What she failed to do is remotely persuade the few undecided voters out there.
After months of avoiding difficult interviews, Kamala Harris finally walked into the lion’s den today, sitting down for an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. When the interview was announced the other day, I noted to my colleagues what a gamble this was for Harris, the sort of move her handlers would allow only if their previous strategy of avoiding all unscripted media interactions had become untenable. It was a gamble that did not pay off for her. That it rated only as a sad failure rather than a spectacular news-making disaster means that her partisans are treating it like the greatest public resurrection since Christ rolled away the stone.
You can watch the entire interview here if you like. (The Trump campaign posted it in its entirety, announcing, “Our newest ad just dropped.”) Harris sat for 26 minutes, taking tough questions from Baier that she simply refused to answer. When asked about immigration and the border right off the bat, for example — specifically how many illegals the Biden-Harris administration has released into the country — she began filibustering and fell back on vague generalities as she fought with Baier over the fact that she kept interrupting and doing everything except answer his questions. (“Let me finish,” she repeatedly said, before reciting pre-rehearsed non-answers.) It was annoyingly substance-free mush.
Democrats, of course, will tell you that Harris just delivered a performance for the ages, a bravura Christopher Hitchens–like masterclass in adversarial interviewing that puts to bed forever all doubts about her competence. I know this because several hundred Democrats are currently insisting as much to me on social media. Others are less considerate, simply accusing me of being a Trumpist hack blinded by my partisanship.
I get a chuckle out of that, because as readers probably already well know, I think that neither Harris nor Trump should ever be president, and I consider the fact that one of them inevitably will be in the Oval Office as evidence of God’s judgment on a sinful nation. But that detachment also liberates me to assess political performances without indulging in the partisan need for them to be “a win for my team.” Heck, I’d have loved it if Harris had gone out there and revealed heretofore unsuspected power levels to the nation while deftly parrying Bret Baier’s questions. It would have been yet another shocking twist in the craziest presidential election cycle of my lifetime. But she could not do that. Kamala Harris simply lacks the capacity to surprise anybody, because, as my colleague Charlie Cooke politely pointed out the other day, Kamala Harris is an idiot.
Instead, people are so desperate for a change in narrative that they’re mistaking Harris’s flailing unpleasantness for “fighting spirit.” Perhaps you are as well, and if so I can only warn that you have gotten too lost in the fog of the late-stage campaign to step back and take proper perspective of what, in any set of circumstances other than those of 2024, would instantly be rated a notable disaster. The countless reviews I see flooding in from the Left along the lines of “she should do more adversarial interviews, she does better in them” underline the politics-as-team-sport habit of making the best of a bad situation. Harris “did good” by this logic merely because she seemed aggressively snippy. To partisans, that’s at least a sign of feistiness from an otherwise moribund and intellectually vacant campaign. (Literally: “She fights!”) What she failed to do, however, is remotely persuade the few undecided voters out there.