Vice President Kamala Harris’ interview drought finally ended last week, but after 46 days as the presumptive and now official Democratic nominee for president, she has yet to hold an official press conference.
Under pressure to sit down for an important interview after weeks of stonewalling, she agreed to a sit-down with CNN’s Dana Bash in Georgia last Thursday, joined by running mate Tim Walz.
After Harris’ first sit-down interview, NBC News Washington correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, who is known to him. Glowing Biden-Harris coverageappeared unaffected.
“Harris keeps saying ‘my values haven’t changed’ while not explaining why her position has,” Alcinder wrote.
When he will actually hold a formal press conference, the day will never come. Sunday marked exactly six weeks since Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris; No other Democrats challenged her and she quickly clinched the nomination.
“You won’t see a press conference from her in the next 75 days until Election Day,” Fox News contributor Joe Concha predicted earlier this month.
Curtis Hawk, managing editor of Newsbusters, felt that the vice president “clearly owes it to the American people to hold a free-wheeling press conference where reporters can, unlike what happened. [Thursday] Ask follow-up questions, with CNN’s Dana Bash.
“For every softball, say ABC or NPR, you would hope that a liberal reporter would show some courage to do the right thing,” Hoke told Fox News Digital.
“The interview itself had a positive atmosphere. From the get-go in a hype video-like opening by Bash, CNN gave the impression that this was an event, not a grinding fact-finding mission,” Hawke continued. “She missed the litany of topics with Harris. Allowing death row inmates to vote, shutting down ICE, defunding the police, ending private insurance, girl’s sports, the filibuster, Jussie Smollett, the Minneapolis bail fund, systemic racism… these were some of the areas she could have touched on.
Former President Trump has sat for several long interviews and held a pair of press conferences in recent weeks to try to highlight the contrast in media availability between the two.
Harris received mixed reviews for her performance with Bash on Thursday, where she took most of the questions but Walz was still there for support.
She pointedly dismissed a question about Trump’s suggestion that she doesn’t acknowledge being black until adulthood, a point that drew praise from liberals. Calling Trump’s tired “playbook” of attacks around race, she asked Bash to move on to the next question.
But conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings said the Trump campaign should be “drooling” over one revelation from the interview, which appeared to be her embrace of so-called “bidenomics.”
“She’s making it clear that she’s going to accept Biden’s economic policy and continue his — his record — what they’ve done,” he said. “She offered no remorse, no remorse, no introspection about what she had done.”
By interviewing, Harris met the bar set three weeks ago that she wanted to schedule one by the end of the month. Whether the pressure on her to do more, and her first solo interview as a candidate, remains to be seen.
“My fear is that, seeing as Barack Obama wasn’t as bosh as CBS’s Steve Croft or NPR’s Steve Inskeep, the liberal media will claim this and the next ABC debate is enough interview time for the campaign,” Hawke said.
Paul Steinhauser of Fox News Digital contributed to this report.
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