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    • Kamala Harris’ CNN interview was completely unremarkable. And yet it proved Trump wrong.
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    Kamala Harris’ CNN interview was completely unremarkable. And yet it proved Trump wrong.

    Vaseline Posted on

    The hype leading up to Kamala Harris’s first and utterly unremarkable “sit-down” interview as a 2024 presidential candidate is a reminder that no one running against Donald Trump is ever fairly judged. Imagine arguing that Harris, an elected district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. senator, and sitting vice president, should treat an interview with a CNN reporter as a high-stakes case; that is, that she might say something that makes her seem less qualified than Trump.

    Imagine arguing that Harris, California Attorney General, Senator and U.S. Vice President, should treat an interview with a CNN reporter as a high-stakes affair.

    Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, apparently feeling that Trump’s ticket needed even more misogyny, suggested in a social media post Thursday that Harris wouldn’t be able to hold her own. It’s been the way it’s been since Trump came on the political scene: We watch for something Trump says, and we watch for other politicians to say something even remotely untrue. In an ideal world, no one would have been sitting on the edge of their seat wondering whether Harris would sound knowledgeable or prepared in an interview — if only because she could never sound less knowledgeable or less prepared than her opponent so often does.

    The CNN sitdown was a big deal, though, largely because the media had made such a big deal out of her not doing an interview in the first place. And with the suggestions that a candidate deliberately avoids the media comes the suggestion that she’s afraid of the media. Harris showed no fear on Thursday. She came across as a typical politician — and I mean that in every sense. She answered questions she thought would help her candidacy head-on, and she deliberately dodged details.

    I think the American media has unfairly contributed to what I call the fetishization of a president’s first day in office. No, the vice president didn’t give a convincing answer when asked what she would do on “day one,” and yes, CNN’s Dana Bash re-asked the question in an attempt to force her to answer it. But the bigger problem isn’t that Harris didn’t give a direct answer; it’s an absurd question — even if it’s one that political journalists feel the need to ask.

    In preparation for the interview, recorded at Kim’s Café in Savannah, Georgia, CNN played a clip of Trump saying of Harris, “She’s not a smart person.” It’s the same approach Vance took in his social media post comparing Harris to a young beauty contestant who was completely overwhelmed by an interview question. It’s hard to know exactly what part of that attack on Harris’ intelligence to attribute to sexism and what to racism. But there’s no denying the presence of both. Former President Barack Obama, chairman of the Harvard Law Review and “associate professor” of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, was one of the most cerebral presidents we’ve ever seen, and yet billboards and bumper stickers proclaiming, in reference to the country where his father was born, “Somewhere in Kenya, a village is missing its idiot.”

    Harris doesn’t want to get bogged down in questions of identity.

    But Harris, as my colleague Zeeshan Aleem recently noted, doesn’t want to get bogged down in questions of identity. We saw that when she responded to Bash’s question about Trump’s lies and the fact that she had only recently identified as black. She told Bash, “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.” Nor did she focus on race and gender when asked about the viral photo of her second cousin watching her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. She said she wants to be the president for everyone.

    Her opponents, however, will work hard to reduce her to those elements of her identity, and slyly suggest that because of those elements she is not up to the task.

    But apparently they are not up to the task, because they have set the bar so low that she simply has to sail over it.

    In response to the interview, Trump described it as “BORING!!!”

    He wasn’t wrong about that. But I think Harris is counting on voters choosing boring over the drama — no, let’s be honest and call it chaos — that Trump inevitably brings.

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