One of the most enduring complaints Kamala Harris has faced during her two-month barnstorming presidential campaign is that she has been evasive in her willingness to make herself available for media interviews. On Monday night, though, she sat down for what has been a staple presidential television event for 50 years: the October interview with 60 Minutes.
Her opponent Donald Trump had originally agreed to participate in a CBS News interview also and his campaign team were negotiating with producers to have a segment of the interview take place during Trump’s return last Saturday to Butler, Pennsylvania, the scene of the assassination attempt in July.
But they cancelled the arrangement last week, complaining, the programme presenters said, that his interview would be subject to fact-checking.
So, the Republicans ceded a primetime audience to Harris, who gave both a sit-down interview in her residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington DC and also had the show follow her to Ripon, in Wisconsin, for a rally in the town where the Republican Party was founded.
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The format offered potential voters a rare chance to see Harris quizzed on the promises that she is making on what has been a furiously paced procession of rallies and meet-and-greets in the seven key battleground states, namely on the economy, the border crisis and on how a Harris presidency would be distinct from the four years she has spent as vice-president.
But on the anniversary of the October 7th attack by Hamas, Harris was pressed, in the opening section, on the escalating crisis in the Middle East and on what the United States can do to stop it from spinning out of control.
“Let’s start with October 7th: 1,200 people were massacred, 250 people were taken hostage, including Americans. Women were brutally raped. And as I said then I maintain Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Far too many Palestinians have been killed. This war has to end.”
It was a slight variation on Harris’s standard line on Israel-Gaza and won’t do much to convince the Muslim population in the swing state of Michigan that the deaths of more than 40,000 Gazans through a year-long onslaught is foremost in the campaign concerns.
And Harris also sidestepped a direct question as to whether the Biden administration has any influence over Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has acted with impunity despite repeated calls for restraint from the White House. But she declined to confirm that the United States has a “real close ally” in the Israeli leader.
“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.”
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Prominent as the Middle East conflict is in the minds of millions around the world, it is not the issue which any strategist believes will define the election.
The Democratic campaign has moved away from explicitly warning that the election revolves around the preservation of the democratic founding principles to emphasise the more mundane issues – the price of groceries and other cost-of-living necessities. Harris has made child tax credits, tax breaks for first-time home buyers and small businesses central to her campaign promises.
On a broader spectrum, she was asked to account for her inconsistent views on issues such as fracking, border control and Medicare for all. Her difficulty lies in reconciling these new promises with previous positions she took.
“In the last four years I have been vice-president of the United States. And I have been travelling our country and I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it is not a bad thing.”
She acknowledged host Bill Whitaker’s premise that she had called Donald Trump a divisive figure and “a racist”. How, though, he wondered could she reconcile the fact that tens of millions of Americans support the Republican candidate.
“How do you bridge that unbridgeable gap?” Whitaker asked.
“I am glad you are pointing these comments out that he has made that has resulted in a response by most reasonable people,” Harris said.
“It is just wrong. I believe that the people of America want a leader who is not trying to divide us. And demean. I believe that the American people recognise that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down, it’s based on who you lift up.”
It was a balanced, almost neutral response. The closest Harris came to a direct criticism of her opponent was when she told viewers to watch his rallies where they would hear “conversations that are about himself and all of his personal grievances and what you will not hear is anything about you, the listener”.
It was not the most riveting half-hour of television but if it has helped clarify doubts that undecided voters may retain about Harris, then it will have paid off.
With less than a month until election day, Harris has scheduled a series of curated interviews that are a departure from traditional platforms. She has already sat down with former NBA basketball stars Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson who host a high-ratings sports podcast, All the Smoke, in a conversation that was an attempt to sell her story to a young and primarily male audience.
Harris followed that with an interview with Alex Cooper, host of the phenomenally successful Call Her Daddy podcast and is due to sit down with the enduring shock jock Howard Stern later this week.
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