Vice President Kamala Harris has been criticized for avoiding details and dodging questions in multiple interviews this week, with media experts calling on her to answer questions from reporters.
“She couldn't or wouldn't answer a single question this week, and it was clear to everyone. She's a callous evasive troll,” wrote The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, suggesting voters now had only a choice between “bad or empty.”
Harris spoke to reporters this week in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NAJB) and met with Oprah Winfrey, who endorsed her as a presidential candidate at the Democratic National Convention. Harris has yet to hold a formal press conference since emerging as a candidate.
“She owes us an answer. Her inability or refusal to answer is wrong and a disrespect to her constituents,” Noonan wrote, arguing that dodging questions about illegal immigration was “political malice.”
Todd Purdum, a former White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote Thursday that Harris cannot afford to be equivocal.
“In a campaign where Donald Trump has filled our days with utter nonsense and dominated the national debate (and polls have Harris trailing Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race with some groups), the vice president cannot afford to stick solely to rehearsed answers and street-level speeches that may not persuade voters or shape the American debate,” Purdum said.
Purdum suggested a direct answer from the vice president would have a big impact on voters.
“Having written about politicians for decades, I am confident that Ms. Harris's direct, concise answers and explanations will go a long way in convincing voters that they know a lot about her and her plans — probably more than she realizes,” the journalists wrote.
MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have suggested the opposite, arguing that Harris didn't need to be specific about policy.
When Clinton ran against Trump in 2016, she claimed she had more policies than anyone else.
“I've given speeches about it. I've put it on my website. I've written a book with Tim Kaine. We have a whole bunch of policies. At the end of the day, that's not why people are going to vote for me or vote against me. And I think the Harris campaign knows that. They know they have to cross a certain threshold in terms of how they're going to govern, and they've pretty much hit that,” Clinton said in an interview on MSNBC's “Morning Joe.”
Ruhle suggested Harris didn't need to be specific because she is at odds with Trump.
“Kamala Harris is not running to be perfect. She's running against Trump. We have two options. So we're not going to know her answers. And in 2024, unlike 2016 for many Americans, we're going to know exactly what Trump will do, who he is and what a threat he is to our democracy,” Ruhle argued during an appearance on Bill Maher's Show.
Bret Stephens, the anti-Trump columnist for The New York Times who has called for Harris to answer questions more directly, told Ruhle: “I don't think it's too much to ask her to sit down for a proper interview, not a smug piece about how she felt growing up in grassy Oakland.”
Stevens called on Harris to answer some tougher questions. A recent NYT column.
“It shouldn't be hard for Harris to show she can answer pressing policy questions in detail; to express how she sees America's interests in a darkening world beyond a series of platitudes; to articulate a true politics of inclusion that can reach tens of millions of distrustful voters; or to prove she is more than a hard-working liberal Democrat whose greatest virtue is as much to do with not straying too far from common sense as her greatest fault,” he wrote.
Some reports and experts pointed out that Harris lacked specifics during her interview with NABJ and spoke from a script.
Asked about the war between Israel and Hamas, ABC's Selina Wang said Harris “did not answer the question directly or offer any specific policy.”
“However, there were numerous times throughout the interview when VP Harris did not provide a specific answer. Instead, she pivoted and returned to the point she wanted to make,” Wang continued.
CNN's Abby Phillips showed footage of Harris answering a question about whether voters were better off than they were four years ago.
“We came to power in the middle of the worst public health pandemic in centuries. We came to power after the worst attack on democracy since the Civil War, much of which is due to the failures of the previous president in relation to COVID-19 and, of course, January 6th. And we had a lot of work to do to clean up the mess. To date, we've created more than 16 million new jobs, more than 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. Black unemployment is the lowest it's been in generations,” Harris said in an interview.
Mr Phillips argued Ms Harris should have had a “quick” and “easy to understand” answer ready to respond to a question about whether things were better for voters four years ago, adding: “But that wasn't a real answer.”
CNN political commentator Scott Jennings argued that Harris should just “answer the questions,” pointing to some of her responses during the debate.
“She completely ignored and did not answer every policy question she was asked during the debate. Why does she think she doesn't need to answer reporters asking very basic questions of a presidential candidate?” he said.
After the interview, Politico reported Wednesday that Harris refused to “go off script.” The report said she avoided questions about key issues, adding that “she didn't make any major advances or stray far from her talking points.”
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
