It was long a trope of American politics that candidates would tack left to win Democratic primaries (or right to win Republican primaries) and then move to the center in the general election. To the extent it was ever true, it hasn’t been the case in quite some time, as it’s next to impossible to get away in the modern media environment. But Kamala Harris hasn’t run in a primary in five years and is giving it a try.
AP (“The interview: Kamala Harris’ inaugural sit-down was most notable for seeming … ordinary“):
After avoiding a probing interview by a journalist for the first month of her sudden presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris’ first one Thursday was notable mostly in how routine it seemed.
CNN’s Dana Bash, sitting down with Harris and running mate Tim Walz in a Georgia restaurant, asked her about some issues where she had changed positions, the historical nature of her candidacy, what she would do in her first day as president and whether she’d invite a Republican to be a Cabinet member (yes, she said).
What Bash didn’t ask — and the Democratic nominee didn’t volunteer — is why it took so long to submit to an interview and whether she will do more again as a candidate.
With no clips from interviews or extended news conferences as a candidate to pick apart, Republican Donald Trump and his campaign had made Harris’ failure to take on journalists an issue in itself. She had promised to rectify that by the end of August, and made it in just under the wire.
In the interview, taped earlier Thursday at Kim’s Cafe in Savannah, Georgia, Bash occasionally had pressed Harris when the vice president failed to answer a question directly. She asked four times, for example, about what led Harris to change her position on fracking — a controversial way to extract natural gas from the landscape — from her brief presidential candidacy in 2020.
“How should voters be looking at some of the changes in policy?” Bash asked, wondering whether experience led Harris down another path. “Should they be completely confident that what you’re saying now is going to be the policy moving forward?”
Bash asked Harris twice whether she would do something different, like withhold some military aid to Israel, to help reach a peace deal in the Mideast. Harris stressed the importance of a deal, but offered no new specifics on achieving it.
When Bash sought a response to Trump suggesting that Harris had only recently been emphasizing her Black roots, the vice president swiftly brushed it aside. “Next question,” she said.
CNN political analyst David Axelrod suggested that Harris, by not doing interviews previously, had raised the stakes on what is usually a typical test that presidential candidates face. But after the Bash session aired, Axelrod said that she “did what she needed to do.”
“What she needed to do was be the same person she has been on stage the past month,” said Axelrod, onetime aide to Obama when he was in the White House. He predicted the interview would ultimately make little difference in the campaign.
It has been a very long time, indeed, since presidential candidates had any need to sit down for tough interviews with mainstream journalists. Bill Clinton may have forged a new path during the 1992 campaign, famously going on The Arsenio Hall Show and other venues with friendly interviewers rather than sit-downs with more traditional journalists. Most, if not all, nominees since have followed variations of that model. While I understand why reporters for the AP, NYT, WaPo, and the like don’t like it, it’s rather clear that the voting public doesn’t punish candidates for it.
CNN (“Harris explains in exclusive CNN interview why she’s shifted her position on key issues since her first run for president“):
Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday offered her most expansive explanation to date on why she’s changed some of her positions on fracking and immigration, telling CNN’s Dana Bash her values haven’t shifted but that her time as vice president provided new perspective on some of the country’s most pressing issues.
In the CNN exclusive sit-down interview, Harris also said she would name a Republican to serve in her Cabinet if elected.
She described for the first time President Joe Biden’s telephone call informing her he was planning to abandon his bid for a second term after his disastrous debate performance. She stopped short of saying she would alter Biden’s policy toward arm sales to Israel.
[…]
In all, the joint interview in Savannah with her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz – their first since becoming the Democratic presidential ticket – provided one of the clearest looks into Harris’ positions and her plans for the presidency.
Asked to describe her day-one objectives should she win, Harris did not list any specific steps, like signing executive actions or orders.
Instead, she reiterated her focus on strengthening the economy: “First and foremost, one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class.”
In the post-convention phase of the race, Harris is seeking to address scrutiny of her record and add substance to her pitch to American voters on how she would govern if elected president.
Harris had been under pressure to explain her policy positions in greater detail during a sit-down interview. Her last-minute campaign has been fueled not by detailed proposals or policy papers but by Democrats energized by the newly competitive election.
Pressed by Bash on her reversals on fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings, Harris sought to explain why her positions had changed.
“How should voters look at some of the changes that you’ve made?” Bash asked Harris. “Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information? Is it because you were running for president in a Democratic primary? And should they feel comfortable and confident that what you’re saying now is going to be your policy moving forward?”
Harris said despite the shifts in position, her values had not changed.
“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” she said. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed – and I have worked on it – that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”
Her campaign later said Harris does not continue to support the Green New Deal, a wide-ranging proposal to address climate change first introduced in 2019.
During a September 2019 climate crisis town hall hosted by CNN, Harris was asked if she would commit to implementing a federal ban on fracking on her first day in office.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, and starting with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands,” Harris said at the time. By the time she had become Biden’s running mate, she had moved away from that stance and even cast the tie breaking vote to expand fracking leases, as she noted to Bash.
On Thursday, Harris pointed to the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provided record investments in combatting climate change, as an example of her climate record.
“We have set goals for the United States of America and by extension, the globe, around when we should meet certain standards for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as an example. That value has not changed,” she said.
“What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,” she added.
And she pointed to her record as California attorney general, when she prosecuted gangs accused of cross border trafficking, as an indication of her values on immigration.
“My values have not changed. So that is the reality of it. And four years of being vice president, I’ll tell you, one of the aspects, to your point, is traveling the country extensively,” she said, pointing to her 17 visits to Georgia since becoming vice president. “I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems.”
[…]
For Democrats, the economy remains a political weakness. Polls show more voters trust Trump to handle the economy and tame inflation, though they have been narrowing since Harris entered the race.
Harris laid out an economic policy plan earlier this month focused on bringing down costs on food, housing and childcare, in part by going harder after corporations. Her proposals included efforts to combat price gouging and ramp up construction of affordable housing.
Her plans did not amount to a wholesale departure from policies Biden has pursued over the course of his term. But she has chosen to focus more centrally on discussing affordability as a messaging strategy rather than job creation or manufacturing gains, as Biden did.
On Thursday, Bash pressed Harris to explain why those proposals hadn’t been executed during the three-and-a-half years of the Biden administration: “Why haven’t you done them already?
“We had to recover as an economy, and we have done that,” she said, pointing to efforts on containing inflation, cutting costs for prescription drugs and cutting taxes for families.
“There’s more to do, but that’s good work,” she said.
Harris also did not expose any daylight between herself and Biden on the Middle East when asked directly if she would be doing anything differently, including limiting arm sales to Israel.
“We have to get a deal done. This war must end, and we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out,” she said.
NYT (“In CNN Interview Excerpts, Harris Defends Ideological Shift to Center“) adds:
In her first television interview as the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday defended her ideological shift to the political center, saying she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet but promising “my values have not changed.”
[…]
Appointing a nominally bipartisan cabinet would be a return to tradition after eight years of more partisan White Houses. No Republicans are serving in President Biden’s cabinet. But President Barack Obama had a Republican secretary of transportation and two Republican secretaries of defense. President George W. Bush had a Democratic transportation secretary, and before that, President Bill Clinton had a Republican defense secretary.
Ms. Harris declined to name potential Republican picks, but two former representatives, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have become implacable foes of Mr. Trump. Democrats may feel in their debt if Ms. Harris wins in November.
It would be “really important” for her administration to represent “different views, different experiences,” Ms. Harris said.
“It would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my cabinet who was a Republican,” she said, according to a video clip released by CNN.
In the interview, Ms. Bash pressed Ms. Harris on why she had shifted some of her positions from the past. In the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor then serving in the Senate, ran as a progressive. She now appears to be running a more centrist campaign, though she has yet to outline much of her platform in detail.
WSJ (“Kamala Harris Defends Policy Shifts in CNN Interview“) adds:
Vice President Kamala Harris declared that her “values have not changed” on key issues such as climate change and immigration despite shifting policy stances, as she and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat for their first major television interview of their 2024 campaign Thursday.
Harris and Walz, who have faced criticism that they have avoided close media scrutiny, spoke to CNN’s Dana Bash as they took a bus tour through Georgia. Harris addressed questions regarding fracking and other areas where her position has changed and defended President Biden’s economic record, but didn’t lay out significant new details on how she would govern if elected to the White House this fall.
Asked what she would tackle on day one, she pointed to previously announced efforts to cut housing costs and offer tax credits for families.
“People are ready for a new way forward,” Harris said.
[…]
During her earlier campaign for president that kicked off in 2019, Harris said she was in favor of banning fracking, a stance backed by environmentalists, but has since disavowed that position. Pressed on that shift in the interview Thursday, Harris said she had made clear in 2020 that she wouldn’t ban fracking. That year, she said in the vice-presidential debate that she agreed with Biden’s energy plan, which didn’t include a fracking ban.
“What I have seen is we can grow and we can increase a thriving green energy economy without banning fracking,” she said Thursday.
Inconsistency is treated like a cardinal sin in American politics by both opponents and the pundit class. But Harris certainly has a different perspective after nearly four years as Vice President than she did as a politician representing California. It would be disappointing, indeed, if she held exactly the same policy positions now as she did then.
Do I think some of her position changes are out of expedience rather than genuine Bayesian updating? Sure. Do I believe her when she says her core values haven’t changed? I do.
More importantly, given the nature of our system, her values and instincts are far, far more important than her actual policy positions. Regardless of whether she would like to, for example, ban fracking, she won’t have the votes to do so.
With regard to her policy positions, my primary concern is with regard to foreign and national security policy, where I really have no idea what her values or instincts are. As a prosecutor in California, it wasn’t on her radar screen. And, while she did briefly serve on the Intelligence Committee, her focus during her short tenure in the Senate was on domestic policy. So, she’s largely a cipher on that front.
Her opponent, by virtue of having served four years as Commander-in-Chief, has vastly more experience and record on that front. Alas, it’s mostly bad. So, I’ll take my chances with Harris.
