Playbook: Kamala Harris goes Baier hunting
With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine
DRIVING THE DAY
“MALE CALL — “Both Parties Are Getting Men Wrong,” by Richard V. Reeves for POLITICO Mag: “There is a real political opportunity right now for a party to craft an agenda that speaks to men — and addresses their real problems.”
HARRIS’ FOX TEST — Since she replaced President JOE BIDEN atop the ticket, the most pervasive knock on VP KAMALA HARRIS has been that she’s too buttoned up, employing a risk-averse strategy that hews toward friendly interviewers who lob softball questions and don’t challenge her enough.
After her Fox News sitdown with BRET BAIER last night, you can forget that.
There are 19 days left in the election. And with no debate and DONALD TRUMP playing it safe, Harris is showing that she understands she needs to take more risks in order to control her campaign narrative — and, despite some hiccups, she managed to do that.
Yes, there was something of an ink-blot quality to the interview: Republicans thought it was a disaster for her (see Trump’s own reaction), and Democrats thought it was a pugilistic triumph.
But set aside those knee-jerk responses, and you can see the bigger truth: This was a snapshot of a presidential candidate who knows she has work to do to close the deal, and is willing to take chances, play aggressively and, frankly, get comfortable with the street-fight mentality she’ll need to eke out a win.
As NYT’s Michael Grynbaum wrote last night: “Harris may not get another debate with former President Donald J.Trump, but on Wednesday, she got one with Bret Baier.”
Gone was the friendly chit-chat about workout routines and music preferences. Baier hit Harris with some of the toughest questioning we’ve seen this cycle, including:
- When she noticed that Biden was mentally “diminished.”
- Whether she thought Trump’s supporters were “stupid.”
- How many immigrants she thinks have entered the country illegally under the Biden administration.
- Whether she wants to apologize to the parents of a 12-year-old who was murdered by undocumented migrants.
But Harris came ready to rumble. She fairly smoothly responded to all of the above — even if she didn’t always answer his questions outright. She asserted herself as Baier frequently interrupted her (“But I’m not finished” … “I was beginning to answer” … “May I finish responding, please?”). She pivoted to attacking Trump on the right-leaning network that rarely broadcasts such criticism, emphasizing, for instance, all the former Trump administration officials who say he’s too dangerous to lead again. And she got her points across to Republican viewers — some of whom she’ll need as part of her electoral coalition — even if most won’t agree with her.
And she landed some blows.
One of her strongest moments came when she took Baier to task for playing a watered-down version of Trump’s recent comments threatening to sic the U.S. military on his political foes. Baier instead played a clip of Trump cleaning up the comments at the Fox News town hall that had aired earlier in the day: “I’m not threatening anybody. They’re the ones doing the threatening.”
Harris wasn’t having it. “Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the ‘enemy within,’” she said, before delivering a fiery answer about Trump’s proposal to start “locking people up because they disagree with him.”
Yes, there were plenty of tough questions that exposed Harris’ weak spots.
- She ducked inquiries about giving taxpayer-funded benefits to undocumented immigrants — as, Baier noted, running mate TIM WALZhad as governor.
- She refused to say if she had “regrets” for ending Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy at the beginning of the Biden administration.
- She defended Biden’s fitness for office when Baier pressed her on the president’s ability to do his job — then quickly pivoted.
- And while some Democrats cheered that Harris finally answered a question about how she’d be different from Biden, she was pretty damn vague about it. (“I, for example, am someone who has not spent the majority of my career in Washington, D.C.”)
But even in difficult moments, Harris found a landing. When Baier played clips of Americans whose loved ones had been killed by an illegal immigrant and asked the VP whether she owed those families an apology, Harris showed empathy and admitted that illegal immigration was a big problem before pivoting to Trump: “But let’s talk about … an individual who does not want to participate into solutions.”
She also found a response to the flurry of GOP attacks on transgender issues — with the help of a just-breaking scoop from NYT’s Glenn Thrushabout Trump’s own administration had allowed gender-affirming care for federal prison inmates. That teed up her accusation that Republicans are spending millions to create a sense of fear over a secondary issue because Trump has no plan to meet the needs of the American people.
Needless to say, the Harris folks are happy.
“Constant interruptions and 20 straight minutes of attempted Fox-style gotchas, and she schooled him, shut him down, and got hits in that Fox’s audience literally never gets to hear,” one person close to Harris texted us last night.
Baier, on the other hand, seemed frustrated. “I tried to redirect numerous times without interrupting too much, but at some point, you kind of have to redirect to get back in the game,” he said on Fox News after the interview aired.
Good Thursday morning. Thanks for reading Playbook.”
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