The best thing about Kamala Harris sitting down for the traditional grilling by a 60 Minutes correspondent is that she showed up and Donald Trump didn’t.
He ducked.
In an election where contrast is everything, she took CBS’ Bill Whitaker’s questions while CBS’ Scott Pelley used the time that had been allotted for Trump to describe how the former president canceled at the last minute, demanding an apology for what another correspondent said to him four years ago that she never said. He walked off the set that time.
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This is how Trump tries to turn a media blitz by Harris into a pile of lies that advantage his campaign in these final weeks. After refusing a second debate with Vice President Harris, which he would likely lose, Trump has resorted to spewing conspiracy theories that disrupt recovery efforts from Hurricane Helene, while Florida braced for the fearsome onslaught of Hurricane Milton.
In a race that the Harris team believes will be won by inches, her 60 Minutes appearance was the first in a 24-hour media tour that took her to the set of The View, a daytime talk show with a dominantly female audience, then to a New York studio for a 75-minute interview with onetime shock jock Howard Stern, whose core audience is men between the ages of 25 and 54, and finally for an appearance with late-night host Stephen Colbert, with whom she shared a Miller High Life, hoping to settle the time-honored question of which candidate voters would rather have a beer with.
She moved the needle simply by being in these venues, but there were missed opportunities like when she blew the first question out of the box on The View about whether there is anything she would have done differently from President Biden. She said she couldn’t think of a thing—a statement the Trump campaign immediately turned into a devastatingly effective ad.
She recovered, saying she will have a Republican in her cabinet, which Biden didn’t. Still, it’s bewildering that Harris isn’t better prepared for a question that she knows is coming. She should say, “I love Joe Biden, but….” And then give the voters some sense of separation to bolster her credentials as the candidate of change versus more of the same, which every election turns on.
We need to see her every day between now and the election, overseeing storm recovery efforts, combatting Trump’s lies and—most important—showcasing the contrast between herself and Trump on important issues, not letting him get away with portraying her as out of the mainstream. He’s the one who couldn’t say when challenged in their debate that Ukraine should win the war.
Harris settled in on the couch with the other women on The View, and while they’re not all Democrats, they seem in her corner for this election. In a question about the “sandwich generation,” of women caring for aging parents while also caring for children, Harris had a meaningful proposal to make about Medicare covering in-home care on a long-term basis to keep people from having to go into nursing homes, which in the end are more expensive and soul-draining than in-home care.
Asked how she would pay for it, she cited the money being saved now that Medicare is negotiating to bring down the cost of prescription drugs. She has the beginnings of a good idea that will require bipartisan action in Congress.
“She’s not going to get everything right for everybody on Day One,” Whoopi Goldberg said. “But I believe she’s going to do her best.”
Next stop was Stern, who has become the king of interviews with his ability to make his guests feel so relaxed that they break out of their talking points and say things they might ordinarily censor. Harris resisted at first but then we learned she doesn’t eat Raisin Bran cereal every day, and then the personal details spilled out. She went through a family-sized bag of Doritos after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. She works out on an elliptical every day. Her favorite Formula One driver is Lewis Hamilton. (Extra points for that in reaching male voters!)
And yes, she’s losing sleep over the election because the stakes are so high.
Her last stop was with Colbert. News had just come out on journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, War, in which he reveals that Trump may have had as many as 7 phone conversations with Russian President Putin since leaving office in January 2021. Woodward reports that as president, Trump sent Putin test kits for Covid when they were at an extreme shortage in this country.
This is an ongoing story—what does Putin, an ex-KGB agent, want with Trump?—and Harris jumped on it. Trump, she said, “openly admires dictators and authoritarians. He has said he wants to be a dictator on Day One, if he were elected again as president. He gets played by these guys. He admires so-called strongmen and he gets played because they flatter him or offer him favor."
As for the COVID tests, she added, "I ask everyone here and everyone who is watching: Do you remember what those days were like? You remember how many people did not have tests and were trying to scramble to get them?"
She went on to say we should strengthen NATO and stand with Ukraine, issues on which there is a clear difference with Trump.
These issues should be front and center. Yet the Trump campaign is focusing on CBS airing two different clips in response to 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker asking why it seemed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn't paying attention to the diplomatic efforts of the United States.
In Clip one, Harris replies, “Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
In Clip two, she says, “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
Harris made both statements, editing for clarity and space is standard, and there is no substantive difference between version one and version two. Even so, CBS just gave the Trump conspiratorialists a gift.
Her critics say she can’t do interviews, then she does them and they say they’re not hard-hitting enough. “When we fight, we win,” she says, and she needs to continue the fight, draw the contrast between her economic “opportunity” plan and Trump’s tariffs, get more of those name brand Republicans to appear with her on the campaign trail, and ridicule Trump for chickening out of a second debate.
Contrast, contrast, contrast, every day in every way.
