WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris attended a star-studded campaign event hosted by Oprah Winfrey on Thursday night, but her rambling responses to policy questions from the crowd forced Winfrey to prompt the vice president to get to the point.
The two-hour “Unite for America” livestreamed event from Michigan was intended to showcase grassroots activists who support Harris and give voters a chance to ask questions about her policies, but the Democratic presidential candidate did not offer any new policy proposals.
At one point in the evening, Harris was asked what she would do to secure the southern border.
“This is a great and important question. I have a background as a prosecutor, as you know, and I was elected two terms as attorney general of a border state. So this is not a theoretical issue for me. This is something I have worked on in practice,” Harris began her three-minute response, concluding with a slamming of Republicans for not passing a bipartisan border bill.
“So to answer Justin's question,” Winfrey interjected.
“That bill died and now you would introduce it?” the billionaire talk show host asked, before Harris interjected.
“Of course,” the Vice President replied.
“If I am elected president of the United States, I will see to it that this bill gets to my desk and I will sign it into law,” Harris said, without laying out any new policies to resolve the crisis on the southern border.
The “Unite for America” event was intended to reach a large number of voters through Winfrey's presence and multiple simultaneous streaming platforms on social media.
Many celebrities, including Chris Rock and Ben Stiller, who said they would vote for Harris, also watched the event.
The 2024 Democratic candidate spoke at length about abortion, calling it “immoral” and “violating” to say people “don't have the right to decide what happens to their bodies.”
Harris also reiterated her commitment to providing $25,000 down payment assistance to new homebuyers and increasing the new small business owner tax credit and the child tax credit.
Winfrey, who endorsed Harris and spoke at the Democratic National Convention, said Harris has become more assertive and confident since President Biden dropped out of the race.
“You know, there are moments in each of our lives where we have to move on,” Harris said of how she felt after Biden withdrew his candidacy.
“I felt a responsibility to be honest with you, and with that came a sense of purpose.”
“The beauty of democracy is that each of us has power, so long as we can maintain it,” Harris said, implicitly criticizing Trump.
The vice president gave a total of six media interviews before going live with Winfrey as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, which is expected to be the fewest of any recent presidential candidate.
She waited more than a month to lay out her list of policy proposals, but said she is “not Joe Biden” and “cannot go back to Trump.”
Her campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon, acknowledged that the race against Trump was close and urged voters to get out and vote.
“While there's an extraordinary surge of enthusiasm that we're seeing all over the place from the vice president and Governor Walz, we're still within the margin of error. It's a tie,” she said.
“We're tied here in Michigan. We're tied in all the battleground states. So we need all of us to help forge a path, many paths, to get to 270 electoral votes. That's our focus.”
