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The rollout of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has gone remarkably smoothly over the last three weeks. From her initial announcement to unveiling her vice-presidential pick and future “Tool Time” host Tim Walz, to this week’s swing-state tour in rallies in front of thousands upon thousands of supporters, the whole Harris team has exceeded our normally low expectations for Democratic competence. In fact, we would dare say that our cynical black hearts have been — what is this strange nausea washing over us, is it sincerity? — impressed.
There really has not been much for the media to criticize. But smooth-running campaigns are death on ad sales, so they have gone back to an old well to gin up some controversy: Kamala Harris has not yet sat for an interview with a self-important media outlet such as The New York Times or CNN. This, we are given to understand, is some sort of scandal?
Mediaite has one such example from Thursday night. On CNN, commentator SE Cupp had a minor meltdown on the subject while arguing with Bakari Sellers:
“This is so in the Beltway,” Sellers said.
Cupp fired back, “No, it really isn’t! I speak to swing state voters every day!”
Name them.
“Bakari, I adore you, you know that, but you will lose and I’ve — you’re not the first person to make this argument that she doesn’t need to do this,” Cupp said. “It’s very inside the Beltway for us. You lose credibility when you do that! Because if it were someone else, you would be demanding that they sit down for questions and you know what? It’ll make her a better candidate!”
Sellers did not make the argument that Harris does not need to bother with interviews. He made the argument that we’re less than three weeks into her candidacy and there has been a lot going on, so maybe everyone could just chill the fuck out for a minute?
Yr Wonkette is not privy to the Harris campaign’s media strategy, but we can make a few guesses as to why Harris hasn’t rushed to a podium to get asked inane questions by 27 different reporters from the Times’ political desk.
One, the campaign is currently awash in “earned media,” that mystical totem of media coverage which the candidate does not have to pay to air. Every time networks air one of Donald Trump’s rambling rally speeches, as it has done a lot for the last nine years, that has been earned media. It has been great for Trump, rather worthless to the rest of the voting public.
Two, Harris has been the candidate for less than three weeks. She and her team have been more than a little busy with standing up a national campaign in a condensed period of time, vetting and picking a vice presidential candidate, flying around to swing state rally after swing state rally, and oh yeah, she still presumably has her day job of being Vice President of the United States. In other words, extend her some grace. It might help make her more cooperative in the future.
And three, as Dave Weigel pointed out this week, Harris has been spending a fair amount of time talking to and taking questions from the traveling press pool on her campaign plane. She just has been doing it off the record. It still counts, though!
So this is why the people who seem to be complaining the loudest about her lack of a formal interview are the likes of SE Cupp and other journalists who are covering this campaign without actually leaving their desks in Washington and New York. The reporters who are actually interfacing with Harris every day seem to be okay with the situation.
Harris did do an on-camera press gaggle with the traveling press on Thursday, hours before Cupp had her freakout, but Cupp may have chosen to ignore that since it was very inconvenient for her whole argument. Can’t sell papers without a little controversy, and if they get to be the center of that controversy, all the better!
And when the press has had a chance to question a presidential candidate directly, it has not exactly covered itself in glory. As anyone who watched Trump’s presser from Mar-a-Lago on Thursday can attest.
One person who was really pissed off about the reporters at that press conference — and we do mean really — was MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who devoted a good chunk of his show Thursday night to absolutely excoriating the press for its performance. He called the media “utterly useless” and expressed shock that it still had not learned from its own “stupid mistakes” in covering Trump in 2016.
O’Donnell was furious at the quality of the questions that did get asked. (Nothing about the recent story that Trump took a $10 million bribe from Egypt for his 2016 campaign? Really?) He even criticized reporters for participating in a press conference that the Trump team so poorly miked that no one watching on TV or online could actually hear their questions, leaving Trump free to ramble and frame his answers how he wanted them framed.
O’Donnell also pointed out that when the media gives Trump all sorts of praise for doing what Harris won’t do by standing up and answering their questions, it is failing to make one basic point clear: Trump is not actually answering the questions, he is lying, and reporters are just dutifully scribbling those lies down without pushing back.
It was a righteous rant and we very much wanted to buy Lawrence O’Donnell a beer when he was done. (And hey, Lawrence, if you’re at the DNC next week, this can happen!) The whole thing is below, and worth watching.
If any of Harris’s team is a Wonkette fan, we volunteer to be the first outlet to which she gives a formal interview post-nomination. We will ask her the important questions that other media won’t touch, such as “Madam Vice President, don’t you think that JD Vance is an unlikeable pile of human butthair” and “No, seriously, Madam Vice President, isn’t JD Vance an unlikeable pile of human butthair?” We’ll even have a crew at the convention in Chicago next week, if that makes scheduling this sit-down more convenient!
Wonkette’s presence at the DNC to beg for a Kamala Harris interview is only possible through the generous support of our readers!
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