
Whitaker "But the numbers did quadruple under your watch."
Harris: "Because of what we have done-- we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half. We have cut the flow of fentanyl by half. But we need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem."
Trainwreck. After his initial question, she launches into her familiar commentary about the (fatally flawed, for various reasons) Senate bill, which has become Democrats' only talking point, foisted upon the public in an election year. But the question was about executive actions that have reduced border encounters, and why they didn't come years sooner. It wasn't about some piece of legislation or the internal machinations of why it was dead on arrival in a divided, election year Congress. It was about what this chart illustrates:
Here is what I would like to know.
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 8, 2024
What changed in January 2021 that caused border patrol to commence mass releases of illegal aliens into the United States? Did the law change?
And why did those releases finally start declining in recent months? Did the law change? https://t.co/9c6m8OzdEI pic.twitter.com/xubWlyBNH5
Encounters were very low as Trump left office, then Biden and Harris came in and trashed a bunch of Trump-era policies that were working. The crisis exploded, then raged for years, after the new administration took actions like these:
“Biden has defended the number as necessary to undo what he considers ‘bad policy’ inherited from Trump, especially on immigration. To date, 10 of his 12 actions on immigration are reversals of Trump’s policies.”
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) October 8, 2024
Then we had *10 million* illegal border crossings. https://t.co/wXpoURFnYF
Finally, with an election approaching, they started talking a lot about a bill with no chance of passing (Democrats controlled Congress for the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration, and they did nothing on immigration, focusing instead on passing trillions in inflationary spending). They also began funneling as many illegal immigrants into the country through non-encounters as possible (CBP One app entries, ports of entry crossings, etc). to artificially bring down the politically-problematic statistics. And they did tighten up some asylum rules and other executive-level changes they'd eschewed for years. Those moves were available to them the whole time; they made a choice not to enact them. Whitaker's question is, why not? And she has no answer. In fact, her final piece of the back and forth is to boast about the recent reductions -- illegal immigration is still at historically stunning levels -- that were partially achieved by doing the very things they refused to do until the final stretch of a national election. She's inadvertently highlighting the premise of his question, which she steadfastly will not and cannot answer.
One of the reasons the Harris administration didn't reverse course much sooner, aside from being fundamentally pro-illegal immigration), is that they spend the first three-plus years of the crisis they created refusing to call it a crisis and insisting the border was "secure," even after illegal crossings "quadrupled," per Whitaker (not to mention the roughly two million got-aways). She herself called the border "secure" in the middle of the catastrophe her policies caused. How can she credibly assess "solutions" to a massive problem she outright denied for years? I'll leave you with my analysis of this on Fox & Friends:
Joined @foxandfriends earlier to discuss the Vice President’s border crisis “answers” on 60 Minutes last night. Her clumsy evasions were as revealing as they were insulting: pic.twitter.com/TSmMbiS0cg
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) October 8, 2024
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