The Political Tradition Harris and Walz Are Bringing Back (2024)

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Kamala Harris has now completed her first major television interview as the Democratic standard-bearer: perhaps the most feverishly anticipated, campaign-defining, existentially urgent interrogation ever conducted in the English language, or any language, in recent memory. Everyone will remember exactly where they were when they watched last night’s extravaganza—nodding along, rolling their eyes, dozing off, changing the channel.

In other words, the spectacle itself did not exactly match the buildup that accompanied it. Personally, I watched the interview on my couch, eating a bowl of kettle corn and occasionally checking the Red Sox score on my phone (they lost). It was a perfectly fine and forgettable Thursday night, not unlike the perfectly fine and forgettable performance that Harris; her running mate, Tim Walz; and inquisitor-host Dana Bash turned in on CNN.

In the end, the only thing that made this interview a watershed event was the hype and heavy anticipation that preceded it. This was fueled in large part by the Harris campaign’s refusals to do any major network interviews up to this point. And shame on the campaign for that: It should not have taken this long.

The most obvious sign that last night’s production would not be a terribly game-changey affair came when CNN kept teasing Harris’s answer to Bash’s question about what it was like when President Joe Biden called to tell her that he was dropping out of the race. “I’ll give you a little too much information,” Harris replied, giggling. “Go for it,” Bash encouraged. “There’s no such thing, Madam Vice President.”

To me, the phrase “too much information” suggested that Harris was about to overshare something excessively personal or mildly embarrassing about the phone call. Or perhaps she was about to blab something hugely significant and newsworthy that Biden had said to her or that she’d said to him, a detail that would loom large when the complete story of this momentous summer is written. But we would all have to wait for the Big Reveal, because CNN then cut to a commercial.

Finally, near the end of the interview, the cliffhanger was resolved. “It was a Sunday,” Harris reminded us. Her family was visiting, “including my baby nieces.” They were finishing up a pancake breakfast. Her nieces had asked “Auntie” for more bacon—which Auntie agreed to provide—before they turned to doing a puzzle. This was all very humanizing, yes, but a bit beside the point.

“And the phone rang, and it was Joe Biden,” Harris said, finally getting to the nub of the matter and returning us to the suspense at hand. “And he told me what he had decided to do.” Harris had then asked Biden if he was sure about stepping aside.

Yes, he’d said, he was sure.

“And that’s how I learned about it,” the vice president said.

That was pretty much it.

Bash followed up with a question about whether Harris had asked Biden during the phone call for his endorsem*nt, or whether Biden had indicated that he would support her. “He was very clear that he was going to support me,” Harris said. Ideally, Bash could have gotten in a few more inquiries about that famous phone call—about the bacon (thick-cut?), pancakes (blueberry?), and puzzle (jigsaw?). Personally, I wanted to know if Doug Emhoff had been allowed to skip the puzzle and maybe escape for a nap or something—because that’s what I would have wanted to do after a big Sunday breakfast, to be honest. Plus, I hate puzzles.

Sometimes, history gets interspersed seamlessly with the mundane pace of everyday life. Big, fate-shifting phone calls are not, in fact, highly dramatic occurrences, nor will much-awaited interviews always yield the massive developments we expect. Sometimes, syrup-smeared breakfast dishes are getting cleared away, and then the president calls, and life takes a major pivot. And sometimes, appointment TV will serve up a nothingburger.

As for the Trump campaign, it seized rather loudly on Harris’s answer to a question about whether she supported a ban on fracking, which she had previously said she did during her short-lived and ill-fated presidential campaign of 2019.

“As president, I will not ban fracking,” Harris assured Bash, which she indicated has been her position since Biden picked her to be his running mate, in 2020. Bash later asked Harris how voters should view some of the rather dramatic policy shifts she has made from 2019 to now.

“The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is: My values have not changed,” Harris said. This was of course a classic politician’s evasion, and entirely predictable given that Harris (1) is a politician and (2) very badly needs to win Pennsylvania (a.k.a. one of the nation’s largest fracking states). Donald Trump expressed some outrage about this flip-flop, but his heart did not really seem to be in it.

“BORING!!!” he declared in a Truth Social post about the interview, a much bigger sin in his eyes than anything Harris actually said.

Trump wasn’t entirely wrong about that. But for an interview like this, “boring”—or, as my colleague Tom Nichols called it, “good enough”—feels quite okay, maybe refreshingly so. It isn’t healthy for a populace to put so much weight on a politician’s every TV appearance. Or, for that matter, for every election to feel as life-and-death as this one does, or the previous one did.

If nothing else, last night was a reminder that Harris and Walz are politicians, and their interviews are likely to consist of the finesse and obfuscation that’s been standard in American politics forever. I’ve been covering campaigns for more than two decades, and this is how it goes. Still, things should get much more interesting when Harris and Trump meet up 11 days from now in Philadelphia for the next existential, campaign-defining moment.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Dispatches

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The Last Social Network

By Lora Kelley

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Culture Break

Check out. This photo of the day from the Paralympics shows the Italian Paralympic athlete Arjola Dedaj, who brought style to the track with her butterfly blindfold.

Watch. Between the Temples (out now in theaters) imagines how different generations of Jewish Americans might be connected by the same rituals, Mark Asch writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Speaking of burgers (nothingburgers or otherwise), I was at a Shake Shack when I learned that Biden was dropping out. We were at the Vince Lombardi rest stop, on the New Jersey Turnpike, driving back to D.C. from New York. Really bad traffic, the trip took six or seven hours, yuck. It was midsummer, which feels like a long time ago, but not as long ago as the Biden debate debacle, which was in early summer (late June).

Now it’s almost Labor Day already, which is also hard to believe. May everyone enjoy their weekend, and please drive safe.

— Mark

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.