The problem was not so much with Dana Bash, though she let Kamala off the hook too often. The problem was that the Vice President kept hiding behind Biden’s coattails and spoke mostly in generalities. She kept saying, “My values haven’t changed.” Dana should have asked, “Well then, what are your policies for carrying them out?” It would have been telling if Dana had used a few hard-hitting questions instead of the puffballs she tossed out.
Kamala gave up on the Green New Deal, she said, because Biden’s new climate plans coopted most of it. Well, in fact they didn’t, and a good interviewer would have questioned that. The whole point of the exercise seemed to reinforce what she had already established at the DNC—her good-guy, middle-class likeability. There she did make an excellent acceptance speech, hitting all the right notes. But personally she blew it for me when she reinforced the Biden arms for Israel policy while calling blandly for a cease-fire. And sadly, there was nothing on abortion.
So thanks for an hour of apple-polishing and raising questions that got pro-forma answers. CNN is more disgusting by the day; how many inane commercials kept interrupting this unproductive show? Kamala couldn’t even give straightforward answers to her role in the border security mess. She babbled on about price gouging and giving first-time home buyers $25,000 in down payment support. How’s that going to help lower inflation? She sometimes sounded like Tim Walz who when challenged about his DUI arrest appeared evasive. And what was he doing there at all?
The Harris campaign has to do better than this.