Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris sat for an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier on Wednesday night and skewered Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump on several occasions.
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Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson: “Kamala came to Fox to stack bodies.”
In the most controversial part of the interview, Baier played a clip of Trump insisting that liberals were the enemy because he has been investigated “more than Al Capone.” When Baier asked for Harris’ reaction, she pounced:
“With all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the ‘enemy within’ that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people,” Harris said. “That’s not what you just showed.”
Baier tried to interrupt, but Harris kept going.
In my experience, gotcha questions are outliers. Most of these sorts of interviews, and public debates, are composed of questions that are aligned with the viewer of that outlet. So when a politicians side steps the question asked, they’re rejecting the opinions and concerns of the audience. I can’t tell you how many times a “liberal” news outlet has interviewed a democratic candidate and the candidate fails to answer the question. Gotcha question or not, it pisses me off.
I disagree that the interviewer should allow the person to finish their thought. I prefer people to be direct when asked direct questions. This is not the time to speak broadly - that’s what your campaign ads are for, that’s what your social media is for, that’s what your stump speeches are for. This is the moment to speak directly to the concerns of the outlet’s audience - assuming they are in-good-faith questions.
Conservatives care about what conservatives think, as do moderates. There may be enough among them who might be swayed one way or the other depending on the dialog. The middle ground is where elections are won so what’s happening in these forums is not irrelevant. Moreover (and where my mind is spending a lot of time these days), how blind are people in liberal forums to the larger premise of what they’re observing and saying. People need to spend more time imagining what they’re reading / hearing is being said about the other candidate. I’d this were a clip of Anderson Cooper interviewing Trump, how would liberals and conservatives react? I imagine just the mirror of what we’re seeing now.
And, to be honest, I care about conservatives because they’re Americans. They’re my friends and neighbors and family members. They’re being mislead by politicians and manipulated by corporations. The further we push each other away from each other, the more we fail to embrace our commonalities, the more likely we are to actually face a civil war. Allowing misinformation to continue like this is going to lead to nine conservative justices. “They’re stupid” is not a good enough reason to write them off. The choices they make and the choices we make has an impact on the entire country now and for the foreseeable future. If you give a flying fuck about any young children in your family, you’d be a little more open to finding common ground with conservatives and calming the toxic atmosphere we’re living in.