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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
One swallow does not a summer make. Nor does a hitch-free convention spell election victory. That Kamala Harris has been averse to giving interviews is a problem. Harris’s opponents think it is because she is scared of flubbing her answers, as she has a couple of times as vice-president. The cure is to sit down for a grilling. She will do her first with CNN on Thursday. The same applies to the debates. If, as Harris’s supporters believe, she would wipe the floor with Donald Trump, then she should press for more than one.
Why has she been so reluctant? For two reasons. The first is that many in the Democratic world are convinced that the traditional media is both losing relevance and secretly hoping for a close race; the more challenged old media’s business model, the more journalists crave the subsidy of an exciting finish, or even a Trump win.
That gives them an incentive to trip her up. There is some truth to this. In 2016, Les Moonves, then head of CBS, said a Trump victory “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”.
There is also some falsehood. The idea that the so-called legacy media is monolithic is less true than at any time in the modern era. The ideological gap between Fox News and MSNBC, or the Washington Examiner and the Washington Post, is wider than ever.
Some outlets are making money. Others are not. The criticisms Democrats make are not that far from what Trump says of the “corrupt” media and hard to distinguish from what Elon Musk posts several times a day on his platform, X. Given that the media is supposedly irrelevant, it is attracting a lot of attention.
It was only a few weeks ago that Joe Biden’s team was complaining that the push to get him to quit was a media conspiracy. Trump’s team, meanwhile, thought that Biden’s visible ageing was not exposed sooner because the media had been covering it up.
For a politician of any stripe, the beauty of the word “media” is that it is fungible. It brings to mind whatever the listener most hates. Everybody reviles the media, including most of the media. But most people make exceptions for the particular bits of it that they like. “Media” has thus joined “elite” and “fascist” as terms of abuse that have lost any useful meaning.
The second reason for Harris’s relative scarcity is that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Things have been going so well for her campaign without much media exposure, why take the risk? It would be easier to stick to her exuberant rallies and the occasional TikTok encounter. Social media influencers do not pose awkward questions about price gouging, or border controls.
The problem with this tactic is that most Americans still do not know Harris well. They want to see more. The election remains close, which means she will have to convince independents. Not every anti-Trumper is caught up in Kamalamentum.
Any self-respecting journalist would try to catch Harris out in an interview. It is their job to kick the tyres. The nominee’s prep is to make sure there are no big punctures. Since Democrats quite reasonably say that democracy is on the line in November, they should pay heed to that non-trivial right to interrogate governments-in-waiting.
For Harris, or any presidential aspirant, coping with tough interviewers is child’s play compared to parlaying with foreign autocrats. This is especially true if you bring your running mate along — as Harris will do with Tim Walz in the CNN interview. No matter how unfair the interviewer, Trump will be far worse.
The challenge Harris faces is to sustain her five weeks of momentum for another ten. But the very thing that catapulted her into her party’s top slot makes complacency a temptation. She did not face any primaries, which means she does not now have to walk back the radical stances she just took to win over the party’s base. Every Democrat, from progressive to centrist, can project their fondest hopes on to Harris as president. The party’s infighting for the spoils can begin on November 6.
But undecided voters do not want to wait and see. It is no use insisting that even the local dog catcher would be better than Trump; if they shared liberal America’s existential dread of Trump they would not be undecideds. It is clear that they did not think Biden was fit to serve a second term.
With Harris they are newly open-minded. As Harris herself might say, they should not be left thinking that she fell out of a coconut tree. The more debates and interviews she does the better.
edward.luce@ft.com
