Team Harris’s Press-Avoidance Strategy Is Delusional

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 08, 2024

 

As I noted at the close of today’s Jolt, Donald Trump’s decision to hold a press conference today is a savvy move. His accessibility to media, to say nothing of J. D. Vance’s, establishes an implicit contrast with Kamala Harris that favors the Republican ticket.

 

For now, however, Harris’s campaign staffers are unfazed, and why shouldn’t they be? There is little pressure on the Harris campaign to pry the candidate out of the cocoon to which she has been consigned. Indeed, the Democratic campaign seems to have convinced itself that it can maintain the artifice they’ve fabricated for Harris until further notice.

 

“Harris’ top communications aides are deeply skeptical, as Biden’s inner circle was, that doing big interviews with major TV networks or national newspapers offer much real upside when it comes to reaching swing voters,” today’s Politico Playbook noted:

 

One longtime Harris ally suggested to West Wing Playbook that Harris could hold off on big interviews until after Labor Day. “There’s really no need,” the person said. “The voters that she needs are at the local level. They’re not reading the national press.”

 

Sorry, Democrats, but that is insane.

 

It is highly unlikely that Harris can maintain the arm’s-length relationship she’s had with both media and her own voters until the Democratic Party’s nominating convention, much less for another three weeks. The cracks in media professionals’ resolve to play along with the Harris campaign’s strategy are already forming:

Forget that it would be desirable in and of itself for someone who could become the next president of the United States to voluntarily contribute to the sum of human knowledge. That comes later. For now, the safest course is to raise the subject of Harris’s insularity in partisan terms. Republicans are going to make an issue of this. She’s making herself look bad. The next stage of this logical progression is the one from which the Harris campaign cannot escape. Republicans have made this an issue, as we’re seeing from the polling. She’s making us look bad.

 

The Trump campaign can and probably will hasten this process. Whatever Trump says at today’s press conference will make news, and the press’s attention will be on litigating the former president’s remarks in a vacuum. But Trump will be filling the void left by Harris’s stage-managed approach to the campaign. He will be setting the terms of the discourse. Kamala Harris will merely be responding to those terms from a defensive posture. Being buffeted by events rather than commanding them will not wear well with the press for much longer — much less until September.

 

The notion that Harris can avoid speaking extemporaneously until the fall is delusional. And if Democrats aren’t a little worried that the Harris campaign is buying the hype media outlets have contrived for it, they’re deluded, too.