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October 11, 2024
Harris Rocked the Media Blitz That Big Media Mocked
This ought to calm the media malcontents who’ve insisted she hasn’t sat for enough interviews, right? Wrong.
(60 Minutes)
Vice President Kamala Harris blitzed the media this past week with appearances on CBS’s 60 Minutes, ABC’s The View, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on NBC, Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show, the podcast Call Her Daddy, and a town hall with Univision. Go back a week or so and we saw her sit down for a one-on-one with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and appear on the sports podcast All The Smoke. That ought to calm the media malcontents who’ve insisted that she hasn’t sat for enough interviews, right?
Wrong. Politico opened the week with a widely panned assertion that, despite all those plans, Harris “is still avoiding the media.” It went on: “Let’s be real here: Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about, even as voters want more specifics from Harris.”
Really? How do y’all know, guys?
Midweek, The New York Times dismissed the blitz with a condescending headline: “In Interviews, Kamala Harris Continues to Bob and Weave.” At first, the complaints centered on the prediction that Harris wouldn’t face tough questioning; when in fact she did, the criticism morphed: She didn’t answer directly enough.
The piece acknowledged that Harris was trying to address voters’ concerns that they don’t know enough about her—in a Times/Siena poll last month, one in four voters said they needed to learn more about Harris, versus one in 10 who said the same thing about Donald Trump—but concluded: “Her verbal acrobatics may be contributing to the impression that some voters have that they do not know her or her policy views very well. It has become a key weakness as she rushes to sway millions of undecided voters in the battleground states.”
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Says who? The piece provides zero evidence for this claim.
The idiocy of the big media’s dismissing Harris’s interviewers can be refuted simply by its massive and varying audiences: Stern draws an estimated 10 million listeners, and his audience is three-quarters male. Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy is the number-one podcast on Spotify, and reaches 5 million listeners a week, overwhelmingly female. The View is the number-one daytime talk show, averaging 2.5 million viewers, most of them women. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is the top-rated nighttime talk show, also averaging 2.5 million viewers. Harris’s 60 Minutes appearance drew 5.7 million voters, second only to Monday Night Football. No ratings are available yet for the Univision Town Hall. It’s mathematically dubious to simply add up the shows’ viewership, since some people watch more than one, but let’s do it anyway: More than 25 million people potentially viewed Harris’s media swing; millions more likely saw the Univision special.
But we all know quantity is not quality. So how did Harris do? I watched all of her appearances, and graded them, from worst to best, below. Quick summary: She rocked it, dealing with tough questions and funny ones, showcasing policy and empathy, unapologetically centering women, while not ignoring men. It’s no more an assumption than the statements Harris’s big-media critics made about voters to conclude that those critics are mainly jealous that they are no longer the gatekeepers.
60 Minutes: Anchor Bill Whitaker was out to prove he was no pushover. He was aggressive, repeatedly interrupting Harris to get her to answer his questions. The interview was edgy, sometimes even unpleasant (Bill, you can smile occasionally without being in the tank for Harris). But it was substantive, covering the Middle East, Ukraine, the economy, and taxes.
Harris got attention for refusing to call Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “close” ally. The Times cited that as an example of her evasiveness; I found it revealing that she wouldn’t use the word “close.” Instead, she replied, “With all due respect, the better question is do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people. And the answer to that question is yes.” I’m sure that got attention in Jerusalem.
Like Stephanie Ruhle, Whitaker dogged Harris about how she’d pay for her $6,000 child tax credit, her $25,000 first-time homebuyer subsidy, and a $50,000 tax write-off for start-up small businesses. As she always does, she insisted that those programs would buoy the overall economy and thus raise tax revenues, and also repeated her promise to raise taxes on billionaires and big corporations. Whitaker opined that Congress would never pass those tax hikes, and Harris pushed back. “I disagree with you. There are plenty of leaders in Congress who understand and know that the Trump tax cuts blew up our federal deficit.” We’ll see about that. But to demand that Harris declare defeat on such a widely popular set of policy priorities, as so many journalists do, seems wildly myopic.
Harris was indeed evasive when Whitaker pushed her about President Biden’s border policies that allowed a rise in the number of undocumented immigrants in the country, preferring to emphasize how new policies have stemmed the tide. For me, the exchange underscored one huge difficulty for Harris: She is not the president, and though reporters push her to differentiate or even distance herself from Biden, that ain’t gonna happen. To me, that’s just basic politics; to others, it’s evasion.
Speaking of evasion, Trump first accepted and then turned down an invitation to do the show, reportedly because he would be fact-checked.
Grade: Whitaker C, Harris B.
The Howard Stern Show: If you could combine Bill Whitaker with Stern, you would have a great interviewer, one who pursued tough questions but let Harris answer them, as well as be herself: funny, combative, unpredictable. (She’s a Formula One fan? Who knew?)
But Stern immediately announced that he supported Harris, and that he was loath to do any kind of interview that would hurt her chances. Howard, you’ve been at this longer than I have. But you hurt her by taking any chance of tough questions off the table.
Indeed, it was a lovefest. Although the Times, again, found fault with Harris’s answer to one substantive question: Would she put Liz Cheney, the Republican who has become an unlikely Harris supporter, in her cabinet? She didn’t answer. “I gotta win, Howard,” she said. “I gotta win. I gotta win.” It was a fine answer. First of all, she’s right. Second, she’s not going to announce what might be her most controversial cabinet pick in advance. Third: I’d bet money that, while she’s pledged to put a Republican in her cabinet, she still isn’t sure who.
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Listeners had to wait until the last 10 minutes to see the pair discuss what might be Harris’s boldest policy proposal yet: to expand Medicare to cover in-home care for frail or disabled seniors. Stern kvelled over that; we learned that his mother is 97. To me, it was a missed opportunity to introduce Stern’s vast, male audience to some breaking news, but maybe her time was better used showing that she’s a warm, funny person, and not a Communist childless cat lady.
Grade: Stern B-, Harris: B+
The View: Harris’s appearance on the show made headlines mainly because of her answer to a question about what she’d do differently from Biden. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said, apart from naming a Republican to her cabinet. I don’t love that part of her answer, but as I said above, I don’t expect her to list her differences with Biden (and I’m sure she has some). Republicans pounced; who cares?
Harris hit Trump for his lies about the Biden administration bungling its response to hurricanes Helene and Milton. “It’s profound, and it is the height of irresponsibility and, frankly, callousness,” she said. “Lives are literally at stake right now.”
She also took the chance to unveil, for this audience of mostly middle-aged women, her plan to get Medicare to cover in-home care. “There are so many people in our country who are right in the middle,” she said. “They’re taking care of their kids, and they’re taking care of their aging parents, and it’s just almost impossible to do it all.” “Finally,” Ana Navarro said.
The View’s hosts were warm, if not worshipful. Whoopi Goldberg endorsed Harris on the spot, and the pair locked eyes in a silent moment that said everything about the bond between the two Black women. It drove Trump (even more) crazy: He called Goldberg “filthy dirty” at a rally that night, labeling the panelists “really dumb people.”
That made one of Harris’s main points. “He spends full time engaged in grievance about what has happened to him,” she told the panel. “But what he does not talk about is you. He does not talk about what you need.”
Grade: Hosts: B+, Harris: B+
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert: This one was just plain fun—except for a vigorous but friendly exchange on Gaza. Colbert pressed her on why the administration has said many times it’s “close” to a deal, only to still be without a deal. What does “close” mean? he asked. She answered, a bit tersely: “It means we had a lot of details worked out. Some of them weren’t.” The vice president said she’d met with hostage families as well as “families of innocent Palestinian civilians who have been killed.” She added: “We must have a ceasefire and hostage deal as immediately as possible. This war has got to end. It has to end.” But she sounded pessimistic that it would end anytime soon.
Kudos to Colbert for pushing Harris on a question many of us have wanted more substantive answers to. He slipped policy questions in with the jokes. Noting her plan for a billionaire tax, he said she must know a lot of billionaires coming from Northern California, seeming to gently rib the candidate who is close friends with Laurene Powell Jobs and other über-wealthy celebs. “So who’s your favorite billionaire?” She didn’t answer. “Oprah?” he prompted. No luck.
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Harris got passionate talking about Bob Woodward’s report that Trump secretly sent Covid testing equipment to Vladimir Putin in 2020, back when Americans couldn’t get tests. “I ask everyone here and everyone who is watching: do you remember what those days were like? You remember how many people did not have tests and were trying to scramble to get them?” Hundreds were dying every day, she said, unable to say goodbye to their families because of Covid restrictions in hospitals and nursing homes.
Visibly angry, she went on. “And this man is giving Covid test kits to Vladimir Putin? Think about what this means on top of him sending love letters to Kim Jong-un. He thinks, well, that’s his friend. What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”
The funniest moment was one you’ve probably already seen: Colbert showed Harris a photo of her during the debate, when Trump was going on about immigrants eating pets. What were you thinking, he asked. “It’s family TV, right?” she replied. “It starts with a W, there’s a letter between it, then the last letter’s F.” Then she broke into laughter.
They closed by drinking beer together—Miller High Life, in a can, “the champagne of beers,” she noted. It comes from Milwaukee, Colbert noted. in the “So that covers Wisconsin,” he added, a key swing state. To be fair, the vice president took only a chaste sip. The best part: The folks on Fox and Friends displayed faux outrage. “It just doesn’t look good,” one said.
Grade: Colbert A-, Harris: A
Call Her Daddy: Alex Cooper conducted the best interview, in my view, one that combined substance and emotion. She and Harris had a conversation that centered women—“the Daddy gang,” as Cooper calls her listeners, talks about sex (graphically), dating, relationships, abortion rights, as well as sexual abuse. But Cooper also asked hard questions about what Harris’s economic policies will do for Gen X and millennials, who are “disincentivized to vote because politicians are essentially like over-promising, under-delivering.”
They began with a moving exchange about their mothers; Cooper’s is a psychologist and Harris’s was a breast cancer researcher. Both women instilled in their daughters a sense of “agency,” they agreed. But Harris shared a story I hadn’t heard before. It’s worth quoting at length:
“When I was first running [for attorney general], my mother was very sick with cancer, and she ultimately passed away. I would take her to the hospital, and I spent a lot of time with her and took care of her. So one day we’re at the hospital and she’s in the bed and she, you know, she was at this phase of her illness where she was really just really tired.
“And so I’m sitting next to her and she had her face turned in the other direction. She was kind of half sleeping. And then she leaned over to me and she said, what’s going on with the race? And then she leaned back over and I said, well, mommy, they said they’re going to kick my ass. At which point my mother turned her head, looked at me, and had the biggest smile.
“Had the biggest smile ever. That was my mother.”
Cooper asked what advice she’d give women suffering through sexual abuse—as Harris’s high school best friend did when the pair were teenagers. “I have women write in being like, ‘I don’t know who to tell,’” Cooper explained. “‘I’m DMing you and I’m telling you because [of the] the shame and the terror. Where do I go from here?’”
Harris answered in detail.
“So the first thing that I would say to anyone going through it is, tell someone that you trust. Don’t quietly suffer.
“You have done nothing wrong. You have done nothing wrong and don’t let anyone convince you you have.
“Often the abuser will tell her that if she tells, then something worse will happen. And that is usually wrong.
“And know that there are people that want you to be safe and will want to protect you. But don’t silently suffer.”
Cooper brought up Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s tone-deaf assertion that children keep moms humble, and because Harris doesn’t have biological children, she has nothing to keep her humble.
Harris nailed Sanders: “I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble.
“Two, a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life. And I think it’s really important for women to lift each other up. You know, I’ll tell you, Alex, one of the things that I have really enjoyed about where the discussion has gone, one of the places it’s gone, we have our family by blood, and then we have our family by love.
“And I have both. And I consider it to be a real blessing. And I have two beautiful children, Cole and Ella, who call me ‘Momala.’ We have a very modern family. My husband’s ex-wife is a friend of mine, you know.”
The pair discussed, in detail, the deadly toll Trump abortion bans are taking on women’s health. Cooper, who was raised as a Catholic to believe abortion is a “sin,” notes that since Dobbs she has seen women realize you can be Catholic and pro-choice (most Catholics are). Some of her Southern Christian listeners, she said, have told her that since Dobbs, they’ve realized “maybe I am pro-choice because I won’t get an abortion because of my religion, but why should we control what someone else wants to do?”
Maybe the most policy-rich but also personal exchange came when Cooper noted, “Almost one in four Gen Z and millennials say they don’t want to have kids because it’s too damn expensive. How are you going to help young people not feel left behind?”
That let Harris lay out her $6,000 infant tax credit, her first-time homebuyer subsidies, her plan to use tax credits to get builders to build more homes. She also noted that the Biden administration has forgiven “student loan debt for millions of people by this point, I think over 5 million, including doubling the amount of student loan forgiveness for public servants like nurses and teachers and firefighters.”
Cooper didn’t push Harris about Israel, or nag her about how she’ll pay for her programs. That will make some journalists dismiss the conversation as shallow. But young women are among Harris’s most important voting blocs. They heard a rare hour of conversation centered on them, featuring the most powerful woman in the country. That matters.
Grade: Cooper: A, Harris: A
Univision Town Hall: This one is tough to grade because its format was so different from the rest: an audience, not just an interviewer, asking Harris sometimes challenging questions relevant to their own lives. The event mattered, perhaps more than the others, with Harris’s support among Latinos flagging some, especially among men. She promised to establish an “orderly and humane pathway to earned citizenship for hardworking people,” and especially for Dreamers, immigrants who came here as young children, who “should not have to live in fear but should have the ability to be on a path to earn their citizenship.”
Harris also pitched the pocketbook proposals she sold on all the shows, from capping prescription drug costs to help for first-time homebuyers, a generous child tax credit, and adding in-home care to Medicare. “When you just lift up a little bit of the weight, people thrive and we all benefit,” she said. “And so that’s how I think about the economy.”
The vice president faced the kind of questions she wouldn’t get from mainstream interviewers. A Tampa resident, Ramiro Gonzalez, cited “rumors…that your administration didn’t do enough to respond to the last hurricane,” and asked Harris, “What would you specifically do, or your administration do, to help us in the Tampa Bay area or the Central Florida area with this hurricane?” She got to decry the disinformation spread by the right wing about the federal emergency response. “I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics,” she said. She then itemized her briefings with state and local officials and her work to combat price gouging in the aftermath of the disasters.
A 62-year-old woman named Martha Rodriguez said she was homeless because she suffers from long Covid anf is unable to work, and has been waiting three years for Social Security to decide that she’s eligible for disability benefits. Harris told the woman she’d worked to get long Covid classified as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She also touted her plans to make sure medical debt isn’t counted against your credit score, which is laudable but doesn’t sound like it would help this woman. Rodriguez happens to live in Florida, and it was hard not to wonder if she’d have gotten more support in a state not run by Ron DeSantis.
The most moving exchange came when a sobbing woman told Harris her mother died six weeks ago without achieving legal status. “You and I have something in common,” said Ivett Castillo. “We both lost our mother.… My question for you is, what are your plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?” Harris tried to comfort her.
“I’m so sorry for you,” she told Castillo. “Remember your mother as she lived.” Harris admitted that “we do have a broken immigration system.” But she reminded Castillo and the crowd that “the first bill we offered Congress” when she and Biden got into office “was a bill to fix the immigration system, including a comprehensive, earned pathway to citizenship for hardworking people. And it was not taken up.”
Harris then pivoted to tout the tough immigration reform bill crafted by conservative Senator James Lankford, which passed the Senate but not the House, after Trump told Republicans to tank it “because he would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.” It was an example of the tightrope she’s walking between emphasizing border security and compassionate, humane policies for the undocumented. But it also reflects Democrats’ perhaps belated realization that Latino voters are not a monolith; they include advocates for less restrictive immigration policies but also people who work for the Border Patrol. She boasted of her work as a prosecutor going after gangs “from the Guadelajara cartel to the Sinaloa cartel.”
Then she returned to Castillo’s mother. “Let’s speak her name,” Harris said. “Maria Dolores Figaroa,” the still-weeping woman told her. Harris sought out Castillo for a conversation after the event.
I can’t grade this one, but I thought it was Harris’s best event of the week.
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Joan Walsh
Joan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.
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