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The political tradition that Harris and Walz are bringing back

Vaseline August 31, 2024

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Kamala Harris has now completed her first major television interview as the Democratic standard-bearer: perhaps the most feverishly anticipated, campaign-defining, existentially urgent interrogation ever conducted in the English language, or each language, in recent memory. Everyone will remember exactly where they were as they watched the extravaganza last night: nodding, rolling their eyes, falling asleep, changing the channel.

In other words, the spectacle itself didn’t quite match the buildup to it. Personally, I watched the interview on my couch, eating a bowl of popcorn and occasionally checking the Red Sox score on my phone (they lost). It was a perfectly good and forgettable Thursday night, no different than the perfectly good and forgettable performance that Harris, her running mate Tim Walz and Inquisitor-host Dana Bash put on on CNN.

Ultimately, the only thing that made this interview a turning point was the hype and heavy anticipation that preceded it. Much of this was fueled by the Harris campaign’s refusal to do any major network interviews thus far. And shame on the campaign: it shouldn’t have taken this long.

The most obvious sign that last night’s production wasn’t going to be a terrible game-changer came when CNN continued to tease Harris’ response to Bash’s question about what it was like when President Joe Biden called her to tell her he was dropping out of the race. “I’m going to give you a little too much information,” Harris replied, giggling. “Go for it,” Bash encouraged. “There’s no such thing, Madam Vice President.”

To me, the phrase “too much information” suggested that Harris was about to share something inordinately personal or mildly embarrassing about the call. Or maybe she was about to share something hugely important and newsworthy that Biden had said to her or she had said to him, a detail that would loom large when the full story of this momentous summer was written. But we’d all have to wait for the Big Reveal, because CNN cut to commercial.

Finally, toward the end of the interview, the cliffhanger was resolved. “It was Sunday,” Harris reminded us. Her family was visiting, “including my baby nieces.” They were finishing up a pancake breakfast. Her nieces had asked “Auntie” for more bacon—which Auntie had agreed to provide—before they did a puzzle. This was all very human, yes, but a little beside the point.

“And the phone rang, and it was Joe Biden,” Harris said, finally getting to the heart of the matter and bringing us back to the suspense. “And he told me what he had decided to do.” Harris had then asked Biden if he was sure he was going to step aside.

Yes, he said, he was sure of it.

“And that’s how I found out,” the vice president said.

That was pretty much it.

Bash followed up with a question about whether Harris had asked Biden for his endorsement during the call, or whether Biden had indicated he would endorse her. “He was very clear that he would endorse me,” Harris said. Ideally, Bash could have asked a few more questions about that famous phone call—about the bacon (thick-cut?), the pancakes (blueberry?), and the puzzle (jigsaw?). Personally, I wanted to know if Doug Emhoff had been allowed to skip the puzzle and maybe escape for a nap or something—because that’s honestly what I wanted to do after a hearty Sunday breakfast. Plus, I hate puzzles.

Sometimes history is seamlessly woven into the mundane pace of life. Big, fate-changing phone calls aren’t really dramatic events, and long-awaited interviews don’t always produce the huge developments we expect. Sometimes syrup-stained breakfast plates get cleared away, and then the president calls, and life takes a big turn. And sometimes appointment TV serves up a nothingburger.

The Trump campaign seized quite loudly on Harris’s response when asked whether she supported a ban on fracking, something she had previously said during her short-lived and ill-fated 2019 presidential campaign.

“As president, I will not ban fracking,” Harris assured Bash, which she said has been her position since Biden picked her as his running mate in 2020. Bash later asked Harris how voters should view some of the rather dramatic policy changes she has implemented from 2019 to now.

“The most important and significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is: My values have not changed,” Harris said. This was, of course, a classic politician’s dodge, and entirely predictable given that Harris is (1) a politician and (2) desperately needs to win Pennsylvania (also known as one of the country’s biggest fracking states). Donald Trump expressed some outrage at this turn, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

“BORING!!!” he declared in a Truth Social post about the interview, in his eyes a far greater sin than what Harris actually said.

Trump wasn’t entirely wrong about that. But for an interview like this, “boring”—or, as my colleague Tom Nichols called it, “good enough”—feels good, maybe even refreshing. It’s not healthy for a population to place so much value on a politician’s every TV appearance. Or, put it this way, for every election to be as much a matter of life and death as this one, or the last.

If anything, last night was a reminder that Harris and Walz are politicians, and their interviews will likely feature the finesse and obfuscation that have been standard fare in American politics for centuries. I’ve been covering campaigns for more than two decades, and this is how it goes. Still, things should get a lot more interesting when Harris and Trump meet in Philadelphia in 11 days for another existential, campaign-defining moment.

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