The Interview

Pablum to the People

Here is what NPR made of the Harris-Walz interview on CNN last night (hat tip Taegan Goddard):

“From a strictly performance standpoint, Harris was clear, calm and didn’t get rattled when pushed about changes to her positions on certain issues.”

“In some past interviews, she came across as defensive, but that wasn’t the case here. She seemed comfortable and in command, which is important for a presidential candidate who people are still getting to know.”

“She also continued to show a degree of relatability. For example, she talked about making pancakes and cooking bacon for her nieces when President Biden called to inform her of his decision to drop out of the race.”

Yes, yes all true…but this was thin gruel, a vastly unsatisfying journalistic exercise. Spare me the pancakes, why didn’t Dana Bash ask: Did you notice any significant cognitive or physical decline in President Biden over the past four years?

And that was just for starters. The questions were obvious, easily anticipated; the follow-ups easily parried. There was nothing unexpected. Harris had already tipped that her positions on fracking and illegal immigration had changed. OK, that’s allowed, but tell us why. There was no skepticism—the primary tool of honest journalism—and little specificity: What do you mean, your values haven’t changed? Why did you support decriminalizing the border in 2019—and not now? What does your vision of our energy future now include—and for how long are fossil fuels part of it?

Aaron Blake of the WaPo excused Harris’s muzzy answers this way:

But politically, you can’t really say that you abandoned a position for expediency or because you realized you were wrong. The former would call into question your sincerity, while the latter would call into question your wisdom.

I disagree. To say, I was just wrong about that, is a sign of strength and growth and maturation. Harris hinted at it, but didn’t quite go there. She cited her experience as Vice President, but she could have said, “The world isn’t as simple as I thought when I was younger. I’ve learned a lot.” (But then, she’d have to explain why her values haven’t changed.) I would have liked a better sense of how her mind works. Even a peripheral, but unexpected, question like Have recent advances in nuclear power made it safer? Should it be part of our energy future? might have forced her to think on her feet. She was never pressed. She never experienced a moment of discomfort.

The whale in the room was race, as it so often has been in American history—and as it remains to this day. Harris didn’t want to talk about being black or a woman, and that’s all to the good, a shunning of the identity politics that has crippled the Democrats in the past. But why didn’t Dana Bash ask the most obvious biographical question: Why did you choose to go to Howard, University, a historically black college? And why wasn’t Harris asked about the most divisive racial question in America right now: What do you think about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs? Or another cultural flashpoint: Do you believe sex-change procedures should be available to minors? We know where Harris stands on the cultural issues that work to her advantage—abortion control—but shouldn’t we have a better sense of where she stands on the issues that don’t?

And Tim Walz should not have been allowed to get away with saying that carrying a semi-automatic weapon into war was a grammatical error. Because it wasn’t. It was a slight prevarication, easily rectified: “I was wrong to say that I carried an assault rifle into war, but I spent so many damn hours training with one—assembling and disassembling it, oiling it, shooting it, carrying it on long marches and runs—that I felt it was part of my body.”

Am I asking too much? My fellow journalists seem inclined to give Harris and Walz and Dana Bash a pass. (See NPR, above.) But, to me, the purpose of an interview is to learn something. I learned nothing new, except that Kamala Harris knows how to make pancakes.

Of course, I would vote for a fence post over Donald Trump, whose pursuit of the vile and ugly seems to be gathering momentum as he grows more desperate. But in an era when journalism and the integrity of journalists are being questioned, democracy demands more rigor from my colleagues.