After avoiding a probing interview by a journalist for the first month of her sudden presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris' first one Thursday was notable mostly in how routine it seemed.
CNN's Dana Bash, sitting down with Harris and running mate Tim Walz in a Georgia restaurant, asked her about some issues where she had changed positions, the historical nature of her candidacy, what she would do in her first day as president and whether she'd invite a Republican to be a Cabinet member (yes, she said).
What Bash didn't ask — and the Democratic nominee didn't volunteer — is why it took so long to submit to an interview and whether she will do more again as a candidate.
Harris drew criticism for not doing an interview until now
With no clips from interviews or extended news conferences as a candidate to pick apart, Republican Donald Trump and his campaign had made Harris' failure to take on journalists an issue in itself. She had promised to rectify that by the end of August, and made it in just under the wire.
In the interview, taped earlier Thursday at Kim's Cafe in Savannah, Georgia, Bash occasionally had pressed Harris when the vice president failed to answer a question directly. She asked four times, for example, about what led Harris to change her position on fracking — a controversial way to extract natural gas from the landscape — from her brief presidential candidacy in 2020.
“How should voters be looking at some of the changes in policy?” Bash asked, wondering whether experience led Harris down another path. “Should they be completely confident that what you're saying now is going to be the policy moving forward?”
Bash asked Harris twice whether she would do something different, like withhold some military aid to Israel, to help reach a peace deal in the Mideast. Harris stressed the importance of a deal, but offered no new specifics on achieving it.
When Bash sought a response to Trump suggesting that Harris had only recently been emphasizing her Black roots, the vice president swiftly brushed it aside. “Next question,” she said.
CNN political analyst David Axelrod suggested that Harris, by not doing interviews previously, had raised the stakes on what is usually a typical test that presidential candidates face. But after the Bash session aired, Axelrod said that she “did what she needed to do.”
“What she needed to do was be the same person she has been on stage the past month,” said Axelrod, onetime aide to Obama when he was in the White House. He predicted the interview would ultimately make little difference in the campaign.