Charles Cooke of National Review Online explores Vice President Kamala Harris’ media strategy during her run for the White House.
The New Republic’s Alex Shephard has confirmed what all but the most myopic of political observers have by this point been forced to acknowledge: That it is the official strategy of the Kamala Harris for President campaign to “avoid the press at all costs, even when asked questions that should be layups.” “The Democratic ticket, or perhaps those who advise them,” Shephard wrote, … “seem to believe that nothing good can come from talking to the media.” “If this sounds familiar,” he concludes, “it’s because President Biden employed the same media strategy in his reelection campaign. That didn’t work out so well for him — and it may not for Harris, either.”
This is all true. But Shephard’s conclusion — a conclusion that I have seen echoed fairly broadly across the left in recent weeks — is not. Harris’s silence is “troubling,” Shephard deduces, “because it suggests that the people running the Biden campaign still have influence in the Harris campaign.”
Does it? In Shephard’s estimation, the core problem here is that Joe Biden had a team around him that was unusually captivated by the electoral benefits of reticence, and that, because that team is incompetent or lazy or deluded or unduly motivated by vendettas, it has erroneously transferred its preference over to Kamala Harris. “Biden,” Shephard submits, “wasn’t being hidden from the press because he was old but because his advisers were engaged in a self-destructive feud with the media.” I disagree. I think that Joe Biden was being hidden from the press because he was old — or, more accurately, because he was senile. …
… Why has this pattern continued with Harris? That’s simple: Because, for different reasons but with broadly the same results, Harris is as flatly incapable of speaking effectively in public as was the last guy. Since Harris was anointed in August, we have witnessed a concerted attempt to convince voters that they are not seeing what they are, in fact, seeing.
