Kamala’s press tour ends in viral mockery

Amid lingering questions about what Kamala Harris stands for — plus a precipitous decline of the momentum the vice president enjoyed after leaping to the top of the Democratic ticket — her campaign decided it was time to send her into the media fray. This was a very calculated media tour, of course. With the exception of the traditional 60 Minutes interview on CBS (which Trump declined this time around, as his team claimed the outlet wanted to do “live fact-checking”), Harris stuck to friendly, low-risk outlets where she was unlikely to make any major fumbles.

Unfortunately for the Harris campaign, this simple task would prove to be too much for the veep. Harris’s abortion-centric interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast reached shy of half a million views, below other episodes like “Leah’s Love Island Tell-All” and Megan Fox’s “plastic surgery story.” The sole viral clip came from Harris and host Alex Cooper laughing at the idea that there were any laws dedicated to regulating men’s bodies — you know, like the draft. Harris’s 60 Minutes appearance was so bad the network had to shuffle around answers she gave to different questions — and she could not respond deftly at all when asked about the Biden administration opening up the southern border. Harris successfully drank a beer without incident on Colbert, but debuted a new accent in the process. Her real slip, though, was when Sunny Hostin of ABC’s The View asked Harris if she would have done anything differently from Joe Biden. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she replied. The Trump campaign quickly cut the blunder into an ad.

It’s not clear why the Harris campaign thought the potential benefits of these interviews would outweigh the risks. The audiences for nearly all of them, with maybe the Howard Stern radio program as an exception, are reliable Democrats. “She’s not talking to any audience she already hasn’t captured,” Stephen L. Miller pointed out. She also hasn’t provided any clarity for voters who are confused about her policy positions and how her administration would be different from Biden’s. The best guess is that the campaign’s internal polling must be pretty bad, because why else would they put the notoriously unlikable and bad-at-interviews candidate in front of so many cameras?

-Amber Duke

On our radar

ROGERS-SLOTKIN The candidates to represent Michigan in the US Senate met for a debate Tuesday night where they covered policy toward China, the Middle East, the border and abortion. Democratic candidate Elissa Slotkin recently distanced herself from electric vehicle mandates as Republican Mike Rogers has come within striking distance in the polls. 

MARK MY WORDS Billionaire Mark Cuban is taking heat from some Democrats after he suggested Kamala Harris replace FTC commissioner Lina Khan if she wins the presidency. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Cuban was wrong to go after Khan, who has become known for her strict anti-monopoly standards. 

YOU DON’T KNOW JACK Colorado baker Jack Phillips won another court case this week as the Colorado Supreme Court tossed a lawsuit accusing him of discrimination for refusing to decorate a cake to celebrate a gender transition. Phillips, a Christian, previously won at the US Supreme Court as he denied a request to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding. 

McCormick creeps up on ‘Punxsutawney Bob’

Democratic senator Bob Casey has been representing my home state of Pennsylvania on Capitol Hill since 2007. Ask some average Pennsylvanians what Casey has accomplished during his seventeen years in office, though, and they’ll likely shrug (if, that is, they even know who he is). Casey has the reputation of being a do-nothing politician, earning himself the moniker “Punxsutawney Bob” because, as Republican rival Dave McCormick put is, he “pops his head out every six years and tries to act like he’s doing things.”

Casey’s coasting has been rattled this campaign season by McCormick, a former hedge fund exec who in 2022 personally spent $7 million to Dr. Oz’s $11 million, only to lose the GOP senatorial primary to the celebrity doctor (who went on to lose to John Fetterman). Evidently determined to hold a Senate seat, McCormick has been giving Casey a run for his money, raising $8.4 million over the summer, a season that also saw McCormick’s stock rise on the national stage, literally, as he was in the front row during the assassination attempt of Donald Trump in Butler on July 13.

As I’ve written before, Pennsylvania is the “Keystone State” in more ways than one: it consistently determines the outcomes of presidential elections and the makeup of Congress, and this year is no different. A McCormick win could flip control of the Senate back to the GOP, and though polls show him still trailing Casey, the Wall Street Journalreports this week that “Dave McCormick is putting up a real fight.” Polls have tightened in recent weeks, and according to Project FiveThirtyEight, McCormick currently garners 48 percent of the vote to Casey’s 51 percent, prompting the Dems to convince “the big guy,” President Joe Biden, a fellow Scranton native, to leave his Delaware beach house and head to PA to campaign for Casey.

–Teresa Mull

SNAFU at CBS

CBS News is under scrutiny for a pair of entirely self-inflicted controversies following its editing of a high-profile 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and a planned DEI-filled struggle session after a supposedly contentious interview with left-wing polemicist Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

In the case of the former, 60 Minutes released two separate clips of Harris answering the same question about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In one heavily mocked version, Harris responded with a typical word salad: “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” she said.

In the edited interview that aired this week, Harris sounded far more focused: “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” she said. In the wake of the discrepancy, the Trump campaign demanded that CBS release the full transcript of her interview. Trump took some flak for skipping the traditional 60 Minutes interview, but it is clear his campaign is trying to make hay from Harris’s decision to sit down with the network.

Elsewhere at CBS News, the network planned to bring in a contentious DEI lecturer after anchor Tony Dokoupil asked Coates some mildly probing questions about his latest book, which is replete with problems. Dokoupil’s questions apparently did not meet whatever editorial standards the network purports to still maintain, with fellow CBS staff complaining about how the interview was conducted. They submit that the interview was too biased in favor of Israel and that Coates was targeted for his pro-Palestinian stance. 

Their objections to Dokoupil’s attempts to do journalism aren’t all that surprising. Shortly after the terrorist attacks of October 7, CBS’s Gayle King lectured Thomas Hand, whose eight-year-old daughter Emily was still held hostage by Palestinian terrorists, about the “politics” surrounding the conflict. “You know, you have innocent children — Palestinians who are dying, innocent Israeli children who are dying, and no one seems to be able to say enough, stop that,” King whined to the father of a hostage victim. 

King, who was also present during the Coates interview, allegedly gave him the questions she planned to ask him ahead of time. “She was like, I’m gonna ask you about this,” Coates said. “I’m gonna ask you about that.” 

That seems far more worthy of investigation than what Dokoupil said and how he said it.

 –Matthew Foldi