Kamala Harris had just finished making a Sunday pancake breakfast for her grandnieces before starting on a puzzle when she received a life-changing phone call.
“It was Joe Biden,” Harris said in an interview aired on CNN Thursday night, reflecting on the July 21 call she got at her residence at the Naval Observatory. “And he told me what he had decided to do.”
President Biden was letting her know he couldn’t go on. He was abandoning his re-election effort in the wake of a disastrous presidential debate performance that laid bare his frailties and sparked a coup of epic proportions.
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“And I asked him, ‘Are you sure?’” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash in a taped interview that aired Thursday night. “And he said, ‘Yes.’ And — and that’s how I learned about it,” Harris said.
While Biden’s answer was unequivocal in Harris’ retelling of that day, it was unclear whether the president immediately offered to back his vice president to carry the torch.
CNN’s Bash asked, “And what about the endorsement? Did you ask for it?”
“He was very clear that he was going to support me,” Harris replied. But she stopped there... offering no details on whether Biden offered or if she asked for an endorsement of her candidacy for president. The president's announcement on that Sunday that he was bailing out of the race came nearly a half-hour before he would release a second statement declaring his support for Harris.
Bash tried to address that lapse in her interview on Thursday. “So when he called to tell you, he said, ‘I’m pulling out of the race and I’m going to support you?’”
Harris demurred. “Well, my first thought was not about me, to be honest with you. My first thought was about him, to be honest,” the vice president said before launching into a history lesson of the Biden administration’s accomplishments on the economy, sovereignty, and other non sequiturs.
The CNN interview was Harris’ first long-anticipated mainstream media appearance since becoming the Democratic nominee. Her campaign has had to defend heavy criticism from Republicans and the media for not being more accessible to the free press—and for insisting that her first interview be conducted jointly with her running mate, Tim Walz.
For his part during the CNN interview that was taped Thursday afternoon in Savannah, Georgia, the Minnesota governor defended himself against accusations that he misled the public about his exit from the Army National Guard service and the type of fertility treatment he and his wife used to conceive children.
