After more than a month of hand-wringing by the Harris campaign, the vice president and Democratic nominee will finally sit for her first unscripted interview. But her decision to bring along running mate Tim Walz is being panned by CNN analyst Scott Jennings who called the move for what it is: “weak sauce.”
Jennings, a conservative commentator for the network, said it’s indicative of how aides to Vice President Kamala Harris don’t trust her to competently complete a sit-down interview with Dana Bash on Thursday without having Walz by her side. The 9 p.m. ET interview comes while Harris is barnstorming Georgia, a swing state she desperately needs to win in November. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper agreed that it’s fair to question why Harris can’t speak solo, teeing Jennings up to mock the terms of the interview.
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“I have great confidence in Dana and CNN to do this. I think it’s incredibly weak, weak sauce, to show up with your running mate. The fact that they don’t have enough confidence in her to let her sit, herself, the actual top of the ticket and let her do a single interview… in fact, I think the hand-wringing and the gyrations over this, over the last month, show a troubling lack of confidence in her ability, which also makes you wonder as a voter what kind of president would you be if this kind of a small-time decision – can we do an interview or not? – what does that look like for your decision-making process,” questioned Jennings. “So yes, I think Republicans are going to think it’s pretty weak to show up effectively with someone to take up half the time.”
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For weeks, former President Donald Trump and his allies in the media have lambasted Democrats’ decision to hide Harris from the cameras. She was kept to tightly scripted rallies and teleprompters and only briefly exchanged words with Fox News’s Peter Doocy who jokingly got in a question asking when he would get his own one-on-one interview with her. Harris laughed and shrugged as aides shuttled her past reporters and out a side door. The announcement of her CNN interview is in keeping with a previous promise by her spokesman that an interview would occur by the end of the month, though the special request that Walz be included has raised eyebrows among observers.
Polls show that Vice President Harris did not experience a post-convention bump following her time in Chicago last week: national surveys have her trailing, tied, or barely ahead of Trump in battleground states. In addition, her team is intimately aware of how badly President Biden’s image was tattered after a disastrous sit-down interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt after an even worse debate performance in June. Trump, in contrast, has done a number of high-profile, hour-long media appearances where he accuses Harris of purposely hiding from tough questions and coasting to November. Even getting the vice president to agree to a first debate has been a problem: earlier this week the Harris campaign demanded that ABC News leave microphones unmuted in hopes that Trump will turn off voters by interrupting her. Trump, who has already agreed to debate on ABC despite his ongoing lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos, accused her of trying to change the terms so she can avoid skipping a debate altogether.
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