Kamala Harris’s big Fox gamble did not pay off
Kamala Harris’s interview with Fox News on Wednesday night was never expected to be a friendly affair.
The network has been consistently hostile to the vice-president since she entered the race in July, and this awkward 30 minutes was no different.
There are many within the Harris campaign who thought sitting down with Bret Baier, one of Fox’s most experienced interviewers, was a mistake.
But the stakes were too high. With several swing states too close to call, including battlegrounds that Ms Harris needs to win the presidency, she has just three weeks to convince Republicans to vote for her.
It is hard to see how Wednesday’s interview achieved that goal. On almost every subject, Ms Harris batted away policy questions and opportunities to push her plan for the White House in favour of slamming Donald Trump.
Ms Harris described border security as a “topic of discussion that people want to rightly have”, but then didn’t talk about it. She talked about Trump’s role in blocking Joe Biden’s border deal, and offered no solutions of her own.
She was then asked why voters do not trust her to tackle inflation, and she talked about Trump’s economic plan, not her own. A question about transgender operations in federal prisons produced a response about Trump.
Even in the most newsworthy section of the interview, about how her White House would differ from Mr Biden’s, Ms Harris suggested she would avoid “the kind of rhetoric coming from Donald Trump”.
It is hard to imagine that this strategy was compelling for Fox News viewers, who are almost all likely to think Trump’s policy positions are at the least defensible, more probably laudable.
Ms Harris has spent weeks on the back foot, unable to answer detailed policy questions even in softball interviews with Left-wing outlets. When she finally sat down with Fox, she could only attack the man the network most supports.
The other theme of the interview, which got heated at times as Mr Baier tried to interrupt Ms Harris, was Mr Biden’s legacy.
Ms Harris is stuck with the inheritance of his administration, including a record of high inflation and record border crossings.
She must support him and continue the fiction that he is mentally agile, while trying to run a campaign based on a “new generation of change”.
Many Republicans will have tuned in to hear Ms Harris face their favourite anchor on Wednesday.
After hearing her answers, my instinct is that they will still support Trump. What alternative did Ms Harris offer?