Kamala Harris CNN interview was short, superficial and full of waffle

Kamala Harris during her CNN interview, and Julia Louis Dreyfus in a scene from Veep.

Kamala Harris’s prime time interview with CNN must be among the biggest anticlimaxes in American political television.

The highly anticipated interview that aired Thursday at 9pm (Friday 11am AEST) featuring the Democratic presidential candidate and her running mate Tim Walz was embarrassingly short, superficial, and replete with the saccharine political waffle that’s come to typify Harris’s campaign.

Throughout the 18 minutes of interview, CNN’s producers, whose job is to come up with the most exciting, newsworthy captions to put at the bottom the screen, came up with “I will enforce the laws: Harris”, “My values have not changed: Harris” and “My grammar’s not always correct: Walz”.

Wow, hold the front page.

What would Harris do on her first day in office? “Strengthen the American middle class” was the reply, without anything approaching a concrete proposal.

She undertook as president to “build consensus”, “invest in American families”, and “implement my plan for an opportunity economy”.

It’s almost as if Harris mistook Veep and our own Frontline as guides for, rather than satires, of political communication.

Harris said she wanted to “turn the page on the last decade”, three and a half years of which included her and Joe Biden’s administration and two of Barack Obama’s. She must have known her promise to “bring down the cost of everyday goods” was a lie given it was her (and the prior) administration’s policies that increased them in the first place by reckless money printing and stimulus.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in their first sit down interview, with CNN. Picture: Supplied

Sixty eight days before the presidential election, and over five and a half weeks since becoming Joe Biden’s successor at the top of the Democratic Party ticket, Harris revealed absolutely nothing new, except that she was making pancakes when Joe Biden called her on July 21 to offer her the party leadership, and she’d never met Donald Trump in person.

For about half the interview, being a whole nine minutes, Walz sat virtually silent, raising the question of why he was there in the first place.

Interviewer Dana Bash, after an admirably impartial performance as the co-host of the debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in June that triggered Harris’s ascent, didn’t cover herself in glory.

She failed to interrogate Harris’s misleading answer on fracking, which the former California senator promised stridently to ban in 2019. Harris’s new-found support for funding a wall on the southern border, which she once dubbed “medieval” was barely discussed.

The vice president’s attitude to support for Israel’s war against Hamas was no clearer than Joe Biden’s, being ‘we will support Israel but we want a ceasefire’.

Rather than question Walz on law and order given his egregious failures during the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis in 2020, we learned that Walz was proud of his son for becoming emotional during his acceptance speech last week.

Bash even devoted some of the precious few minutes of the interview to a supposed “iconic” photograph of Harris’s niece watching Harris accepting the party’s nomination last week in Chicago. As someone paid to follow US politics, I’d never seen this photo before.

This interview was a failure, and one made much worse because the Harris campaign team has refused to do any other interviews, ensuring anticipation and scrutiny of this one would be sky high.

The Harris campaign has promised further interviews, although we might expect that to be in the low single digits based on this latest performance.

Perhaps never in television have so many eyes watched something so pointless.

Whatever you think of Trump he gives regular, long interviews before hostile journalists, ensuring none of them face the scrutiny that Harris ensured would be applied to her latest appearance.