Her media swing showed how she often responds to uncomfortable questions by acknowledging them, yet not fully answering them.
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Vice President Kamala Harris during an interview with three members of the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia last month.
Running an abbreviated campaign in the final sprint before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris blitzed the media this week in a series of interviews to speak to voters who say they still don’t know enough about her.
One thing they learned: how she keeps answering the question she wants, not the one that was asked.
Politicians, and presidents in particular, have long treated the ability to bob and weave through uncomfortable questions while remaining on message as a skill to be mastered, like the precise footing required of a carpenter navigating a high-pitched roof.
Bill Clinton’s famous line, “I feel your pain,” was deployed to diffuse an activist’s plea for details on how to end the AIDS epidemic. George W. Bush sabotaged questions about climate change by treating facts as partisan assertions. Barack Obama took his message to social media and largely avoided interviews with White House beat reporters.
This week, Ms. Harris put her own stamp on the art of the dodge.
On “60 Minutes,” she declined to answer a question about whether she considered Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, to be a close ally. She also refused to detail how she would pay for a $3 trillion economic plan.
When asked on ABC’s popular daytime show, “The View,” about accusations from Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida that she had only offered to help with a hurricane as a presidential candidate, she swiftly implicated the criticism as proof of his own partisanship. When Howard Stern asked her on his SiriusXM program later that afternoon if she would select Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman, for her cabinet, Ms. Harris refused to be buttonholed. “I gotta win, Howard,” she said with an air of first-things-first. “I gotta win. I gotta win.”
ImageMs. Harris, at center, was in New York on Tuesday to participate in three interviews, including one on the television program “The View.”Credit…Dave Sanders for The New York Times
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Source: nytimes.com
