Kamala Harris has come under fire for her failure to hold a single press conference or sit-down interview since becoming the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee. We all know why she won't, but the excuses for have generally centered on the narrative that Kamala (and her running mate) are too busy directly reaching out to voters to waste time with media interviews.
This strategy appears to be backfiring.
"Would it kill you guys to have a press conference?" CNN's Jim Acosta asked Kamala's campaign communications director, Michael Tyler. "Why hasn't she had a press conference?"
"Listen, the vice president and Governor Walz have been busy crisscrossing this country since the launch of this campaign and adding Governor Walz to the ticket," Tyler claimed. "You saw the ways in which they went across the battleground states last week, generating rallies of thousands — 10,000 here, 15,000 there—"
Donald Trump, however, isn't hiding at all. Nor is his running mate, JD Vance. Trump just had a completely unscripted and unfiltered discussion with Elon Musk on X. No one believes that Harris could or would do that, and the Harris campaign and the media desperately sought to pooh-pooh the entire event.
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However, they appear to recognize that the run-and-hide strategy can't last forever. So what has the campaign done? Despite not having the time to do a single interview or press conference, Harris and Tim Walz do have time to stage a heavily scripted "interview" between the two of them.
On Thursday, Walz posted the following clip:
After my Dad passed, Social Security gave my family the chance to live with dignity.@KamalaHarris and I will protect Social Security and the programs that stop people from falling through the cracks. pic.twitter.com/AQHVPS8nZ0
— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) August 15, 2024
This 38-second clip is a portion of a much longer discussion that will premiere on YouTube Thursday evening. Not only was this prerecorded and scripted, but it also has multiple camera angles and jump cuts — eerily reminiscent of Joe Biden's campaign videos that would feature jump cuts roughly every two seconds.
It is not clear how long the entire discussion will be, but I suspect that this is their response to Trump's two-hour discussion on X with Musk. There's just one problem: these two events are far from comparable. If Trump tried to pass off a discussion with Vance as an interview, people would laugh at him.
Will the media gush over this "interview"? You bet they will, but from the short clip that the campaign teased, it’s obvious that this is nothing more than a scripted puff piece that no one should take seriously.
But this is also a huge problem for Kamala. A completely unscripted interview doesn't take a while. However long the final cut of this staged interview between Harris and Walz is, it most certainly took at least twice as long, maybe even three times, to get the best takes and deliveries and to review talking points between each topic.
As Vance has said, "Kamala Harris isn't running a presidential campaign, she's producing a movie."
That's exactly what this interview/discussion between Kamala and Walz is. And if they have time to do this, there's no reason they don't have time to do unscripted interviews, which they could do more of in less time. In other words, the campaign's excuse for not doing press conferences and interviews is a total lie.
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