AN EASY INTERVIEW AND A HARD ONE: AN UNPREPARED HARRIS BOTCHED THEM BOTH. Vice President Kamala Harris has been on a media tour in the last 48 hours. Like earlier media appearances, the new set of interviews has been with questioners who mostly ranged from friendly to super friendly, including The View, Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, and the popular podcast Call Her Daddy. (There was one notable exception, which will be discussed later.) During this media tour, Harris has proven that she can make a mess of even the friendliest of interviews and that she can make a mess of more difficult interviews too. And she did both in a way that could have lasting repercussions for her campaign.

Start with The View. How positive was the treatment Harris received? Well, it started with the host asking the audience to welcome “the next president of the United States.” Early in the program, one of the co-hosts, Sunny Hostin, gave Harris an easy question wrapped in a compliment. President Joe Biden had appeared on the show, Hostin told Harris, “and he said there wasn’t a single thing that he did that you could not do.” Then the question: “What do you think would be the biggest specific difference between your presidency and a Biden presidency?”