The first question Vice President Kamala Harris faced Wednesday night, in her first solo interview with a major cable network as the Democratic presidential nominee, was posed as a gentle hypothetical: What would she say to the many Americans who do not see how her economic policies would serve them?
“Well,” Harris began, shaking her head, “if you are hardworking, if you have the dreams and the ambitions and the aspirations — of what I believe you do — you’re in my plan.”
She paused and smiled.
“You know, I have to tell you,” she said, eyes lightly closed, hands raised, “I really love and am so energized by what I know to be the spirit and character of the American people.”
In her dizzying ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris has proved to be a disciplined and effective debater and a tireless campaigner, nimble and energetic in rallies. But one-on-one televised interviews with journalists have long been a weakness in her political arsenal. She often winds her way slowly toward an answer, leaning on jargon and rehearsed turns of phrase, using language that is sometimes derided as “word salad” but might be better described as a meringue.
As a presidential candidate, Harris has largely eschewed such interviews, a calculation by her campaign that she can reach more of the voters who matter through town-hall events with celebrities, local television spots, curated videos and social media, without the risks of a prime-time spotlight.
But the avoidance also appears to reflect something deeper, a nervousness that is palpable from the moment Harris takes her seat across from an interviewer, looking as if she were bracing for a hostile cross-examination — from the witness stand.
Harris’ background as a prosecutor and as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee prepared her to be the one asking difficult questions in high-stakes exchanges; she has had less experience on the other side of the microphone.
It has opened her up to mockery from her opponents and detractors: If she does not do an interview, she is hiding something; if she does, she is a lightweight. It has also led to grumbling in the news media, where it is an article of faith that somebody seeking the presidency should be willing and able to answer questions from nonpartisan journalists about her plans for that role.
It is a fundamental imbalance of the campaign, not lost on Harris’ supporters, that while her every remark is scrutinized, her opponent, former President Donald Trump, seems to suffer few consequences for his public remarks, which are often undisciplined explorations of grudges, rumors and preoccupations, laden with innuendo and outright falsehood, often untethered from standard syntax and, at times, reality.
To many, the disconnect smacks of sexism. While her responses are parsed for proof of slipperiness or incompetence, Trump’s can drift out of public consciousness, evidence only of his persistence in being Donald Trump.
Consider an answer Trump gave last month in an interview with Dr. Phil McGraw, in response to a question about what he thought about Harris: “She’s a Marxist. Well, I can see, by action, she’s a person that wanted to defund the police very strongly, bailed out a lot of people in Minnesota from jails who did some really bad things. I saw that very loud and clear then, when that took place, a lot of bad things. She’s done a lot of bad things. There will be no fracking. There’ll be no drilling. She doesn’t want to drill, which will mean our country is going to shrivel up and die. You can’t run the country without fossil fuel, at least not for quite a while, because you don’t have the power. They don’t have the power. You have all sorts of nice contraptions, but they don’t have — wind is fine, but it kills the birds. It destroys the fields. Destroys the fields, what it does.”
Reporters and fellow prosecutors who have known Harris over the years say that she has always been polite but cautious with the press, even in informal settings, a wariness that stems not from lack of preparation or curiosity but from a fear of saying the wrong thing.
“She can be very engaging, very quick; she’s witty, a lot of eye contact,” said Dan Morain, a longtime political journalist in California who covered Harris starting with her run for state attorney general in 2010 and who wrote a biography of her in 2020. “She was well briefed. She knew the issues. She was very good at answering questions and very good at not answering questions.”
With few exceptions, Morain said, she did not “go out of her way” to speak with the press, and he did not expect that to change. “Why would she take the risk?”
Harris is acutely aware of the consequences of a public misstep. Her clumsy 2021 interview with NBC anchor Lester Holt, in which she responded to a question about the crisis on the southern border with a retort about going to Europe, deeply bruised her confidence. She avoided interviews for a year, and according to people who covered her, she became fearful of making mistakes that would upset the White House.
These days, when Harris gives an interview, she hews to a set of well-rehearsed talking points, at times swimming in a sea of excess verbiage. Her first answer is often the most unsteady, a discursive journey to the point at hand. Like all politicians, she sometimes answers the question she would prefer to address, rather than the one actually asked of her — but not always artfully.
She tends to muddy clear ideas with words or phrases that do not have a precise meaning. On Wednesday night, in response to a question about how the federal government could encourage the building of affordable housing despite stringent local regulations, she used the word “holistic” three times in the space of one long sentence:
“For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people.”
She relies on rhetorical touchstones: In many ways. Let’s be clear. And when she is asked about her economic agenda, in particular, she tends to begin with a familiar windup: I grew up in a middle-class family.
“I think we can’t and we shouldn’t aspire to have an economy that just allows people to get by,” she said Wednesday night. “People want to do more than just get by. They want to get ahead. And I come from the middle class.”
She is best with a live audience, especially when she has a script but also when she has a foil (like Trump at the debate), where she can work an applause line or a long silence, marshal a theatrical brow or hand gesture, or react to something unexpected.
Harris’ background as a local prosecutor, including as the district attorney of San Francisco, gave her a different kind of media training than almost any presidential candidate in recent history.
Prosecutors are not expected, like a mayor or an elected political representative might be, to speak — let alone spar — regularly with the press, and they are constrained, by law, in what they can and cannot share with reporters. While prosecutors in some places, like New York City, tend to engage more openly with the press, that is not the norm. The power dynamics are different, too: Reporters are eager for details about a case and might be more inclined to be solicitous of prosecutors, who hold the secrets and the cards.
“There’s a little bit of walking on a balancing line, telling the truth but not telling things you shouldn’t be telling,” said Summer Stephan, the district attorney of San Diego County and the president of the National District Attorneys Association.
As district attorney, Harris spoke with the press, including live television hits with a local news station; for example, she spoke in 2005 about a case involving a woman charged with killing her three young children by dropping them into San Francisco Bay. Harris’ role was to provide clear answers, within the limits of the law and ethical guidelines, about a complicated and tragic episode. She seemed quite at ease.
Still, her own description of the early days of her career hints at another factor in her uneasy relationship with reporters.
Last week, in a panel discussion with the National Association of Black Journalists, Harris pivoted from an answer about the Trump ticket’s disproved claims about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, to a reflection on the power of public speech and a lesson she learned “a long time ago in my career, having a background as a prosecutor.”
In those positions, she said, “when you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand at a very deep level how much your words have meaning. I learned at a very young stage of my career that the meaning of my words could impact whether somebody was free or in prison.”
“When you are bestowed with a microphone that is that big, there is a profound responsibility that comes with that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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