On the menu today: Kamala Harris agrees to a rare serious interview with 60 Minutes and immediately fumbles; Democrats are starting to doubt whether, in a neck-and-neck race, a rerun of the “basement campaign” that sticks to friendly interviews is really the best approach; CBS News rips into Donald Trump for skipping his own invitation to 60 Minutes; and some are arguing that no one should be attempting any last-minute changes to the rules for absentee-ballot deadlines, what’s required for a legal vote, or how a state allocates its electoral votes.
Two Presidential Campaigns That Fear Their Own Candidates
Kamala Harris was a local prosecutor for twelve years, San Francisco district attorney for eight years, California attorney general for six years, and a U.S. senator for four years, and she’s closing in on four years as the U.S. vice president. (Her last private-sector job might well have been that gig at McDonald’s.*) That’s a lot of time in the public eye; over the years, and during her campaigns, she must have done hundreds of interviews, perhaps thousands.
And yet, since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has appeared terrified of doing them.
When Harris has agreed to take questions, her campaign has chosen interviewers who either are friendly and prone to softballs or who have already formally endorsed her — Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC and Oprah to start. We’re told that Harris is doing a so-called media blitz this week: The View, The Howard Stern Show, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Ana Navarro, a co-host of The View, was one of the hosts at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Four years ago, Howard Stern endorsed Biden and encouraged Trump supporters to drink bleach and “drop dead.” Colbert has turned his show into an infomercial for whichever Democratic Party official is in town that night.
This is an indication that Harris campaign managers wake up in a cold sweat from nightmares about their own candidate’s deviating from talking points and happy chat.
You might be thinking, “And she’s getting away with it!” Eh, don’t be so certain that there isn’t any consequence to running a campaign on coconut-tree memes and vibes and “joy.” A dramatically under-discussed report in Politico from the weekend:
Democratic operatives, including some of Kamala Harris’ own staffers, are growing increasingly concerned about her relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press almost entirely.
In interviews with POLITICO, nearly two dozen Democrats described Harris as running a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the race they fear could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day stretch.
With early voting by mail and in person already underway in more than half of the country, Harris spent just three days of the last week of September in battleground states.
. . . While the plan is for Harris’ travel to ramp up in October, the vice president has spent more than a third of days since the Democratic National Convention receiving briefings from staff and conducting internal meetings, or without any scheduled public events, according to a POLITICO review of her travel. . . .
Of the remaining days, the vice president spent just a little more than half of them holding rallies, policy-focused speeches, events with labor unions and other in-person, public-facing events, including stops at small businesses, in swing states. And she has spent nearly half of her post-DNC days in Washington.
Harris has had no public events on more than a third of the days since the convention? We’re left with the question that has haunted Joe Biden’s presidency: What is the leader doing all day?
Seven states will determine the outcome of the election, and they’re all within the margin of error. They’re mostly clustered in three geographical areas — Nevada and Arizona in the West, Michigan and Wisconsin in the Upper Midwest, and Georgia and North Carolina in the South, with Pennsylvania a bit farther north of the last two. It’s the easiest possible arrangement to do multiple rallies in multiple states in one day. If the hurricanes have disrupted the ability to campaign in the Southeast, there are still five other states worth a campaign stop!
Harris’s interview with Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes, which aired last night, may be the only time the vice president gets anything resembling a tough question. And as we can see in the transcript, she turned in the kind of performance that makes the media-averse strategy appear justified:
Bill Whitaker: Do we have a real close ally in Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Vice President Kamala Harris: I think, with all due respect, the better question is do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people. And the answer to that question is yes.
That’s another way of saying no. Heck of a way to mark the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Harris remains weirdly allergic to specifics when speaking off the cuff:
Whitaker: There are lots of signs that the American economy is doing very well, better than most countries, I think. But the American people don’t seem to be feeling it. Groceries are 25 percent higher and people are blaming you and Joe Biden for that. Are they wrong?
Harris: We now have historic low unemployment in America among all groups of people. We now have an economy that is thriving by all macroeconomic measures. And, to your point, prices are still too high. And I know that, and we need to deal with it, which is why part of my plan—you mentioned groceries. Part of my plan is what we must do to bring down the price of groceries.
Whitaker had to spell out some of the details of Harris’s economic agenda in the form of questions:
Whitaker: You want to expand— the child tax credit.
Harris: Yes, I do.
Whitaker: You want to give tax breaks to first-time home buyers.
Harris: Yes.
Whitaker: And people starting small businesses.
Harris: Correct.
Whitaker: But it is estimated by the Nonpartisan Committee for Responsible Federal Budget that your economic plan would add $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. How are you going to pay for that?
Harris: OK, so the other econ— economists that have reviewed my plan versus my opponent and determined that my economic plan would strengthen America’s economy. His would weaken it.
Whitaker: But—
Harris: My plan, Bill, if you don’t mind, my plan is about saying that when you invest in small businesses, you invest in the middle class, and you strengthen America’s economy. Small businesses are part of the backbone of America’s economy.
Whitaker: But— but pardon me, Madame Vice President, I— the— the question was, how are you going to pay for it?
Harris: Well, one of the things is I’m going to make sure that the richest among us, who can afford it, pay their fair share in taxes.
First, the U.S. has the most progressive tax code out of all the 38 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, including the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand. Check out the tax brackets for yourself.
Or examine the congressional testimony of William McBride of the Tax Foundation:
By any objective measure, the U.S. tax code is extremely progressive and very redistributive. According to the latest IRS data for 2020, the top 5 percent of taxpayers (about 7.9 million filers that earn more than $220,521) paid in aggregate $1.1 trillion in income taxes, amounting to 62.7 percent of all income taxes paid that year. The top 1 percent of taxpayers (about 1.6 million filers who earn more than $548,336) paid $723 billion in income taxes, or 42.3 percent of all income taxes paid—a larger share than the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined.
The share of federal income taxes paid by the top 1 percent is higher than it has been in at least 20 years, according to IRS data. In 2001, the top 1 percent’s share of income taxes paid was 33.2 percent, then fluctuated with the business cycle and the ups and downs of the housing and stock markets, before rising steadily to its current high of 42.3 percent in 2020.
“The rich aren’t paying their fair share” is an exhausted talking point, an economic myth promulgated by partisan hacks attempting to stir up a tide of envy and resentment.
Still, as ugly as it turned out to be, Harris did sit down and do the interview. 60 Minutes raked Trump over the coals for not doing the same. I’m not sure why anyone on the Trump team thought that doing that interview would hurt him — or hurt him any worse than any other appearance during the campaign. Trump’s the ultimate known quantity. What, is the fear that he’s going to say that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” again? Claim that Harris didn’t visit North Carolina when she did? Declare that he didn’t know that Harris is black? Invoke Hannibal Lecter again?
Trump is what he is. There’s no amount of smoke and mirrors that can obscure, spin, or alter perceptions of him. Best to let him rise or fall on his own merits or liabilities.
*I know, I know, lots of people doubt that Harris ever worked at McDonald’s, although I don’t really understand why a college student working at a fast-food joint for a summer is such an implausible tale, or why anyone would expect McDonalds to keep employment records from 41 years ago. To that point, Philip Bump writes:
Harris has indicated that she worked at a restaurant in Alameda — an island on the east side of the San Francisco Bay — during the summer of 1983. Over at the Alameda-focused discussion board on Reddit, there was some discussion about which restaurant that would have been, the one on Central Avenue or the one on Shore Line Drive. Consensus seemed to be the former, since it wasn’t clear whether the latter existed at the time.
I called both, without success. Again, unsurprisingly: This was 40 years ago. I also discovered that both restaurants are owned by members of the same family. My call to them was not returned, even when I touted the potential historic nature of their franchises. Then I reached out to McDonald’s corporate, both to the company and to the company’s archivist (which, as an aside, seems like a very interesting job). No dice.
Technically, then, the claim exists within the formal parameter of “unproven,” which is what the fact-checking site Snopes has granted it. But it might just as well exist as “unprovable,” barring some release of records from the Social Security Administration.
ADDENDA: Over in that other publication I write for, I note an argument being made against last-minute attempts to change what qualifies as a legitimate vote, what the deadline is for an absentee ballot, or how a state allocates its electoral votes. If you want to change any of those rules, you have to do it well before the election process begins.
Over in the Corner, I note that the world’s most notorious arms dealer, released back to Russia by the Biden administration in exchange for professional basketball player Brittney Griner, is back to his old tricks, working to put dangerous weapons in the hands of the Houthis.