Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics and coverage of Campaign 2024.
"There are a lot of things that people want to learn about you and your policies," Bret Baier of Fox News said to Vice President Kamala Harris Wednesday. By that point, the interview segment between the Republican TV host and the Democratic nominee was nearly over; moments before, it had devolved into Baier saying "Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthis" over Harris saying "'suckers' and 'losers.'"
The Fox News appearance was the logical extension, but by no means the end point, of extended campaigning by the campaign press about Harris's press campaign. Less than two weeks ago, Politico's Playbook—in an item reporting that Harris's schedule for the week included the Call Her Daddy podcast, 60 Minutes, The View, The Howard Stern Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and a Univision town hall—wrote that "[a]fter avoiding the media for nigh on her whole campaign, VP KAMALA HARRIS is … still largely avoiding the media." (Emphasis Politico's.)
Politico continued: "Let’s be real here: Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about, even as voters want more specifics from Harris." Ten days later, Baier was repeating more or less that same line about Harris's duty to inform the voters, after an interview that had featured the Fox anchor talking over the candidate and demanding to know why Harris had let so many "illegal immigrants" loose in the country—then, after displaying the photos of young women killed by migrants, asking "Do you owe those families an apology?"
The spectacle was educational, but not about Harris. As Politico so neatly formulated it, the "issues," for campaign media, are whatever the candidate "may not want to talk about." Baier was badgering and abrasive, but his immigration questions could have been borrowed from the ones Bill Whitaker delivered in courteous tones on 60 Minutes. "Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?" Whitaker asked. And: "What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?"
The same applied to the issue, or subject, of Donald Trump. Whitaker: "You have called him a racist and divisive. Yet Donald Trump has the support of millions and millions of Americans. How do you explain that?" Baier: "Why is half the country supporting him? … Are they misguided, the 50 percent? Are they stupid?"
(Meanwhile, on the Call Her Daddy podcast, alongside the soft personal conversation-starters, the questions had included, "How do we make this country safer for women?" and "Almost one in four Gen Z and millennials say they don't want to have kids because it's too damn expensive. How are you going to help young people not feel left behind?")
The point of the mainstream press sessions isn't edification, but hazing. The campaign reporters don't care about Harris's policy agenda or how it contrasts with Trump's; they care about how unscripted remarks might play in the news cycle. A potentially life-changing proposal like Harris's announcement that she wants to have Medicare cover long-term home care pops up in the coverage stream and washes away—in the same appearance on The View in which she made that proposal, after all, she also said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” when asked if she would have "done something differently than President Biden." That got a lot of coverage, and Trump is now working it into his rallies and attack ads. Everybody knows Joe Biden is unpopular and that people tell pollsters the country is on the wrong track, yet Harris wouldn't repudiate anything the administration had done. She didn't want to talk about it!
The real complaint the campaign journalists have against Harris is that she managed to clear the field and lock up the nomination within a day or so of Joe Biden's withdrawal. They had been planning to fill the weeks until the Democratic National Convention by staging a popularity contest, in which various would-be replacement nominees would vie for the approval of the public, as interpreted by the major media—a pageant in which politics reporters and pundits would have served as hosts, judges, and audience all at once, leading to a high-stakes televised finale at the convention. Instead, Harris cut them swiftly and completely out of the loop, demonstrating in the process that the people who are paid the most to talk about politics had no idea how political maneuvering actually worked.
And so the New York Times—still waiting in vain, somewhere behind Charlamagne tha God, for a chance to sit down with the candidate—wrote that Harris "often responds to unpleasant questions without answering them, questions the very premise of questions she finds unfair and can take it upon herself to reword a query she considers unhelpful." All of that is true; in less adversarial contexts, the campaign media call that "message discipline" and punish a candidate who doesn't show it.
But consistency doesn't matter, because campaign season is fully into its mannerist phase now. Everyone who cares about politics knows Kamala Harris is a disciplined campaigner; everyone who cares about politics knows Donald Trump is not; everyone who cares about politics knows the polls are too close to call or self-contradictory or both. The candidates are down to scuffling for the people who don't care about politics, the confused and disengaged people who think, or claim, against all the evidence, that there's somehow something left for them to be persuaded about.
For the tens of millions of voters who've long since figured out whether they prefer Harris or Trump, sitting in the blue or red haze of their 48-ish or 46-ish percent on the basically immobile polling average graph, it's all simultaneously agitating and wearying. The sight of Baier and Harris going back and forth enacting the ritual of an interview—with the video at 1.5x speed, so I didn't squirm out of the chair—was impossible to take at face value. Nothing that Baier could ask, or that Harris could answer, would change Fox's editorial position that the Democrats are fecklessly or maliciously inviting migrant hordes to overrun the country. No tone or attitude Harris might have struck would have certified that she had risen to the challenge of a tough encounter with the media.
If anything, she seemed to be there to see if she could get a few thousand more people to hear her say "affordable housing" a few more times, at the cost of having them hear Baier say "heinous crimes" and "brutally assaulted." That's what's left, in October, of the presidential contest. Maybe it's what makes the difference.
