Kamala Harris may have sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash for her first big interview since she became the Democratic presidential nominee last month, but that doesn’t mean she was willing to play the network’s game.
Since getting the nomination, Harris and running mate Tim Walz have connected with voters mostly by doing rallies and working with content creators, while ignoring sit downs with legacy media outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and others.
The policy has some merit from a strategic standpoint, considering many of those outlets have a bad habit of framing their presidential coverage as a “horse race.”
That means that even though mainstream journalists might gripe that Harris needs to answer their questions about what she would do as president, that’s not what they ask when they have the chance to talk with her.
Instead, reporters mostly want her to respond to wackadoodle things Trump said.
But it doesn’t look like Harris is going to do that moving forward, based on how she responded to one of Bash’s Trump-framed questions during the interview.
Bash asked Harris to comment on remarks made by Trump at last month’s National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago about her racial identity.
During his train wreck Q&A at the event, Trump attacked Harris’ biracial identity.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a couple of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” he said. “And now she wants to be known as Black, so I don’t know ― is she Indian or is she Black?”
During the CNN interview on Thursday, Bash asked Harris to comment on Trump’s questioning about her racial identity.
Harris had a succinct response: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.”
Harris’ refusal to answer a question that doesn’t have anything to do with her ability to lead the country got raves from people on X, formerly Twitter.
Many people felt that if the media was going to ask questions like this one, then Harris had a good reason for previously avoiding reporters.