gotchanewsdaily.com 
After avoiding a probing interview by a journalist for the first month of her sudden presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harrisโ first one Thursday was notable mostly in how routine it seemed.
CNNโs Dana Bash, sitting down with Harris and running mate Tim Walz in a Georgia restaurant, asked her about some issues where she had changed positions, the historical nature of her candidacy, what she would do in her first day as president and whether sheโd invite a Republican to be a Cabinet member (yes, she said).
What Bash didnโt ask โ and the Democratic nominee didnโt volunteer โ is why it took so long to submit to an interview and whether she will do more again as a candidate.
Harris drew criticism for not doing an interview until now
With no clips from interviews or extended news conferences as a candidate to pick apart, Republican Donald Trump and his campaign had made Harrisโ failure to take on journalists an issue in itself. She had promised to rectify that by the end of August, and made it in just under the wire.
In the interview, taped earlier Thursday at Kimโs Cafe in Savannah, Georgia, Bash occasionally had pressed Harris when the vice president failed to answer a question directly. She asked four times, for example, about what led Harris to change her position on fracking โ a controversial way to extract natural gas from the landscape โ from her brief presidential candidacy in 2020.
โHow should voters be looking at some of the changes in policy?โ Bash asked, wondering whether experience led Harris down another path. โShould they be completely confident that what youโre saying now is going to be the policy moving forward?โ
Bash asked Harris twice whether she would do something different, like withhold some military aid to Israel, to help reach a peace deal in the Mideast. Harris stressed the importance of a deal, but offered no new specifics on achieving it.
When Bash sought a response to Trump suggesting that Harris had only recently been emphasizing her Black roots, the vice president swiftly brushed it aside. โNext question,โ she said.
CNN political analyst David Axelrod suggested that Harris, by not doing interviews previously, had raised the stakes on what is usually a typical test that presidential candidates face. But after the Bash session aired, Axelrod said that she โdid what she needed to do.โ
โWhat she needed to do was be the same person she has been on stage the past month,โ said Axelrod, onetime aide to Obama when he was in the White House. He predicted the interview would ultimately make little difference in the campaign.
Tim Walz was included in the interview, too
In seeking a personal connection with viewers, Bash asked Walz for his feelings about his sonโs emotional response to this Democratic convention speech, and a memorable photo that depicted Harrisโ niece from behind, watching her aunt deliver her address to Democrats.
By including Walz in the interview, Harris joined a tradition followed by Donald Trump and Mike Pence, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and Biden and Harris themselves. But that decision stood out because of her lack of solo interviews and the compressed nature of her campaign.
Republicans complained she would use Walz as a crutch, someone who could smooth over his bossโ rough moments and simply take up time that could have been used for questions directed at Harris.
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โThis is one more Harris campaign insult to American voters,โ the Wall Street Journal said in an editorial Thursday.
Ultimately, Bash directed only four questions to Walz โ one a followup โ and the vice presidential candidate didnโt interject or add to Harrisโ responses.
This was the second high profile moment for Bash already this campaign. The โInside Politicsโ anchor moderated Juneโs debate between Trump and President Biden, an event where the journalists were overshadowed by the poor performance by Biden that eventually led to him abandoning his re-election bid.
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder.
