Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on Thursday gave their first sit-down interview since President Biden withdrew from his reelection on July 21.
The interview with Dana Bash of CNN was taped Thursday afternoon in Georgia and broadcast the same evening. Here are some takeaways:
Harris continues pivot to the center
The interview provided more evidence of Harris’ turn toward the center — both in tone and in policy — in the month-plus since she was elevated to the top of the ticket.
The biggest new promise during Thursday’s interview: appointing a Republican to her cabinet if she is elected. Presidents often do this but it seldom amounts to a true team of rivals.
Former President Obama, for example, chose former Rep. Ray Lahood, an Illinois Republican, as his transportation secretary, a relatively low-profile and less partisan post. But the selection did send a message that Obama was willing to work with Republicans and might even boost their hometown transportation needs, one of the most valuable political chips a president has.
More significantly, Obama also retained former President George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, for more than two years, a meaningful gesture for a country that was growing weary of its involvement in two wars.
Neither President Biden nor former President Trump appointed opposition members to their cabinets. Trump, in recent days, has tried to signal a broader coalition with plans to seek policy advice from former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist who suspended his campaign to endorse Trump. But both Gabbard and Kennedy have been outspoken critics of the Democratic Party. Gabbard left in 2022 to become an independent.
Kennedy withdrew from the Democratic primary last year to forge an independent bid, accusing both parties of corrupt leadership. He tried to meet with both nominees before issuing his endorsement last week but was rebuffed by Harris.
Harris abandons old positions, but ‘my values haven’t changed’
The moves to the center from Harris have drawn questions about flip-flopping, one of her biggest campaign vulnerabilities.
Harris previously called for a fracking ban, universal healthcare and decriminalization of border crossings. She is disavowing those positions and promoting a conservative border bill as a central campaign promise. Last week’s Democratic convention painted her as a tough prosecutor in California, another shift from her emphasis on police reform when she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination four years ago.
“The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris said Thursday.
As an example, she pointed to the Green New Deal, a series of expansive measures favored by progressives to combat climate change. She no longer supports it but “the climate crisis is real. That it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”
Harris sometimes came across in the CNN interview as evasive, and she had trouble explaining why she changed her views on a fracking ban, but said that she made the shift in 2020, during the general election, and has not wavered since.
Hogwash, said Trump.
“She’s admitting she’s still as dangerously liberal as ever,” his campaign said after an interview excerpt was released.
Trump has his own baggage with flip-flopping. He has held multiple positions on abortion over the years, before promising to appoint Supreme Court justices who overturned the legal right to the procedure. And he reversed his support for banning TikTok earlier this year after receiving large campaign donations from the company’s investors.
How will voters react? The two candidates’ supporters haven’t complained. All that’s left is a small slice of uncommitted voters, who tend to pay less attention to politics until the election draws nearer.
Some awkward moments
Harris doesn’t love these types of interviews and, at times, it showed. She sounded shaky answering the first question, for example, a softball about what she would do on Day 1 if elected, reverting to slogans.
She said she would “strengthen the middle class” and offer “a new way forward,” while praising Americans for being fueled “by hope and by optimism.” She got only slightly more specific after that, referring to her economic plan that would likely require congressional approval for policies such as expanding the child tax credit and offering more money for first-time home buyers; such efforts would take much longer than a day to accomplish.
Why hasn’t she done this stuff already?
Harris answered one of Trump’s biggest critiques, why she hasn’t fulfilled her campaign promises over the last 3½ years, while sitting in the vice president’s office.
“First of all, we had to recover as an economy,” she said after discussing the pandemic.
She pointed out that inflation has finally been brought down below 3% but acknowledged prices are still too high for many Americans. Inflation is a top concern of voters, according to polls. So Harris has been careful to acknowledge the hardship and has promised to do more, even as she tries to defend the administration’s economic record.
But she also went on offense, pointing out that the administration has capped prices on insulin and other prescription drugs for senior citizens.
Trump made the same promise, she said. “Never happened. We did it.”
More interviews to come?
Harris’ sit-down interview came more than five weeks after Biden dropped out of the race, leaving her the nominee. She put it off as long as she could, in part because she had some notable struggles in prior sit-down interviews.
Now that the pressure is off, she may do more. That would serve voters, who still don’t fully know Harris.
It could also help Harris politically. She was able to reveal more of her personal side, describing the emotion of seeing her grandniece watch her at the convention, for example.
This was hardly riveting television. But the more she speaks in less scripted settings, the more practice she gets and the less impact a single gaffe or misstatement will have.