Well, finally.
Kamala Harris is going to be sitting down for an interview. After over a month as the de facto Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has finally deigned to take questions from the national press — who, to be fair, haven’t really been pressing the issue to any great extent.
But she needs to do it, if just because we want to make sure we aren’t electing this Kamala Harris president come November:
So, finally, this Thursday, Harris will be sitting down with CNN anchor Dana Bash to do a mano-a-mano, according to the Washington Examiner. Or rather, a femano-a-femano. Or, actually, a femano-a-femano-and-mano.
If that doesn’t make any sense to you, putting it in plain English doesn’t make any more sensical. Yes, Harris is sitting down for that interview … with her running mate at her side. Because apparently, a woman vying to be leader of the free world needs a man to come to her rescue if things get rough. If this were part of the plot of a Hollywood movie, the director who came up with it would be canceled posthaste. But this is real life, and so Harris will be sitting with Gov. Walz when she talks to Bash.
Aside from one hoping this doesn’t take place on a couch, since that particular item of furniture seems to give Walz … um, ideas, this looks beyond pathetic, as conservative CNN contributor Scott Jennings pointed out during a Wednesday segment.
“I think it‘s incredibly weak, weak sauce to show up with your running mate,” said Jennings, a former senior adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “The fact that they don‘t have enough confidence in her to let her sit herself, the actual top of the ticket, and do a single interview.
“In fact, I think the hand wringing and the gyrations over this, over the last month, show a troubling lack of confidence in her political ability, which also makes you wonder as a voter, ‘Well, what kind of president would you be if this kind of a small-time decision, can we do an interview or not, what does that look like for your decision-making process?’”
Now, there are a few things to take away from this, other than the glaringly obvious — which is that Jennings is right.
Perhaps it’s just this writer, but this feels a little bit like the tenor of CNN’s coverage of Joe Biden’s senescence. It wasn’t even considered a problem, much less mentioned … until it was, when it became too glaringly obvious for even the channel once nicknamed the Clinton News Network to ignore.
Suddenly, questions were asked. Then the June 27 debate happened, and the post-debacle analysis session had Anderson Cooper grilling Kamala Harris and a visibly shaken Van Jones basically calling for Biden to step aside.
We now know that the dumpster fire that began smoldering at the debate eventually become a conflagration which would lead to Biden being pushed aside, but calling for the sitting president to throw in the towel just moments after the debate was finished was, at the time, unprecedented. But CNN, having dismissed rumors of Biden’s age catching up with him for two whole election cycles, suddenly yanked the emergency brake, did a bootlegger’s turn and sped away 180 degrees in the opposite direction, covering Biden’s decline obsessively as if making up for lost time.
On the issue of Harris’ lack of interaction with the press, CNN has been mostly silent, too. The woman’s busy, after all. She just became the presidential nominee after her boss broke up with America via text message! She’ll get around to answering questions … eventually. Meanwhile, did you see the crowd she drew in Atlanta? Or in Phoenix? Or how about Detroit? Also, did you hear J.D. Vance is weird?
So, when Harris promised at the beginning of August that she’d do an interview before Sept. 1 — not a media briefing, just an interview, presumably with a friendly source — that was enough for them. Apparently, that’s the kind of leisurely schedule we can expect for a woman who wants to be the leader of the free world.
But when she agreed to the interview with her emotional support running mate, even CNN could tell something was amiss. When Anderson Cooper is feeding Scott Jennings — one of the network’s token Republicans — a softball like this, it feels like it counts as alarums and excursions at a network not known for being harsh with virtually any Democrat. This arrangement doesn’t feel right, and Anderson Cooper, among others, knows it.
Whether or not this leads to Dana Bash actually pushing harder on Harris and Walz because of the insistence of a joint appearance remains to be seen, but one thing’s evident: No matter how well Thursday night goes for team Kamala, it’ll do nothing to dispel her reputation as a discombobulated, frazzled, paralyzed verbal and mental wreck whenever she’s confronted — alone — with adversarial questioning.
