Why Kamala Harris’s Fox Interview Was a Failure

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 17, 2024

 

In remarks following Kamala Harris’s sit-down interview with Fox News Channel host Bret Baier, campaign spokesman Brian Fallon outlined what the campaign hoped to achieve. “I think there is a good number of Independents and Haley-style Republicans who are very open to voting for VP Harris,” he said, “and that is why we are open to doing events with Republicans on Fox News.” On those terms, the interview was a failure.

 

It was perhaps the most substantive interview to which the vice president has submitted herself since her party tapped her in to replace Joe Biden at the top of the presidential ticket, but Harris provided no substance. Her answers on everything from the border crisis, to her shift from radical progressive to born-again moderate, to what she knew about Joe Biden’s infirmities and when she knew them have not evolved at all over this campaign. They are as deficient today as they were in the rote press release that first announced them.

 

On the migrant crisis the Biden administration incepted into existence and failed to do anything to mitigate until it became a political headache, Harris filibustered without saying anything in particular. She obfuscated by attempting to claim that a Democratic “immigration reform” bill would have preemptively addressed the conditions the administration hadn’t yet exacerbated with its lax approach to border enforcement. She talked up her biography as a prosecutor as though that background was relevant. She muddled the distinctions between the current crisis and the general lack of a “perfect” immigration system in America going on decades — a distinction Americans who have warmed to draconian measures, like a mass-deportation program, are fully capable of drawing.

 

And amid her prolonged filibusters in her effort to stumble across a thought worthy of expression, she retreated back into a performative display of pique when her interlocutor tried to get her back on track. The “I’m speaking” gambit is a road-worn trick, but it only works if you have something to say. When Harris deployed that technique against Baier, she did manage to quiet his interjections, but she failed to follow through with anything that would have merited her indignation in the first place. Voters whose concerns about the flood of migrants into the country are genuine did not see their sincerity reflected in Harris’s evasions.

 

The same could be said for voters who are concerned that Harris’s shift from revolutionary left-wing reformer to sensible centrist isn’t entirely on the level. “Listen, that was five years ago,” she said when pressed to explain why she has metamorphosed into a wholly different politician from the one she fabricated ahead of her 2020 presidential bid. Really, who remembers what they believed . . . five years ago?

 

Repeatedly, Harris attempted to neutralize the liabilities she crafted for herself during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries by insisting she would “follow the law.” Specifically, the statutory guidelines that make gender-reassignment treatments and surgeries available to federal inmates — guidelines, she added, that Trump himself observed. Center-right voters could only see that as a sufficient response if they were already inclined to believe that the Biden administration has been a scrupulous, by-the-book enforcer of congressional edict whether the White House liked it or not. No sentient right-leaning voter, persuadable or otherwise, would sign on to that proposition. Moreover, Harris dismissed the issue as “quite remote” from matters of more salience to voters. She’s right; this isn’t a top five issue for most voters. But it is reflective of a cultural debate in America in which the progressive Left is pushing the boundaries of what practices should and should not benefit from taxpayer-provided largess. Those voters heard Harris’s tacit endorsement of that cultural crusade loud and clear.

 

Harris failed to articulate any specific reason why her presidency would “not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency” save the fact that she exists in a wholly different corporeal form from the current president. Nor has she thought up a convincing rationale to explain why she spent so many months defending Biden against the charge that he was infirm only to help oust him from his own candidacy after those infirmities became undeniable. Even on Iran, which Harris commendably identified as foe with “American blood on its hands,” the vice president pivoted maladroitly from insisting that additional pressure needs to be put on Tehran and its terrorist proxies to attacking Donald Trump for withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, which relieved pressure on Iran and its proxies. It’s unlikely that right-of-center voters found any of this convincing.

 

The interview was not the campaign-ending disaster that many of Harris’s critics insist it was. In adopting an adversarial posture, she gave her supporters a taste of the prosecutorial affect she wielded to great effect on the presidential-debate stage. She turned the tables on her interlocutor, too, by correctly noting that Fox had played a clip of Donald Trump softening his recent remarks pledging to deploy the armed forces against the “enemy from within” rather than the original remarks. That, too, will energize her partisans. In an election defined by small margins, that matters.

 

But according to Fallon, Harris’s goal was not to provide partisan Democrats with a source of psychological gratification. The objective was to peel some soft Trump supporters away from the former president’s coalition, but she gave those voters nothing on which to hang their hats. There were no assurances that the arch-progressive reformer she posed as in 2019 is not the real Kamala Harris, and no indication that she would be a responsible steward of the interests of Americans who seek to preserve rather than overthrow the existing social compact. Harris will get high marks from her supporters and opponents alike for entering the lion’s den, but showing up is the lowest possible hurdle. It just happens to be the only one she cleared.