Jess Bidgood in the NY Times Newsletter: Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, will sit down with Dana Bash of CNN tomorrow at 9 p.m. Eastern for the first major television interview of their presidential campaign.
It’s a high-stakes moment for their nascent candidacy, a chance to define their campaign, defend their ideas and test their political dexterity in the run-up to Harris’s debate against former President Donald Trump on Sept. 10.
It’s also an opportunity, following a month of rallies and campaign speeches, for the pair to tell a deeper story about themselves and their vision.
But getting them to do that might not be easy.
My colleague Astead Herndon, friend of the newsletter and host of the podcast “The Run-Up,” interviewed Harris as part of his reporting for a profile he wrote of Harris last year.
The interview was contentious, but revealing, too, and I think it’s worth revisiting now. I called Astead to ask him what it taught him, and what he’s looking for from Harris’s interview tomorrow. Our conversation was edited and condensed.
JB: Astead, thank you for joining me! You’ve held sit-down interviews with Harris twice, once in 2019 and once in 2023. How were those two interviews different?
AH: In 2019, I was asking Harris about her own vision, because she was running for president. In 2023, she had a record of the Biden-Harris administration to talk up, and there was less incentive to be vulnerable on her own beliefs. But from my vantage point, in both those interviews, I was trying to sift through platitudes to try to find a specific vision or a story that she was telling about herself, because it wasn’t really clear. I wanted to see where she’d place herself in the political moment.
In a word or two, how would you describe that 2023 interview?
Arduous! When she sat down, I asked her if she liked her job, and she said she did — but that she didn’t like doing this. I was putting her in a position to self-reflect, and to articulate her own story of growth and change. I thought she would want to tell a story on that front, and was surprised that she did not.
During the interview, she showed a reluctance to label herself politically, like when you asked her how she saw herself in the world of California politics. How did that shape the interview and shape your understanding of her?
It showed how she does not view herself with those labels and feels confined by those boxes. I think she’s someone who doesn’t like feeling known, doesn’t like you assuming to have figured her out, and I think that’s true politically and personally.
I don’t think she loses any sleep over whether you think she’s a moderate or progressive. I think she thinks, ‘I’m a person who makes big and hard decisions, with all the evidence in front of me.’ That’s what’s mattered most as a prosecutor and attorney general, and I think that’s how she views political leadership.
