The Democratic candidate’s boosters have telegraphed how they really think the Bret Baier interview went.
The Democratic candidate’s boosters have telegraphed how they really think the Bret Baier interview went.
W e all know campaigns will say anything if they think it’ll move a vote.
It’s why we have to ignore the overt messaging and look at the subtext.
To get inside a campaign’s thinking — whether it believes it’s winning or losing, whether it’s confident or in a full-blown panic — we have to listen for what’s not being said in the midst of all the insisting and the shouting.
Take, for example, Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier last week.
The Democratic nominee had a bad night, to put it politely. She seemed ill prepared and flustered. By the end of the interview, she had abandoned any pretense of an informative back-and-forth. Instead, she fully embraced a filibuster strategy to run out the clock, practically counting the seconds to when she could flee the studio, which produced perfectly absurd non sequiturs. Baier’s direct question about the Biden White House enabling billion-dollar-plus cash infusions to Iran, for example, somehow prompted her to embark on a rambling reference to a 2020 Atlantic article alleging former president Trump once referred to deceased veterans as “suckers” and “losers.”
It was not a stellar performance by Harris. You’d think otherwise, however, from following the post-interview chatter among her staffers and boosters in the press. The way they put it, the vice president had a great night. She put on a masterclass in how to handle a rude and abrasive interviewer. Also, Baier is terrible and unprofessional. But Harris also knocked it out of the park. Remember to print she knocked it out of the park.
“Kamala Harris (strong) handled an ambush Fox interview light years better than the hash Donald Trump (unstable) made of the Fox pep rally disguised as a town hall,” remarked Obama White House adviser David Plouffe.
Said MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell, “Bret Baier was functioning as a Trump campaign operative in that interview by literally playing a Trump commercial in the middle of it. Using precious minutes of an interview with a presidential candidate to run the opponents commercial.”
Elsewhere at MSNBC, host Symone Sanders Townsend, who worked in the vice president’s office but fled after a little less than a year, complained on X, “On the tone, I have sat in the room for a number of interviews with VP Harris and they have been tough. I’ve never witnessed what I witnessed tonight though. The interviewer wasn’t themselves — instead he was rude, misleading and pulled questions straight out of a proverbial Trump/Vance press release.”
“I figured [Bret Baier] would be tough,” said former-senator-turned-cable-news-goblin Claire McCaskill. “I didn’t think he would be downright rude and disrespectful. The VP did great. She is strong. He is scared.”
Though the two narratives — “She won!” and “Bret Baier needs to be stopped!” — diverge slightly, they have one thing in common: the unmistakable aroma of cope. If Harris’s supporters sound disappointed, even as they declare victory, it’s because they are.
Like you, they know she bombed the interview.
Since the interview, Harris’s supporters have written and spoken at length about Baier, who, as Harris would say, is not on the ballot. They’ve tweeted angrily. They’ve gone on television to denounce Baier, Fox, Fox producers, and anyone involved with Fox. They’ve written opinion articles bemoaning that Harris should suffer the indignity of being treated like a Republican politician.
But do you know what her supporters pointedly have avoided? They’re not tripping over themselves to share highlights from the interview. They’re not lining up to share “zingers” or play up any particular response from the vice president. They’re not even trying to will any memes into existence.
They’re too busy complaining about the refs.
And do you know who spends all their time complaining about the refs post-game? Losers.
In focusing so much energy on Fox and so little on anything Harris did or said, her fans are admitting they see the interview as a failure. It was the same when Trump’s supporters spent the days following his debate against Harris railing against the CBS anchors’ moderating skills (or lack thereof). Winners don’t obsess over the refereeing.
Oh, and one more thing you may have missed.
Harris and her team came into the Baier interview hoping it’d help them with Fox’s undecided male viewers. Following the taping, however, the going line among the vice president’s supporters was that she did a terrific job of rallying the Democratic base. But rallying the troops wasn’t the original intended goal (and why does she need to rally her own base anyway?). Switching up the stated goals post-interview tells us everything without saying anything.
Harris was unprepared for even basic questions about her record. She floundered when pressed for policy specifics. Perhaps worst of all, she was utterly unprepared to be asked what she knew about President Joe Biden’s descent into dotardry before he ended up dropping out of the race. Perhaps she had prepared a line for just such an occasion and failed to deliver it, but we’ll never know.
She had a bad night, objectively speaking. But don’t just take my word for it. The campaign has said as much — just not aloud.