Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview: she was disarmingly human

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Anyone else remember when Trump and MAGAts were saying she was scared of interviews? And then Trump pulled out of the 60 minutes interview?

I remember 😂

Disarming??

She wants to take our guns!!

/s

I liked the interview….but is Anyone else just telling themselves Trump is going to win so you’re not as disappointed IF it happens…. but ECSTATIC if Kamala wins?

This election makes the stress leading up to the 2020 election like a god damn cake walk.

You’re the best. AROUND. No one’s gonna ever keep ya down!

Any day now cranky reporters will flip to criticizing the recent media blitz by Harris/Walz. “She’s trying to get too much attention by doing too many interviews”

Meanwhile it’s basically crickets from them as Trump is on stage with a fellow criminal drug addict and eugenics purveyor shouting racist hoaxes about the genes of immigrant Americans.

Aisha called out bigoted MAGA surrogate David Urban today after he bizarrely tried to defend Trump echoing Nazi propaganda. He went ballistic on her, and CNN’s host treated it with the usual “both sides need to take down the temperature” false equivalence.

It really shows how pathetic the media is that normal, sane politics is considered “boring” or “safe”. Like yall do know trump is the EXCEPTION to the rule and not the rule itself?

Disarming Human — as opposed to?

Christ you can almost feel this writer desperately trying to backhand their compliments and find some way to both sides things.

She’s going to do a great job as POTUS. She’s intelligent, experienced, poised, optimistic, open-minded, and fair. I’m hoping she can unite us. Idiot Trump has no desire to repair our country. And why would he, he and his cult are the ones that divided us. He gave hate and racism a face. History will be cruel to him. Deservingly so.

Did she start the interview crying about getting soft or hard questions like the felon did a few years ago? No, she was direct and respectful, way more than the felon could fathom doing.

She was really good on Call Me Daddy too

Paywall. Article:

Kamala Harris has rarely been seen answering questions since she became the Democrats’ presidential candidate — but on this evidence, there was no need to hide.

The vice-president appears to have been using her time away from the TV microphones to find her feet in the race that she entered so unexpectedly in July after President Biden’s collapse. In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes on Monday night, she hit her stride.

It was not just the self-assured way she gave mainly plausible answers, free of “word salads”, to the questions posed by the veteran interviewer Bill Whitaker, who brought her back to the actual question at hand several times after she talked herself away from it.

Nor was it just Harris’s relaxed demeanour, although this was light years ahead of the jittery mess she made of the rare big interviews she gave earlier in her vice-presidency.

Harris scored highly by coming across as disarmingly human the several times that questions challenged her to give a politician’s answer. One of these moments came on the campaign trail in Wisconsin with Liz Cheney, a lifelong Republican whose opposition to Donald Trump has led her to side with Harris.

Whitaker asked Harris what she would have said four years ago if he had told her then that she would be campaigning with the ultra-conservative Cheney. Harris, standing alongside her new supporter, shrugged, smiled and replied: “That would be great!”

Another small moment that showed how Harris had settled into her role came when Whitaker asked what type of gun she had (a Glock) and then whether she had ever fired it. Again, Harris’s reaction did not come across as some kind of politician’s calculation. “Yes, of course I have!” she exclaimed, laughing like a regular person might do to such a daft question, before clarifying that she did so on a shooting range.

Harris still has some gaps in her repertoire that make her look less than the finished item, notably dodging a question on whether the US should welcome Ukraine as a member of Nato.

She also remains vulnerable on border security, and at first attempted to gloss over several years of record arrivals of asylum seekers and illegal entrants.

Pressed by Whitaker on why the Biden-Harris administration did not take the more decisive steps it took this year three years before, she talked about how Biden introduced an immigration bill on day one. (He did, but it was unacceptable to Republicans because of a proposed wholesale amnesty for those in the US illegally.)

Then she said: “Fast-forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate … came up with a border security bill”. This was the one Trump told Republicans to kill, a good campaigning point for Democrats, but her “fast-forward” was doing a lot of work to gloss over three years of failure.

Whitaker challenged her a couple of times, but Harris was not fazed and stuck to her guns — “from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions”. This may do little, however, to win over voters sceptical about her border credentials.

The surest sign that she has found her feet as a White House candidate came when Whitaker attempted to revive her discomfort on weak answers from earlier interviews.

In her rather friendly MSNBC appearance, the only other solo network question-and-answer she has done, Harris was at a loss when pressed on how she would pay for all her expensive policy promises if Congress refused to increase taxes on the rich. At the time, she simply insisted that taxes had to increase.

On Monday night, she gave a more convincing answer that played up her own experience in Congress and her connections: “You know, when you talk quietly with a lot of folks in Congress, they know exactly what I’m talking about, because their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about. Their constituents are those firefighters and teachers and nurses [who want fairer taxation].”

The suggestion was that, once the election is out of the way, a sufficient number of members from across the aisle would be willing to work on deals to improve living standards.

She had given another weak answer to CNN, in a joint interview with Tim Walz, her running-mate, when asked about her “flip-flops” on fracking and decriminalising crossing the border. Then, she said that “my values have not changed” as a catch-all way of explaining 180-degree policy shifts, which simply did not work.

On 60 Minutes, she had a better explanation: “In the last four years, I have been vice-president of the United States and I have been travelling our country, and I have been listening to folks. And seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus.”

This communicated not only her experience but her contrast with Trump on a willingness to compromise to get reasonable deals done. It showed just how much Harris has learned as a candidate in her relatively short campaign and also proved the value of finally facing up to a big network interview in an election marked so far by the soft non-interview on both sides — and a no-show by Trump, who backed out of the chance to feature in his own 60 Minutes interview, claiming that he was treated unfairly four years ago.

Harris’s final answer exuded confidence: asked for her reaction to Trump pulling out of 60 Minutes, she urged viewers to watch one of his rallies instead. “You’re going to hear conversations that are about himself and all of his personal grievances,” she said. “And what you will not hear is anything about you, the listener. You will not hear about how he’s going to try to bring the country together, find common ground.”

She concluded: “I believe in my soul and heart the American people are ready to turn the page.”