Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz finally granted an interview, not to a hostile – or even a friendly – press, but to themselves.
The media-averse duo recorded a bizarre policy-free conversation cut together in the style of a free-wheeling interview released Thursday by the Harris-Walz campaign.
Voters looking for where Harris and Walz stand on the economy, immigration, or any of the pressing issue sof our time won’t find it here. But the video was packed full of information for voters yearning to learn what Walz puts in his “white guy tacos” and tested the limits of how many of her trademark cackles self-proclaimed “hip-hop girl” Harris can fit inside a ten-minute video.
Put simply, the video was full of vibes and vapidity.
The perplexing video is unlikely to satisfy voters – much less an increasingly anxious media – longing to learn how Harris will govern differently than the unpopular administration in which she serves as the second highest ranking official.
And while Bruce Springsteen fans might share Walz’s professed love of the musician, Walz continues to ignore the spiraling stolen valor scandal haunting the campaign since he joined the ticket.
Walz has harangued anyone for questioning the value of a veteran’s service, although that ignores the criticisms, which arose over his repeated lying about his rank upon retirement, where he served, and whether he knew he would be deployed before he retired, among others.
“We’re not attacking his honorable service. We’re attacking the dishonesty about that service. That is not honorable. That is the height of dishonor, and Tim Walz should not be the vice president of the United States because of it,” Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s running mate who served as a Marine in a public affairs role in a combat zone during the Iraq War, said at a rally Thursday.
Trump and Vance have regularly taken media questions as they crisscross the nation.
Harris has not held an unscripted press conference for 25 days since joining the 2024 presidential race.
Even for campaign tripe, the video broke little ground. Harris’s perplexing affinity for Venn diagrams is well known, as is her love of the late Prince’s music.
But this isn’t 1999, and she’s no longer an assistant district attorney (although she has run from her record as a law enforcement official). Campaigning to hold the highest office in the land while ignoring policy questions is a new and untested strategy.
The video release coincides with reports from the Wall Street Journal that Harris campaign advisers worry about publicly releasing “thorny details” of their economic plan because the specifics might backfire.
Those fears are likely justified. In the first inkling of her policy pronouncements, Harris is promising to institute a first-ever national ban on price gouging and price-fixing within her first 100 days in office in an effort to deflect many voters’ low marks for Biden’s handling of the economy.
That task may be herculean, with Biden himself insisting that Harris owns the Biden-Harris economic record.
Their record is ugly.
Consumer prices have soared 20.2 percent since Biden and Harris took office 42 months ago, according to the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), giving Harris and Biden the ignominious record for presiding over the worst inflation since the Jimmy Carter presidency.
But for today, Harris appears to believe voters care more about her vinyl records than her economic record. And Harris and Walz are comfortable ignoring difficult economic questions – or any questions at all – to instead focus on their past careers as a lawyer in law and order-starved San Francisco and an assistant football coach back when rosters still included fullbacks.
How long this strategy can last remains to be seen. But unless the campaign changes its trajectory, a forlorn Walz might one day look back at the time before he joined the ticket as his Glory Days.