NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd said on Wednesday that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign erred in not conducting an interview over a month into her presidential run.
Harris’ first sit-down interview since launching her campaign on July 21 will be with CNN anchor Dana Bash in a segment slated to air on Thursday. Todd said Harris’ delay in doing a single interview will cause any misstep during the event to be “overly scrutinized.”
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“I think the easiest way to defuse this is to go everywhere. Doing local interviews, doing a podcast here, she could go to a friendly place, she could go to unfriendly places,” Todd said. “The idea, when you sort of try to be laser-focused like this, we’re going to gravitate to the big event.”
“If there are six interviews, we’re all overwhelmed with not one thing, everything gets diluted, so I really think it only sort of reinforces this negative stereotype that she had coming into this race, which is, you know what, she hand wrings too much … There’s a fine line between being deliberative and being paralyzed by a decision, and the way they’ve handled this, this media stuff … It’s been a mistake,” he continued.
Todd also said former President Donald Trump doing numerous interviews with outlets of all political persuasions in 2016 made it so a single interview was never so significant.
“They’re now just playing into her perceived weakness. And any fumble now is gonna get overly scrutinized in this interview, unnecessarily so,” he added.
Harris’ CNN interview will be a joint appearance with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Wednesday the vice president is not doing a solo interview because she is incompetent.
“She can’t handle doing this on her own,” Spicer said. “She wants to be commander in chief. It’s CNN for God sakes. This isn’t going to be tough. This is patty cake. Give me a break … This is pathetic.”
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright recently asserted Harris’ previous negative interviews preoccupy her current campaign.
“Certainly, as she’s been vice president, we’ve known that we’ve seen some kind of damaging moments when her speaking to the press, particularly that first interview she did in 2021 with Lester Holt about her work on immigration,” Wright said. “And so I think that that is something that’s always been on the mind of her office and the vice president herself. Of course, we’ve reported that she has been doing media training … over her vice presidency.”
Featured Image Credit: U.S. National Archives
