KAMALA HARRIS AND WHAT (LITTLE) WE CAN LEARN FROM A SOFTBALL INTERVIEW. The circumstances surrounding Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle were remarkable. Last week — see this newsletter — Ruhle was on TV strenuously defending Harris’s right not to do interviews. “There are some things you might not know her answer to,” Ruhle said, but “in 2024, unlike 2016 for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy.” Given the stakes of the election, Ruhle concluded, Harris should not spend her time answering too many questions.

And then, a few days later, came an announcement from the Harris campaign. The candidate would do her very first one-on-one network interview, and it would be with…Stephanie Ruhle. To outside observers, it appeared that Ruhle got the nod by publicly assuring Team Harris that she didn’t really want to know Harris’s answers.