On Eve Of Non-NYT Kamala Harris Interview, NYT Interviews NYT About Interviewing Kamala Harris

And we got us a shitshow!

Photo by David Smooke on Unsplash

Tonight on CNN, Vice President Kamala Harris will sit for an interview with Dana Bash. And it’s about time, too, since according to a lot of people in the media, up until now, no one on the planet actually knew anything about her or what she thinks. She is a mystery wrapped in a puzzle inside an enigma, especially to the New York Times, which simply can’t understand why she hasn’t rushed to do another interview with the puppy-training Paper of Record since this longread last fall (gift link).

The piece has the charming subhed “After nearly three years, the vice president is still struggling to make the case for herself — and feels she shouldn’t have to,” and the rest has pretty much the same tone. Reporter Astead W. Herndon explained, after extensive research and an interview with Harris, that the vice president was “a politician in search of a moment, rather than a leader defining this one,” and that with the 2024 election approaching, maybe Tucker Carlson got it right when he said that “the closer Harris gets to the presidency, the further she has become from convincing the country that she is presidential.”

Like, sure, no politician should demand the sort of fawning coverage Donald Trump gets at Newsmax, but wow, it’s a real head-scratcher that Harris hasn’t asked the Times to drop by Number One Observatory Circle for tea.

To mark the occasion of tonight’s interview, where Harris may finally get the Bashing she has coming, the Times revisited that October 2023 piece by having Jess Bidgood, who runs its “On Politics” newsletter, interview Herndon about the challenges of interviewing Harris (also a gift link).

Herndon thought interviewing Harris was “arduous,” and she seems to have felt the same.

Bidgood 2024: In a word or two, how would you describe that 2023 interview?

Herndon: Arduous! When she sat down, I asked her if she liked her job, and she said she did — but that she didn’t like doing this. I was putting her in a position to self-reflect, and to articulate her own story of growth and change. I thought she would want to tell a story on that front, and was surprised that she did not.

It is indeed surprising that Harris might have been terse with a person asking her mostly why people thought she should be replaced on Joe Biden’s ticket, what did it feel like to be such an Affirmative Action hire in the first place, and why the portions were so small.

Then there was Herndon’s very … we’ll call it “bro-like” need to put her in a box, with the label glued on just right. Was she this or was she that? She claimed that some of the systems were bad but did not agree she would tear them down? And it’s all sort of DSA-meeting-style theory; even though she’s answering his questions thoroughly and deftly, she won’t answer his demand “are you a progressive or a moderate” and “but why do you say you don’t want to restructure society,” which would be a little bit more than a reasonable ask of a president even if we didn’t have a filibuster, and it’s tiring.

Bidgood 2024: She often pushed you to define words like “radical,” “progressive,” and even “economic inequality,” in a lawyerly way. What tone did that set for you?

Herndon: It was challenging. I wrote this in the piece, but it wasn’t just the words, but the body language. She didn’t break eye contact. It was intense. You feel on trial. Fifteen minutes in, I thought, I don’t know if I’m getting what I need to here, and this might be the last time we talk — and it was. I had to really believe that the questions I was asking were ones that more people have.

She just kind of flips it back on you. And I don’t think that’s all bad. Some of the tone of the interviews feels like the Senate hearing version of Harris — which is something lots of Democrats love. You, as an interviewer, just have to be prepared to play the role of Jeff Sessions or Brett Kavanaugh.

Here, if you can stand it, is the podcast so you can hear the actual interview’s tone. And here are some Axios-style bullets from the 2023 story, copy and pasted for your enjoyment. There’s ever so much more at the gift link, it does just hammer on and on and on, and almost all of it in the following vein.

• [A]fter a disappointing 2020 campaign, and the reputational sting that has lasted ever since, Harris has often been a politician in search of a moment, rather than a leader defining this one.

• But if Biden’s age is the Democrats’ explicit electoral challenge, Harris, 59 this month, is the unspoken one.

• [In] terms of her own political profile, Harris has remained a vacuum of negative space, a vessel for supporters and detractors to fill as they choose, not least because she refuses to do so herself.

• Trump recently gave an interview to the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he mocked Harris’s speaking style and also said aloud what many people seem to be whispering: that the closer Harris gets to the presidency, the further she has become from convincing the country that she is presidential.

• Her response did little to quell the line of criticism, but it did expose a fundamental fact about Harris: In the last five years, as social movements have shifted the Democrats’ message on criminal justice and public safety leftward, the figure whose career seems to speak the most to that conversation has refused to lead it.

• Trump isn’t the only one floating a Harris-replacement scenario.

• Unlike Biden, who also faced questions about his tough-on-crime past during the 2020 presidential primary, Harris craved the approval of the party’s left wing, particularly the class of liberal, college-educated women who had grown more interested in Warren’s unabashed progressivism.

• One major donor said there’s an agreement among the party’s heavy hitters that having Harris as vice president to Biden “is not ideal, but there’s a hope she can rise to the occasion.”

• I called top Democratic pollsters to gauge whether a Harris-led party kept them up at night. I talked with members of Biden’s vice-presidential selection committee to ask the question I’ve always wanted to know the answer to: Was Kamala Harris really chosen as a running mate because she had the right identity at the right time, the highest-profile diversity hire in America?

• By this point, the vice president would not break eye contact, and suddenly I had more in common with Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh than I ever expected. Just as in those Senate confirmation hearings, Harris’s tone was perfectly pitched, firm but not menacing — confrontational but not abrasive, just enough for you to know she thought these questions were a waste of her time.

• I asked her where she would define herself politically on a spectrum of moderate to progressive.

  “Why don’t you define each one for me, and then I can tell you where I fit,” she responded. “If you want to say, for example, that believing that working people should receive a fair wage and be treated with dignity and that there is dignity in all work, well then, I don’t know what label do you give that one. If you believe that parents should have affordable child care? I’m not sure what the label is for that.”

• When Harris speaks in an interview or to an audience, it can sound as if she’s editing in real time, searching for the right calibration of talking points rather than displaying confidence in her message.

• In Chicago, I directly placed in front of her the question others had only insinuated.

  “When someone asks, ‘What does Vice President Kamala Harris bring to the ticket?’ what is that clear answer?” I asked. Her team made clear it would be my final question.

  “Were you in this room of 2,000 people?” she asked. I nodded.

  “Did you see them cheering and standing?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I say.”

  She stood up and walked out of the room.

NYT (gift link) / NYT (gift link)]

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