NYT: Why Is Harris Even Less Accessible Than Biden?

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Good question. Which means Kamala Harris won’t answer it. 

This point gets buried in an otherwise friendly take on the Democrat nominee’s media strategies and word salads. The real lede here should be that Harris remains almost entirely disengaged with national media while more than halfway through her emergency-replacement campaign to retain the Biden-Harris administration. At least the Gray Lady understands the problem, even if they only mention it briefly:

During her 2020 campaign and early in her vice presidency, some of Ms. Harris’s biggest missteps came during unscripted encounters with journalists. To avoid taking chances, she has granted only six interviews in the 58 days since President Biden withdrew from the race, three with friendly radio hosts. Even the press-averse Mr. Biden took more questions in the final two months of his campaign than Ms. Harris has in what is nearly the first two months of hers.

Emphasis mine. Biden still did occasional press conferences, for example, even if the White House’s handlers kept him away from one-on-one interviews. Biden even did a couple of the latter in the three weeks between the debate and his withdrawal, although those didn’t go so well for the (nominal) president. 

Even the interviews Harris has done haven’t exactly tested her range, at least not intentionally. Mediaite covers the tongue bath she got from one radio host:

In one radio interview from Monday flagged by Axios’s Alex Thompson, the host began the conversation by telling Harris “you have already made history in so many levels. You’re the first African American and Asian woman to be vice president of the United States and soon, hopefully, president.”

The host concluded by expressing her hope that she and Harris might share a margarita at the White House “soon.”

And even the Times took exception to Harris’ word-salad response to Brian Taff last week in Pennsylvania. A rare tough question on inflation sent Harris around the bend to Biographyville and an unsatisfying response, even by NYT standards:

Asked for “one or two specific things” she would do to address high prices, Ms. Harris spoke for 1 minute 52 seconds about her biography before she got around to articulating her proposals for tax deductions to new small businesses and tax credits for housing developers.

An answer for people worried about the price of groceries this was not.

Indeed it wasn’t. Nor has Harris impressed on her explanation about where she stands on Israel, or any other specific policy proposal. Her standard response is that she’s there to “turn the page” on Donald Trump while leaving the book more or less blank. 

Pressed for when the nominee might get serious about revealing her specific policies and positions, the campaign said … soon:

Her team says this is about to change, promising a series of appearances across an array of media venues, including local and national outlets, podcasts, radio stations and daytime talk shows.

Okay, but when? It has been 59 days since Biden withdrew. We have only 48 days to Election Day, and less than that before most states open early voting for the presidential election. Harris and her team want to run out the clock with this empty-suit strategy, and the media is letting them get away with it.