Tipsheet

The Interview Was Not Good

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  August 30, 2024 10:01 AM

Forty days after Democrats shoved their elected nominee out of the race, the replacement candidate finally gave an interview, alongside her running mate.  It was not an impressive showing.  I posted my overall thoughts on social media, starting with an assessment of CNN's Dana Bash: "Mixed marks for Bash, who pushed on some necessary subjects, but missed glaring follow-ups. I get she was pressed for time. The literal set-up was weird. The shots looked strange and not terribly well lit."  Harris, situated farthest from the camera, looked small, like she was seated in a low chair -- and appeared hunched.  I'm not sure how anyone on her team thought it looked good.  That's a superficial observation, but television and the social media clips it produces are visual media.  As for the 'substance,' if you can call it that, and various other take-aways, here's the rest of my assessment:

Harris served up a few word-salady struggles, but not the sort of meandering mess we’ve seen before. We gleaned very little in terms of what she actually believes or would do. She offered no actual *explanations* for her litany of changed positions. Weak spin on economy and immigration. Didn’t seem to break from Biden on any substance, but wants to break from the past, including from her own current administration. Thats an awkward needle to thread & her efforts were not terribly coherent or persuasive. (Mostly unresponsive and bad ‘answers’ from Walz to some pointed questions btw). Conservatives calling her performance a total meltdown/disaster are overstating it. Lefties hailing it as some triumph...lol, I mean, even left-leaning CNN commentators didn’t sound too hot on what they’d just watched. It was generally non-elucidating and unimpressive, offered some fodder for the opposition, and (embarrassingly belatedly) checked a box without inflicting major damage. A low bar was met, but the reasons for the lowness of the bar were re-confirmed. Lots of material for probing follow-ons in subsequent interviews. When will the next one be?

The shortcomings of her performance were so glaring that even left-leaning media figures were pointing them out.  It's hard for the Harris campaign and their army of acolytes to spin that this was some sort of master class (social media is built for hyperbole on all sides) when CNN's cadre of lefties instantly started debating whether she'd successfully distinguished herself from her own unpopular administration -- or whether she advanced the political ball for herself at all.  Trump's campaign certainly noticed:


And it's impossible to argue with this observation, especially since it's arising not just from the Right, but from one of the most reliably progressive members of the White House press corps:


As far as I can recall, we saw nothing approaching a cogent explanation for why she's supposedly dropped so many publicly-stated stances, even when Bash tried to offer her multiple choice-style options.  This was one representative exchange, which even CNN's Democrat-friendly fact-checker reviewed unfavorably:


When CNN released a teaser clip from the interview (Harris ended up speaking for around 16 minutes, total, having gone 57,000 or so minutes without granting any interviews whatsoever), one of the nominee's eyebrow-raising lines stood, even ignoring the weird, classic Kamala phrasing about the Green New Deal.  I immediately predicted how Republicans would use the assertion against her, and within hours, they were doing exactly that:

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Let's walk through a few more of her answers, starting with this jumble -- a poor, unfocused answer to a layup question:


That was a theme throughout the interview -- Harris trying to present herself as a changing of the guard and a turning of the page -- while pretending she has not been Vice President for nearly four years.  It got awkward:


Harris defended the Biden-Harris economic agenda and record, which is a problem for her.  She relied heavily on the notion that they had to 'save' the economy from destruction at the very beginning of their administration, but the economy was already bouncing back by early 2021.  She acknowledged that prices are still too high, while sidestepping her direct responsibility for inflationary spending that inflicted that exact harm, and hyping her deeply harmful "solution" of price controls against nonexistent "gouging" (several follow-ups are needed on this subject).  In general, however, this was her bottom line, and it's a precarious one for her, given public sentiment:


Her spin on the border catastrophe over which she's presided was insulting -- and one related evasion was noteworthy:


This avoidance of her 'decriminalization' position also cried out for a follow-up. Will she have to rework this answer next time she does an interview -- if she does one?  As for Tim Walz, he looked uncomfortable as Bash confronted him with multiple proven lies and distortions, on everything ranging from his military career, to his DUI, to the way his children were conceived.  He often fell back on the construction that people "know him" and his record, but most voters do not.  He's new to the national stage.  Where Bash had him dead to rights, he clumsily deflected away.  Weak, weak stuff: 


He should do his own interview, in which a journalist has time and space to drill down into some of these details.  I'll leave you with this:


She had no choice but to give that answer, but it's also a very damning one.  Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- knows she and others have lied aggressively on this matter, which isn't some small thing.  They've known for some time that the President of the United States is unfit to carry on, certainly for nearly another half decade, but they were willing to tell us the opposite, entirely for political reasons.  And she's still lying about it.  Also, yes, it's telling that exactly nobody who is insisting Kamala did a great job last night is calling on her to do many additional interviews: