Seventy-One Seconds

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 09, 2024

 

Ever so gingerly, so as to avoid offending the guild or threatening access to the campaign, political reporters began this week to acknowledge a once unspeakable subject: the virtually impenetrable bubble Kamala Harris’s campaign has created around her.

 

The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang found himself among media’s cautious dissenters yesterday. He delicately scrutinized the critique of the vice president’s inaccessibility, and he confessed to holding the “minority view” that journalists are not “ethically bound” to sacrifice objectivity to advance their own political project. “If Harris is running a campaign that’s full of energy but short on specifics, we should say that,” the author opined, “even if we think that Harris’s content-light approach is an optimal strategy for winning in November.” How novel.

 

The Harris campaign is not so insular that it does not recognize the advantages presented by a pliant press corps. Her operation knows that mitigating the risk of frustrating reporters with the candidate’s lack of access is, for now, a nearly risk-free proposition. So, on Thursday, Harris sauntered out of her SUV on a Detroit tarmac and held an impromptu gaggle with pool reporters for all of 71 seconds.

 

“Whatcha got?” she said with all due confidence that what they got wasn’t much.

 

“President Trump had a press conference today. He talked about a lot of things,” one reporter observed. “I wonder if you had a reaction.” Harris replied by relating her eagerness to attend a forthcoming debate in which Trump had agreed to participate.

 

“Are you open to more debates?” another asked. Yes, she replied.

 

“He proposed two more — two more debates,” another chimed in. Harris reminded her interlocutor that she had just answered that question.

 

“Why do you think he pulled out of the debates?” one journalist asked, mangling the sequence of events that produced a brief impasse over scheduling. Harris declined to speculate.

 

“Can you comment on some of his other criticisms? He made a whole litany of them today,” a reporter queried. “Some of the criticism has been about your vice-presidential pick and his leaving the National Guard at 24 years. Vance said that he deserted his own troops and colleagues. What’s your take on that?”

 

To this, by far the most substantive question so far proposed, Harris said she respected the service of all who volunteer for the armed services. But the question’s framing allowed her to dismiss the controversy as an issue manufactured by the Trump campaign, not her running mate’s fellow National Guardsmen.

 

Lastly, as one reporter observed, “There’s been a lot of questions about when you’re going to sit down for your first interview since being the nominee.” That’s a statement, not a question, but Harris responded by insisting that she intended to “get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”

 

In summation, reporters shouldn’t operate under the flawed assumption that they’ll get any more access to the Democratic presidential nominee than that.