If there was one takeaway from Kamala Harris’ much-anticipated CNN interview Thursday night, it’s this: Harris is not a flashy candidate. But she is a lawyer and a serious person, and while her campaign has so far been a lot of fun, she’ll bring sobriety and pragmatism to the White House.
A Harris presidency may not be as exciting as Trumpian insults and reality TV antics. But Americans have a choice: Do we want politics as entertainment, or politicians who put their heads down and get stuff done?
Harris and her running mate Tim Walz sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash after weeks of avoiding press interviews (CNN has reportedly also requested a sit-down with Donald Trump and JD Vance, and has yet to see their invitation accepted).
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When she was running in the 2020 Democratic primary, Harris was often criticized for her “word salad” answers, and was sometimes flat-out hostile to journalists; her interview with The New York Times reporter Astead Herndon, for example, is an uncomfortable listen, as she repeatedly refuses to answer fairly straightforward questions, suggests the problem is the interviewer’s lack of specificity, and, as Herndon put it, made him feel like he was on trial.
Some Harris supporters have even argued that she shouldn’t subject herself to interviews with journalists at all and should focus instead on winning the race.
That’s flatly wrong. Harris is running for president and no matter how unfair her team believes the mainstream press to be, presidential contenders have an obligation to answer difficult questions. And despite past fails, Harris, clearly, is now up to the task.
The CNN interview itself was far from a tough interrogation. It was surprisingly short. Harris’ answers were brief. Tim Walz seemed mostly there for show. And Harris, a seasoned lawyer and increasingly skilled politician, swerved around some of Bash’s inquiries and wasn’t pushed to follow up (certainly a win for Harris).
Viewers hoping for some deep insight into Harris’s personality or a different side of her may have walked away disappointed. She did seem genuinely touched by a photo of her grandniece gazing up at her as she accepted the presidential nomination from the DNC podium. But Harris was not in the CNN studio to make friends. She was there to lay out her agenda, and to give viewers a preview of what a Harris-Walz White House would look like.
And that looks like a White House run by a pragmatic lawyer, which is fairly dull; a good thing, at least for those of us who prefer our president to be working instead of hamming it up for the cameras. And a pragmatic, somewhat technocratic presidency means having a leader who does change policy positions when she realizes she was wrong or that a particular stance might be morally satisfying but is realistically untenable.
Politicians often get accused of “flip-flopping,” as Harris has on fracking. But there’s a difference between adjusting one’s views on a specific and frankly not-all-that-vital policy after learning more, as Harris has, and speaking out of both sides of one’s mouth on some of the most fundamental issues voters must consider, as Trump and Vance often do. Trump has both bragged about ending the era of abortion rights in America and then saying he’ll be great for reproductive freedoms, while has Vance has compared Trump to Hitler and then run alongside him.
In many ways, Harris feels like a president from a different era–aside, of course, from the fact that she is a Black and Indian woman, all identity markers that would have kept her out of the White House until very recently (and still might). She carefully sidesteps the identity questions that have been a hallmark of progressive activism and discourse over the past decade (“I am running because I feel that I am the best person to do this job at this moment, for all Americans, regardless of race and gender,” Harris told Bash when asked about her potentially barrier-breaking candidacy). She doesn’t even engage her notoriously combative opponent on his ugliest attacks. When Bash asked about Trump suggesting Harris “happened to turn Black for political purposes,” Harris waved it away: “Same old tired playbook,” she said. “Next question, please.”
Trump has badly damaged not just American democracy but the American psyche and our relationship to politicians, with scores of Americans (most of them on the right) seeming to now want their leaders to be insult-lobbing entertainers, televangelist-style hucksters, or gun-and-conspiracy-wielding provocateurs. Much of the press has unfortunately latched on to this new entertainment-as-politics normal, searching for the shocking or sleazy over the substantive.
Harris has simply refused to play the game, doing her competent-lawyer thing and letting the TikTok kids bring snark, color (mostly bright green), a sense of excitement to her campaign. Walz has leaned into his aww-shucks-Midwestern-dad persona to charm various social media content creators. And when dealing with mainstream media outlets, both are professional and buttoned-up, more competent adults than reality TV personalities.
As the interview wrapped, Trump took to his right-wing social media platform TruthSocial and tweeted one all-caps word: “BORING!!!”
And thank God.
