With Few Debates And One Interview, Harris Is The Political Machine Candidate Running A Celebrity Campaign

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It’s been 45 days since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democrats’ effective nominee to maintain the White House, and she hasn’t held a single press conference or given a single interview to a reporter willing to challenger her on the issues.

But answering serious questions about her policy reversals isn’t the point of a celebrity-style campaign. Harris is competing in a popularity contest as the machine candidate installed to claim the White House, and that requires shielding her from the press.

[LISTEN: Kamala Harris: The Machine Candidate]

With barely two months to go before Election Day, Harris has evaded substantive questions about a sudden whiplash of platform reversals on everything from fracking to immigration. With her first and likely only presidential debate scheduled next week in Philadelphia, Harris even tried to get out of that after she refused requests to expand the calendar for the three traditional forums held by the major party candidates.

According to Politico last week, Harris demanded host network ABC change the rules of the debate to keep the microphones “hot at all times” throughout the discussion after CNN’s June debate muted them once a candidate had finished speaking.

“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Harris campaign told the magazine. “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”

But if the Harris campaign were truly eager to prove she can “act presidential for 90 minutes,” then the vice president would be wise to hold a 90-minute press conference instead of pretending to talk on the phone to avoid reporters’ questions.

The muted microphones in June, meanwhile, were President Joe Biden’s request, and are now at odds with the vice president, who made a point in her 2020 debate with Vice President Mike Pence to say “I’m speaking” even when she wasn’t interrupted. Muted microphones threaten to undermine her likely plan to capture the same viral moment in a debate with Trump.

“With debate less than a week away, Kamala Harris is still refusing to accept muted microphone rule,” the Washington Examiner’s Byron York reported Tuesday.

While Trump has requested two more additional debates this fall, Harris has capped any debate calendar at two while dragging her feet to even participate in one. Whether she commits to more interviews remains an open question.

Though the first ballots will be cast in Pennsylvania when early voting starts on Sept. 16, Harris continues to evade any questions from the press beyond a sit-down interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, which didn’t even last an hour. While Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio sparred with the moderator of the network’s flagship Sunday program, “State of the Union,” Bash gave Harris a primetime interview with softball questions such as how it felt when Biden dropped out of the race.

Geoffrey Ingersoll, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller, shared a video on X to contrast Bash’s coddling of Harris with the CNN host’s treatment of Vance.

Voters are now preparing to fill out their ballots without any real answers about why Harris’ positions have evolved so wildly since her last run for president. She ardently supported a fracking ban before she opposed one. She endorsed mandatory gun buyback programs before her current campaign said otherwise. “Medicare for All,” meanwhile, is now absent as a platform pledge after it was a centerpiece of her campaign from 2019. And in August, Axios reported the Harris campaign now supports funding for the border wall she called “un-American.”

Here is what Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, where she said the project:

A useless wall on the southern border would be nothing more than a symbol, a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value, but to the fundamental values upon which this country was built.

The truth is, Harris is a career political opportunist who sees no opportunity courting a press that’s already friendly. Machine politics aren’t about persuading undecided voters anyway. It’s about turning out the vote.