Kamala Harris’ campaign may be on a roll, but if she wants it to stay that way, she will need to go off script — and talk to the press, columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote for The Guardian.
“She is running for the highest office in the nation, perhaps the most powerful perch in the world, and she owes it to every US citizen to be frank and forthcoming about what kind of president she intends to be,” Sullivan writes. “To tell us – in an unscripted, open way – what she stands for.”
Sullivan, who is also the executive director for Columba University's Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security, said Harris’ reluctance to grant impromptu interviews with reporters makes sense, as her campaign stands to benefit little from it. But the pressure for her to speak candidly with the media – as Donald Trump so frequently does – is growing and she needs to avoid becoming a candidate “shrouded from public scrutiny,” she said, quoting Semafor's Benjy Sarlin.
“I don’t have a lot of confidence that the broken White House press corps would skillfully elicit the answers to those and other germane questions if given the chance,” Sullivan writes. “But Harris should show that she understands that, in a democracy, the press – at least in theory – represents the public, and that the sometimes adversarial relationship between the press and government is foundational.”
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While strategists have surmised that Harris will pull off an effective prosecution of Trump on the debate stage in September, speaking off the cuff isn’t her strong point, Sullivan notes. Harris is prone to “word salad” when asked tough questions, and her answers may be spun into negative news stories.
All of this is worth the risk, Sullivan writes.
“Even if you very much hope that Harris prevails in November over her corrupt, felonious rival, that’s not a good enough reason to cheer on her press avoidance,” Sullivan says. “If Harris is truly ‘for the people’, as she has long claimed, she needs to speak to their representatives – flawed as they may be.”
