Is Harris Limiting Press Access Helping Her?
Photo by Office of Senator Kamala Harris, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The debate about the current media strategy by Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign has mostly focused on what she is not doing with the press, and accusations from the Trump campaign and supporters of her ducking the press, but is Harris limiting press access hurting or helping her?
From The Editorial Board:
Even if I agreed that candidates who want to be president should be regularly subjected to media scrutiny, I don’t think this press corps, as it is currently organized, is able to. There are exceptions, of course, but this press corps is generally not equipped to scrutinize candidates on matters of fact and substance. I say this because this press corps has conspicuously traded matters of fact and substance for vibes.
It didn’t matter what Joe Biden did – pull the country out of a pandemic, dodge a recession, tame inflation, grow jobs, grow wages, enforce anti-monopoly laws, revive every single one of the so-called “left behind” counties that voted for Trump in 2016 because of “economic anxiety” – it didn’t matter what Joe Biden did. The press corps decided nothing was more important than his age, and lo! 2024 became an election about vibes and vibes ended his candidacy.
Vibes are this press corps’ forte, not fact and substance. If fact and substance were its strength, there would have been a different reaction to The Disaster Debate during which Biden talked about policy and issues while Trump didn’t bother. Trump was incoherent and false, but he came off as confident and strong, and he came off that way, because the press corps’ forte isn’t fact and substance.
If fact and substance were important, there would also have been a different reaction to Biden’s NATO press conference last month. He did it after the Disaster Debate to show he still had what it takes. He talked for an hour about foreign affairs, international laws and war. But this press corps didn’t hear any of that after Biden said “Vice President Trump” by mistake. There’s no grace for the old in Washington, nor is there interest in anything but vibes in the Washington press corps.
There was a time when liberals and Democrats would have nodded in agreement with Chris Cillizza on the merit of candidates being regularly subjected to scrutiny. But after this press corps made a fetish of Biden’s age, I don’t see any more room for the benefit of the doubt – and there’s no going back. This press corps made the election about vibes and it’s going to remain an election about vibes, and if those vibes now grind against the instincts of this press corps, tough shit.
You reap what you sow.
Read the whole piece here. So, what say you?
One of the blind spots that professional politics-knowers (i.e. editorial pundits and Serious Respectable media types) have is when they pretend that people base their vote on a sober rational analysis of the issues and position papers.
Even in the golden age of politics (defined as when a given person came of age) this wasn’t true. And it is even less true today since the main issue that actually separates the two candidates is which one will preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and uphold democracy and the rule of law, and which one sees all American citizens as being of equal worth.
It doesn’t really matter what their ten point plan for trade is, or what their policy on FDA approvals is, or whether they want taxes on tips or not.
What reporters dismiss as “vibes” is really just character and temperament.Report
Joe Biden has character and temperament in loads, and yet …Report
I’ve never heard of The Editorial Board, but his’ conclusions are spot on. Modern Media has normalized Trump for clicks – and thus paychecks – and is wholly incapable of walking back from its error. Witness the NYT’s melt down over both Biden and Harris preferring Rolling Stone and Vogue to its formerly esteemed pages.Report
I agree on this. Never saw this publication before but I found myself nodding firmly along with their points.Report
MattY had a good point the other day in his “Politicians should talk to the press more“.
The press seems to revel in asking the “gotcha” that trips a politician up. It’s a story when they do!
But it’s not to the politician’s benefit to get gotcha’ed.
Back when the only way to get your message out was through a journalist, well… the price was that you had to be good at not getting got.
Now? Hell, you have the internet. Give a speech on Tik Tok (a short speech, of course). Give a short rant on Twitter. There are enough people out there who can help a particularly good one go viral that you don’t *NEED* journalists anymore!
And if it’s to Harris’s benefit that she’s “Generic Democrat” instead of “Actual Politician Who Says Dumb Crap Like ‘We Need Price Controls For Food!'”, then she just needs to get on Tik Tok and yell “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!” and tweet “Here’s a picture of JD Vance from High School!” and tell the press to go eff itself and be a blank slate for the public to project its wants and needs onto.
The only problem is if she screws up badly somewhere and decides that Tik Tok and Twitter might not be enough and she’ll have to go talk to David Brinkley and he might decide to ask her a tough question about her screwup.
Easier to just be a projection.Report
Except David Brinkley would give her the hard questions from the get go as would any of the legacy media while being muted about correct answers and shouting mistakes virally across the country. So by your own measure there’s considerable sense in eschewing the legacy media. Also, in light of their behavior with the Trump campaign hacks they do richly deserve a rolled up newspaper across the nose.Report
Sure. So she’d just better not screw up badly somewhere.
(Just don’t use the people who explained that Biden won the debate as your lodestone for whether she screwed up somewhere.)Report
And, again, it wouldn’t matter if she uses the media or not in that event. If she screws up badly she screws up badly- her availability to the media, or not, would have no effect on the fallout of her screwing up badly.Report
Then, truly, we live in a new era.
Harris is doing the right thing.
Trump showed us what was possible when you went straight to twitter back in 2016 and, thankfully, lost in 2020.
We may never need legacy media again.
Which is good. We can go back to local news and sports scores.Report
Hard to say. I expect she’ll be doing legacy media sometime shortly after her convention. She’s said end of August and I think if she blew through a deadline she, herself, set that’d be interesting and worthy of note. The articles point, that she has zero obligations both in principle and in practice, to legacy media is rock solid though.
But goodness knows an implosion or paradigm shift in media is desperately needed. What noone knows is how to do it. The money for media has mostly been sucked up by tech giants and everyone is just scribble scrabbling around after the crumbs. The legacy media exists because there’s literally no replacement org and no revenue to replace it but it still does things people value (and, equally importantly, it’s a place really smart people and well off people will work at for peanuts).Report
Yglesias suggests doing town hall style events instead of interviews. That would show her engaging with real issues, without having to deal with the press’s uselessness.
I think the idea has a lot of merit.Report
I do as well. I do very much want her to engage more along those lines but, contrasting her and Walz’s frenetic campaigning event pace to Trump and Vances’ I don’t have a lot of justification to accuse Harris of being lazy. Personally I intend to reserve judgement of her media engagement operation until after the convention/labor day. I get a general vibe and feel that their strategy is to try and roll the good vibes through to that point when voters typically start engaging more. If she tries to run dark beyond that point I’ll definitely have criticisms/concerns but all indications are she’s going to engage- just on her own timetable.Report
Also, I’ve noticed that none of the pundits or Substackers or media spokespeople ever seem to be curious as to what the voters want to hear.
Like, on July 21 Biden handed the candidacy off to Harris, and there was an immediate and astonishing shift in enthusiasm and momentum.
Harris has exactly the same issue stances as Biden. So what happened? Why has the public reacted so differently to the new candidate, if “issues” and “policies” are so important?
Maybe the general public isn’t out there looking at the two candidates and saying, “Hmm, they both look great, but where do they stand on the issues?”Report
The general public wasnt doing that because the one who has withdrawn looked like he could drop dead at any second and the one still in sounds like a scatter brained old coot who forgot to take his medication.
I’m not going to over estimate the sophistication of the American people but you can’t do an experiment without a control. Or if there is a control it’s Harris by virtue of meeting the minimal standard of not obviously being in severe age related decline.Report
But even if we put aside Biden/ Harris/ Walz, even if we look at other elections in recent history, is the voting public interested in issues, from any of the candidates?
Did issues matter much in the Florida governor’s race, or the Ohio Senate races, or any other elections that you can think of?Report
Sure I think they matter. And I think it’s fair to say there’s more to it than that. Character (or at least the perception of it) has an influence. Which issues matter varies widely and based around current events.
Iraq was a major factor in Obama winning the 2008 primary and beating McCain. The deficit and right wing rebellion over fiscal policy were major factors in 1992. It’s impossible to imagine Trump’s rise and continued relevance without illegal immigration as a flashpoint. I’m not going to pretend the man on the street is engaging in strategic voting based on well thought out, cogent views on these subjects, but they’re part of the mix.Report
The M. Night Shyamalan twist: the Emperor was fully clothed the whole time! We were naked! It doesn’t actually make sense, or fit what we all saw on the screen, but I’ll admit I didn’t see it coming. So maybe mid-2000’s Shyamalan. Like The Happening or The Village.Report
The Village wasn’t bad, it’s that the twist was mundane and silly and telegraphed.
Bryce Howard was *AMAZING* in that. You couldn’t take your eyes off of her.
It’s just that once the twist was revealed, you realize that you had a lot less of a story than you thought you had going into the flick.Report
I thought the piece was pretty unconvincing, and fails to address the most obvious reason things played out the way they have over the last month. Biden looked terrible. Biden is incapable of communicating or making a case for himself. Biden’s mind may well still be functioning at a minimally acceptable enough level to finish out his term as president- despite the conservative assertions there’s no hard evidence that he isn’t. But the rubber met the road when he walked out there and could not communicate without trailing off and looking like he had gotten lost in the super market or got turned around in his own front yard. His NATO meeting press conference was only slightly better and there were moments he looked like he was on the verge of having a stroke. He would smile bizarrely, stare off into the distance, whispered here and yelled there in disconcerting ways, and otherwise look like a seriously compromised elderly man. I watched both of these events because of the quaint thought that it is my civic duty to pay attention to these things. Anyway, anyone who fails to grapple with this has no credibility to me, which includes this writer.
As for Harris, yes, she should get out there. Strategically what she’s done so far, i.e. coast on the good vibes, makes some sense. But at some point if she wants to turn the election into something other than a coin flip she will need to actually engage with live questions and discussion. The center left does not have the luxury of an alternative media apparatus that will muster dittoheads whi will show up no matter how dumb or incompetent the candidate. Even to the extent they try they fail, and anyone who doubts that should read my preceding paragraph, or ponder the situation that led to this piece being written. They tried damn hard to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, but when reality reared it’s ugly head they accepted it and drew the obvious conclusions.Report
Democrats have never had to campaign (in the last century). They have 90% of the media and Tammany Hall, criminal enterprises running large chunks of the country. They just never got to test it out before 2020.Report
This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read that the person intended to take seriously:
The really funny thing is that statement doesn’t make an argument that the media actually is a critical part of the system, because that actually would be a very hard argument to make.
Instead, it’s making an argument that Harris is just _getting away_ with showing it isn’t a critical part of the system, instead of being forced to keep pointing that out over and over again. His problem is not that she is showing that the media is useless, it’s that she isn’t _arguing_ that with the media about that, as Democrats have been doing for decades, demanding that the media stop running random lies and making things about vibes and stuff…she’s just ignoring the media.
His theory is that she looked at the media, and said ‘literally nothing you do is even slightly useful to me versus directly speaking to voters’ and walked away. And he doesn’t seem to understand how badly this makes his industry look.
Now, I don’t know if she’s actually intending to do this, but considering how much other things that she has started doing that everyone (I don’t just mean the left but almost every activist Democrat regardless of where in the party they are) has been screaming for politicians to do for decades… I think it might be deliberate.
Now, what she’s doing can look bad, but I think there’s a clever way for her to blunt that…she should agree to an interview if, and only if, there are literally no questions about Donald Trump or fluff about her campaign, she will answer policy questions about her future presidency, (and how she intends to manage to implement those, things like that related to future governance), and that’s it.
They wouldn’t be able to do it. The press would be literally incapable of managing this. I know that sounds weird, and it’s hard to think of how they would fail at this, but they would. They have been trained, for decades, to ask the other kind of questions.Report
The interesting thing about this editorial is I somewhat think it is wrong. Sort of.
Politicians indeed don’t have a duty to talk to the press, but they do have a duty to respond to the concerns of the American people, which is traditionally done via the press asking questions that supposedly some amorphous blob of American people want answered.
These questions can be anything from ‘that policy proposal looks incredibly expensive, how is it going to get paid for’ to ‘you appear to have changed your position multiple times on this, why did you do that and why should we believe you’re going to keep your current position’ to ‘you hung out with some white supremacist this weekend, do you think that’s okay?’ to ‘explain the bribery charges that have been filed against you by the FBI’.
So I’m not saying the press should only ask policy questions, but they should only ask _real_ questions. Things people actually want an answer to, that the answer to is plausibly a concern of the public. Not ‘how do you feel about Trump saying stupid stuff about you?’ or even ‘how do you feel about the latest polls?’
But those questions have been how things worked for decades. I’m not entirely a fan of calling this vibe-based, because just as much questions are about horse race minutiae that aren’t important either, and there’s another set of questions that sound like the scandal questions I talked about above, but are literally just made up, and do not have the minimum amount of research that the press should be doing before asking these questions. Or worse, are deliberate lies by the ‘press’.
Harris’s campaign has no actual scandals, or at least the press hasn’t bothered to find any, so she doesn’t need to address any of them, and the press won’t talk about her policies, so there’s literally no reason for her to interact with the press.Report
Agreed.Report
Her policies are her scandals.Report
Then maybe you should ask the press to talk about them?Report
B-but why won’t she talk about policy??
Harris to propose up to $25K in down-payment support for 1st-time homebuyers
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-propose-25k-payment-support-1st-time-homeowners/story?id=112877568Report
I guess that’ll play well with low-info voters, but she’s really testing my distaste for Trump.Report
Joe Biden didn’t do any of those things. He took office with vaccines rolling out and the economy already stimulated enough to avoid a recession and drive further reductions in unemployment. Then he overstimulated it with the ARP, aggravating inflation, and refused to restart student loan repayments, further aggravating it. He hasn’t really made any meaningful contributions to fighting inflation; that’s been handled by the Federal Reserve, which operates independently.
Real wages are up about 2% in the 4 1/2 years since the beginning of 2020, compared to 3% in the first three years of the Trump administration. They’re actually down since Biden took office, although that’s largely an artifact of lower-paid workers being laid off disproportionately in 2020. As deep as my contempt for his irresponsible populist policies has been, I do concede that the anemic real wage growth under Biden may not be his fault; COVID was a major disruption that may well have put us on a permanently lower growth path. But he certainly can’t claim it as a victory.Report
Those are all good points, well worth pointing out. Everything on the list of accomplishments was either already in motion or even doing better before Biden took office. The idea that he pulled the country out of a pandemic – man, it’s so easy to skip over falsehoods that are said about the pandemic because we all lived through it and it was confusing, but Biden in no way pulled the country out of it. He was there at the end of it. Omicron pulled us out of the pandemic, and to a lesser extent, the scientific effort that took place under Trump.Report
Also (I kind of already forgot about the article), the point they were trying to make there was madness. It was essentially “I don’t care how bad season 6 of The Office was, the first four were good so you’re not allowed to stop watching.”Report
One last thing, because I guess Jaybird is off the clock right now: Biden dodged a recession by leading us through two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.Report
Dude, I’m playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and I recommend you do the same.
The Ezio Collection is available from Amazon for sixteen dollars!Report
The fate of democracy is on the line here, Jaybird. This is no time to be playing games!Report
Followed by how many quarters of positive growth?Report
I still think “Yes, we’re going to have a mild recession as a healthy part of the regular business cycle” would have been a better play than “we’re going to redefine ‘recession’ away from ‘two consecutive quarters of negative growth’ and define it as something else entirely and we’re going to accuse people who notice of being dishonest.”Report
How many quarters of positive growth followed those two alleged quarters of negative growth?Report
If we’re unsure as to whether those two quarters were negative, why do you believe we’d know whether other quarters were positive?
Our measuring tools are either good enough or they aren’t.Report
My point is not whether the tools are good – I believe they are as good as they can be giving their built in limitations – its that those two quarters were followed by a greater number of quarters of something else. Which conservative never seem to want to talk about
And as we discussed at the time, those well defined tools were set up pre-pandemic and are not robust enough to account for the unique once a century disruption of the pandemic to world economies. Hence my and others continued skepticism of their designations of anything useful.Report
two quarters were followed by a greater number of quarters of something else. Which conservative never seem to want to talk about
They’re probably still hung up on your willingness to change long-standing definitions on the fly in order to wring out a tiny drop of temporary advantage and are wondering if you’re still doing that with any given definition you’re going to provide in the future.Report
Here’s something from June: California revised its numbers for 2023.
Newest Early Jobs Revision Shows No Net Job Growth During 2023
There was a net gain of ~9,000 jobs in 2023.
The interesting sentences from the official report:
Trying to will good things into existence by lying about them doesn’t actually help.Report
I have to make a couple of distinctions here. Lying is deliberately telling a mistruth. Spinning is deliberately telling a truth in a way to suit your own purposes. I don’t know that either of those things happened with these preliminary statistics. Some preliminary economic statistics are awful. They’re just not built on reliable inputs. Job gains and losses have always been hard to measure. With a lot of preliminary stats, they plug in certain assumptions based on previous trends, which mean they always miss the breaking story.
I do think there was some spin on the part of the NBER when they failed to label the negative economic growth as a recession. They may have had good reasons. To understand a phenomenon you need to study it, and if a bad-luck few quarters gets lumped into the formulas which analyze recessions, then you’re not going to understand recessionary patterns. I personally think that makes for a stronger argument to exclude the covid crash from recessionary analysis though. You don’t gain an understanding of the economy by saying things like “housing sales dropping by more than 5% when adjusted for interest rates and people coughing really hard in China are leading economic indicators”.Report
Spinning enough times and having the official numbers moved back down and then spinning some more and having the official numbers moved back down eventually presents identically to…
Well, it presents identically to trying to will something good into existence independently of facts.Report
Once again,
“Jaybird thinks X” is presented to us as some truth, universally acknowledged.
Pinky and I disagree on nearly everything, except the fact that economic agencies constantly revise numbers after the fact for the reasons he stated and no sane person thinks this is odd.
If you think its odd, that’s cool, everyone can have an opinion.
But accept that nearly everyone else thinks its normal.Report
The numbers are constantly revised. I agree with this.
2023 was revised down.
2022? revised down.
2021 was revised up!
2020 has all kinds of weirdness so I’m not sure I can find good reports one way or another.
What’s consistently irritating is that it’s so hard to find histories of the revisions going back more than a year… histories of the numbers? No problem.
Histories of the revisions? Why would someone want one of those?Report
The initial and revised estimates were both public documents, widely publicized and circulated at the time. It would take special efforts to memory hole them, and wouldn’t work if they were made.Report
The purpose of a thing isn’t always what it does. Beta code isn’t intended to crash your system. Junior High dances aren’t intended to humiliate you. They’re also no expected to work perfectly or find you your soul mate.
Survey data like the CES is intended to give a preliminary snapshot. Census data such as the QCEW is intended to give the most accurate count. These files are regularly reconciled and statisticians pore over them in an effort to improve the CES.Report
It’s intended to give an accurate count, but because it’s read as being intended to be an accurate count, it gets nudged.
Remember the one-day crash we had a couple of weeks ago? That was due to a whole perception=reality mismatch that got resolved over the course of a day (Japan actually moved its rates rather than keeping them steady).
If you know that a number that tries to be accurate can give you some temporary advantage, why not nudge it?
“Because it’s supposed to be accurate!”, you may say.
Yes. That’s why nudging it might work!Report
Or maybe the original numbers were right and the revised were nudged! Or maybe they’re both nudged by different people with different agendas! Maybe they’re both right and you’re being nudged! There’s no end to the possibilities once you divorce yourself from the requirement of evidence. The internet welcomes you aboard!Report
Well, I picked a bad week to defend preliminary employment statistics. 🙂 I still think I’m right though.Report
The lesson is that you need to release these numbers when they can’t be corrected before the election.Report
As a wise commenter once said: There’s no end to the possibilities once you divorce yourself from the requirement of evidence. The internet welcomes you aboard!
These estimates and revisions are released on a regular, public schedule. Market professionals and the financial press know when they’re coming well in advance and issue their own predictions just before they are released. Messing with the schedule because of elections would set off all sorts of alarms.Report
“Messing with the schedule because of elections would set off all sorts of alarms.”
We’d send out messages to key players that this is just for the election.Report
We who? What key players? And how would that message, whether it got out to the public or the public could read a calendar, not make matters worse?Report
The people whose job it is to respond to alarms.
“It’s okay. They’re messing with the schedule for *ELECTION* reasons.”Report
Who would be in charge of getting the message out and why would literally thousands of market players and financial journalists play along? If you’re going to spin conspiracy theories, the conspiracy has to make conspiratorial sense.Report
Why are you defending Trump?Report
Except that the revisions don’t always make things look better.
And if you’re talking about “independently of facts,” that assumes there are facts that can be ascertained with useful accuracy. You need something more than an arched eyebrow to establish that the estimates that promote your narrative are better than the ones that don’t.Report
This seems to be a prominent case of the revisions making things look worse.
You need something more than an arched eyebrow to establish that the estimates that promote your narrative are better than the ones that don’t.
“If the guy is giving you numbers that promote your narrative, double-check to see if he’s lying to you. If the guy is giving you numbers that promote his narrative, double-check to see if he’s lying to you and triple-check to see if he’s lying to himself.”Report
Good advice if you actually know what you’re doing and how to do it. I’d be interested in hearing from someone who matches that description.Report
You’re trying to change the subject.Report
The subject is “are the Democrats lying when they say the economy is good and has been getting better since the LIED about the two quarters of negative growth that defines a recession early on.”
My response is that refusing to lump those two quarters into the longer term trends – especially all the quarters after – is misdirection bordering on misinformation.Report
Substitute different events and stats and you have the campaign of every presidential candidate of the incumbent party since John Adams. The economy of a nation, even a small one, is too big to be changed quickly by any one man’s policies.Report
FDR managed to keep the Great Depression going for more than a decade by doing things that we’d now recognize as wildly inappropriate. For example his 100% income tax for “the rich”.
Trump shut the economy down. Biden brought it back up. With after-the-fact armchair quarter backing, mistakes were made.Report
I don’t know enough to speak to the FDR contention. Trump, rightly, shut it down. Biden, of course, woke it back up, but that was going to happen under any president. Inflation, after a period of depressed demand, is always going to happen. Look at the inflation rate for 1946.
The turning of an aircraft carrier analogy remains true for the American economy, IMO.Report
The FDR contention is conservative nonsense. It was pretty much standard conservative nonsense a generation or two ago, and has recently been making a comeback among the yutes with a vengeance, but it remains as silly as it was 40 years ago.Report
I heard this stuff, along with the “FDR knew the Japs were coming for Pearl Harbor” bit, when I was a kid longer ago than most folks here were alive.Report
Sure. But let’s not pretend that the people claiming that Biden simultaneously deserves full credit for everything good that happened during his administration and no blame for any of the bad things are not either liars or morons.Report