MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” heaped a pile of faint praise upon Kamala Harris’ first TV interview as a presidential candidate, saying the Democrat “didn’t do any harm,” demonstrated that she “should probably do more interviews” – and with one analyst concluding after her defense of policy shifts that “we should normalize changing your mind.”
For her first sit-down since Joe Biden withdrew over a month ago, Harris took questions from CNN’s Dana Bash, and brought along her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Bash gently pressed on Harris’ public flip-flops, including shifts on fracking policy and immigration, which the candidate parried by saying her “values haven’t changed.”
“One of the big questions going into this first interview was how she would address specific questions about clear policy differences,” “Morning Joe” host Willie Geist said, teeing up guest analyst Eddie Glaude: “Given that this was her first sit-down interview as the Democratic nominee, what are your impressions?”
“I think she did well. She didn’t do any harm. That’s important,” Glaude said. “But I also thought the answer about the shift in her positions between 2019 and today was really, really spot-on. You know, we could have consistent — we could have values that constitute the through-line of our positions, but the context changed. The situation changed. Our experiences changed.”
Glaude suggested that sometimes staying firm on an issue amounts to “foolish consistency,” and that Harris answered the question “really powerfully.”
“There were some other powerful moments, too,” he said. “So the final judgment for me: She did no harm. She set the stage for the next time she sits down.”
Later in the segment, Geist – who was filling in Friday for hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski – brought the same question to New York Times reporter and author Jeremy Peters, who acknowledged Harris’ dramatic 180s.
“I mean, you know, she said that she was — you know, she reversed herself on the decriminalization of border crossings,” Peters said. “She said that, you know, she would support fracking. … I mean, this is about as far from the Kamala Harris of 2019/2020 as I could have imagined.”
Peters called Harris’ new positions a “repudiation of the politics that dominated the Democratic Party in 2020” when Harris was forced to “stake out some positions that were not popular with most Americans.”
He also said the “subtext” had changed for the now-presidential nominee.
“I’ve always wondered in these situations, could someone go full ‘Bulworth’ … but be like, ‘I was running in the Democratic primary and needed progressive votes, and now I’m not.’ Would that work? Probably not. But that is probably the truth or close to it. There is some validity to the idea that the Inflation Reduction Act, did spend, you know, historic amounts of money to prop up the clean energy economy … but, you know, if we’re being frank about it, fracking is a relatively huge industry in a critical swing state of Pennsylvania. You don’t want to offend that industry.”
Peters then suggested that Harris had to rip off that Band-Aid – and finally did, if a little later than most had anticipated.
“This is why you probably should do more interviews,” he said, because “you get these things out of the way so you can move on to more favorable terrain.”
In a separate Friday segment, pundit and author Anand Giridharadas took things a step further, suggesting that distinct policy changes should be “normalized.”
“I think sometimes we’re not honest with ourselves about a couple of things,” Giridharadas said. “First of all, we change our minds all the time based on information, based on where we’re sitting, based on whether we’re a junior person at the office or the person running the office. It’s actually normal; we should normalize changing our mind.”
He also said journalists “shame people for figuring out a different view that they might hold, and call it flip-flopping, trying to catch people in it, when in some ways, on some issues, that’s a measure of progress.”
Giridharadas described Harris and Walz as “people who know a lot about stuff, to use a big word. Just going into the weeds. If anything, Kamala Harris errs on the side of being intricate in discussing these issues in a non-soundbite way. What a relief to have someone whose sin sometimes is knowing too much about issues when she’s up against a kind of babbling fascist.”
Watch both exchanges in the video clips above.
