After avoiding a probing interview by a journalist for the first month of her sudden presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris’ first one Thursday was notable mostly in how routine it seemed.
CNN’s Dana Bash, sitting down with Harris and running mate Tim Walz in a Georgia restaurant, asked her about some issues where she had changed positions, the historical nature of her candidacy, what she would do in her first day as president, and whether she’d invite a Republican to be a Cabinet member (yes, she said).
Harris drew criticism for not doing an interview until now.
With no clips from interviews or extended news conferences as a candidate to pick apart, Republican Donald Trump and his campaign had made Harris’ failure to take on journalists an issue in itself. She had promised to rectify that by the end of August, and made it in just under the wire.
In the interview, taped earlier Thursday at Kim’s Cafe in Savannah, Georgia, Bash occasionally pressed Harris when the vice president failed to answer a question directly. She asked four times, for example, about what led Harris to change her position on fracking — a controversial way to extract natural gas from the landscape — from her brief presidential candidacy in 2020.
“How should voters be looking at some of the changes in policy?” Bash asked, wondering whether experience led Harris down another path. “Should they be completely confident that what you’re saying now is going to be the policy moving forward?”
By including Walz in the interview, Harris joined a tradition followed by other political pairs. But that decision stood out because of her lack of solo interviews and the compressed nature of her campaign.
Ultimately, Bash directed only four questions to Walz — one a followup — and the vice presidential candidate didn’t interject or add to Harris’ responses.
This was the second high-profile moment for Bash already this campaign. The “Inside Politics” anchor moderated June’s debate between Trump and President Biden, an event where the journalists were overshadowed by the poor performance by Biden that eventually led to him abandoning his re-election bid.
David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder.
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