St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Kamala Harris is on a well-deserved roll right now. Her strong campaign appearances and energetic VP choice are firing up Democrats and building momentum for her nascent presidential campaign. Polls indicate once-skeptical independents are taking another look at a candidate who not long ago had been written off as unviable to lead a national ticket.
This momentum may explain her handlers’ reluctance, during the more than two weeks since Harris’ campaign began, to sit her down for serious media interviews or news conferences outside the controlled bubbles of partisan rallies and teleprompters. Why mess with what’s working?
Because it’s not going to keep working for long, that’s why. The narrative of Harris hiding from real media scrutiny has already taken root within right-wing media outlets and has become a top attack line from the Trump-Vance campaign.
Unlike most of their attack lines, this one isn’t nonsense. Every day that Harris continues this bunker strategy does a disservice to the country — and to her own campaign.
The urgency of dispelling the “hidin’ Harris” narrative is particularly relevant for a candidate still coming out from under the shadow of President Joe Biden. Steering clear of real interviews, as Biden himself got away with for far too long, is a particularly bad look for his vice president.
Among the questions interviewers will want to ask Harris is whether she was aware of the president’s clear cognitive decline — a fact that his inner circle effectively hid from the public until it shuffled fully into view during that disastrous June presidential debate.
There’s no good answer on this for Harris: If she knew, why didn’t she insist on public disclosure? If she didn’t know, shouldn’t she have? It will, undoubtedly, be an uncomfortable interview hurdle. But it’s a necessary one to clear if she wants to put the issue behind her.
Other interview topics, however, don’t have to be the momentum-stoppers that Harris’ campaign apparently fears they will be.
Another favorite narrative on the right — that Harris is somehow responsible for U.S. border failures because Biden assigned her a tangential diplomatic role on the issue — has always been baseless and silly. Harris should relish the chance to look an interviewer in the eye and point out that Donald Trump ordered House Republicans to scuttle a Biden administration border agreement that gave them virtually everything they’d demanded, because he wanted a continuing crisis rather than a solution.
Granted, recent examples of presidential candidates throwing themselves on the mercy of journalistic questioning haven’t gone great for them.
Biden’s post-debate interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, designed to stanch his campaign’s bleeding, instead intensified it. Trump’s recent open interview with a convention of Black journalists spotlighted his thin skin and bizarre racial views.
These weren’t failures, though, but successes — not for the candidates, of course, but for an American public that has the right to look behind the curtain of carefully controlled campaign events to watch and listen as those who would lead answer tough questions from knowledgeable questioners.
During most of Harris’ vice presidency, she had been dismissed by many as shallow and incompetent. All indications are that those judgments weren’t consistent with her actual abilities. She was a respected prosecutor and an effective senator long before she was cast as a bumbling veep.
But false narratives can be stubborn, and this one still has her running even with an opponent she should be crushing by virtue of his own manifest unfitness for office. Hiding from media questioning will only lend credence to that false narrative.
Giving (improved) speeches is one thing — but it’s time to actually talk, Madam Vice President.
