by Philip Wegmann
Kamala Harris shrugged.
Asked about former President Donald Trump’s questioning of her racial identity, the vice president replied, “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.”
And then she laughed. “That’s it?” protested CNN’s Dana Bash, probing for more during the first sit-down interview with the Democrat since she accepted the nomination. “That’s it,” Harris confirmed.
She is on the cusp of history. Harris would not only be the first female U.S. president but also the first black woman and first person of South Asian descent to occupy the Oval Office. She has eschewed identity politics; Harris is focused, instead and primarily, on a message of economic renewal.
Intersectionality, the progressive placeholder for the overlap of different kinds of discrimination like racism and sexism, is the talking point suddenly left undeployed by Democrats. While Democrats wore suffragette white at the convention in Chicago to mark the occasion and other speakers stressed the historic nature of Harris’ candidacy, the nominee herself made no explicit mention of her gender or race while accepting the nomination. It is a notable omission from a member of an administration that has repeatedly put concerns about racial equity front and center.
But Harris already had her hands full without talking about the possibility of historic firsts.
Republicans have attacked her for avoiding reporters in the wake of President Biden’s announcement that he would withdraw from the race. Journalists grumbled publicly. The vice president finally met the press Thursday, and Dana Bash had plenty of material to draw from during the interview. This is because Harris has undergone a metamorphosis via press release.
Once considered the most liberal member of the Senate, Harris has subsequently jettisoned the more progressive policy positions she espoused when running for president in 2020. For the first time as the Democratic nominee, Harris was pressed to explain that evolution during the CNN interview.
Harris was asked if she still wanted to ban fracking. “No,” she replied definitively, “and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking. As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.”
But she had said the opposite five years ago during a CNN town hall in the middle of the Democratic presidential primary while she was still seeking the nomination. “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” she told voters. After joining the Democratic ticket the next year, Harris vowed during a debate with then Vice President Mike Pence that a Biden administration would not, in fact, end fracking.
All the same, while the policy prescriptions are different, Harris said that her principles are not. “Well, let’s be clear,” she told Bash. “My values have not changed. I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate.”
Another clawback: Harris was asked if she still believed that crossing the U.S. border illegally should be decriminalized. Again, the Democrat was definitive. Suddenly hawkish on the issue, she replied, “I believe there should be consequences. We have laws that have to be followed and enforced that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally.”
In a line repeated endlessly in Chicago – and in television ads for the Democratic ticket – Harris also told Bash that as attorney general of California attorney general, she had prosecuted transnational criminal organizations. Left unmentioned, however, was the fact that illegal border crossings during the Biden-Harris have swelled past 10 million.
Accompanied by running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris walked into the interview on a mission. The nominee wanted to discuss just how exactly she plans to “support and strengthen the middle class.” An increased child tax credit. A $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. Investments in small businesses. She said implementing all of this would be part of her agenda on Day One in the White House. But there is an obvious follow-up question to these promises.
“The steps that you’re talking about now,” Bash asked, “why haven’t you done them already?”
“We had to recover as an economy,” Harris replied before pointing to lessening inflation and a Medicare program to cap drug prices, “and we have done that.” The public disagrees. According to a May Pew Research survey, just 23% of Americans say that the economy is in good shape.
But Harris wanted to tell a story that began during the pandemic, to remind voters of just how far the country has come in the time since. This will be a tricky balance for her to strike. She has sought to distance herself from the perceived shortcomings of the Biden administration while embracing the success. White House officials, meanwhile, told RealClearPolitics that the current vice president has been “an integral partner” and owns “the comprehensive whole” of the last four years.
Seeking to thread the needle, Harris has almost entirely dropped the “saving democracy” boilerplate that Biden repeated at every campaign stop while he was still a candidate. She has also shifted away from rhetoric about a strong job market, the feather in the cap of this administration, to talk more about bringing down the everyday costs of life.
Such is the New Way Forward she emphasized in Chicago. It seems to be working. She leads Trump by a point-and-a-half in the same RealClearPolitics Average where Biden was so recently trailing. According to new polling from Suffolk University, Democrats have experienced a significant swing among key demographics since Harris took over the party.
Young people aged 18-34 favored Trump over Biden by 11 points in June. With Harris atop the ticket, Democrats now lead among that group by 13 points in August – a dramatic 24-point improvement. Similarly, while black Americans favored Biden by 47 points over Trump, now 64% favor Harris. Most striking, however, are the changing opinions among Americans making less than $20,000 annually.
Trump led among that group by three points at the beginning of the summer, but now Harris has a 23-point advantage – a remarkable 26-point swing that likely explains her emphasis, first and foremost, on the economy.
Without copying and pasting old talking points about hope and change, Harris has tried to cast herself as a transformational candidate and Trump as the incumbent, even as she is the one currently in government running for president. “I’m talking about an era that started about a decade ago,” she said of the time frame her campaign now insists the country cannot return to.
The Trump campaign counter-argument is one of nostalgia. Were you not better off, the former president often asks voters, just four years ago? The election will likely turn on that question. In the meantime, the Trump campaign was less than impressed with the interview they had been pressing Harris to accept for so long.
“Kamala spoke for just over 16 minutes and didn’t even address the crime crisis in this nation,” the Trump campaign said in a statement posted to Truth Social. “She spent a mere 3 minutes and 25 seconds talking about the economy and 2 minutes and 36 seconds talking about immigration.”
Harris notably spent even less time talking about race or gender. She sidestepped the issue for most of the interview except for one notable exchange. Bash asked about a photo from the convention of one of Harris’ young nieces watching her accept the historic nomination.
“Listen, I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender,” she replied.
Then Harris added, “But I did see that photograph. And I was deeply touched by it … It’s very humbling.”
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Philip Wegmann is White House Correspondent for Real Clear Politics.
Photo “Kamala Harris” by CNN.
