The level of drama and strategery surrounding Kamala Harris’s plans to schedule her first major news interview after becoming the Democratic presidential nominee is reaching concerning levels. We are quickly getting to a point where Harris’s media strategy itself is becoming a significant narrative of her campaign, a fact that undercuts her goals.
Eugene Daniels reports that the campaign is deliberating which reporter to grant the big interview to. I think the whole premise that Harris can solve this by doing a big interview is misguided. She should be doing a lot of interviews.
The campaign’s evident fear of exposing the candidate to interviews stems from a handful of bad experiences during Harris’s first couple years as vice-president. Harris’s role was poorly defined, and President Biden had saddled her with an impossible job (sometimes described, inaccurately, as “border czar” when she was attempting to work on root causes of the migration surge).
Harris had a poor interview with Lester Holt, in which she failed to provide a convincing answer for why she hadn’t visited the border (it was not her job). That interview had an inordinate impact on her public persona because there was little else to shape it.
The correct takeaway from this experience shouldn’t be that Harris needs to avoid interviews. It’s that a dearth of interviews creates a situation in which a single interview has an outsize effect on her public image. That creates the vicious cycle in which she still seems to be mentally trapped: Fear of interviews makes every interview far more important, thus raising the cost of giving a bad answer, thus making her more hesitant to do interviews.
The opposite approach would be to flood the zone with interviews. Not all of them have to be brand-name national reporters. Local news stations have real journalists who ask questions their audiences care about. But, yes, getting Harris out into the news several times a week is actually a much safer strategy. If she gives a bad answer, there will be a news cycle about it, but she will be back in the news a day or two later talking about something else.
The most famous example of a politician exploiting media attention is John McCain, who let reporters talk to him on the record for hours on end. McCain committed gaffes all the time, but the gaffes didn’t matter. Now, McCain may have enjoyed a unique, non-replicable relationship with the news media. But you can see other, more recent figures using aspects of this model. Pete Buttigieg built a whole candidacy around putting himself out there constantly. And Mayor Pete may be an unusually skilled communicator, but he did slip up from time to time — it just didn’t matter much.
Donald Trump, of course, is the ultimate example of a politician absolutely flooding the zone with bullshit, most of it from his deranged monologues on the stump but some from real interviews. Trump is more of a cautionary tale than a model, but it does go to show that the effect of a harmful comment is minimized when it’s in the context of a constant flow of comments.
Look — Harris can try to get through the campaign with just one big interview, and maybe if she makes it through without committing news, that approach can work. But it’s a high-risk play that is going to put far more pressure on every word she utters.
