Harris team complains media asked VP ‘dumb’ questions:’ ‘A disservice to voters’
Kamala Harris campaign officials Stephanie Cutter and Jen O’Malley Dillon suggested the media’s “dumb” questions were partially to blame for negative coverage of the vice president.
Cutter and Dillon appeared on the “Pod Save America” podcast on Tuesday with host David Plouffe and fellow Harris campaign official Quentin Fulks to discuss the aftermath of the presidential election. During the episode, Cutter complained about the “narrative” surrounding Harris.
“If you’re a candidate with a limited amount of time to get your voice out there and define yourself, you kind of have to do everything. But did it screw with our narrative? Not just in getting s— not doing enough earned media but getting questions we knew voters were not going to care about. And their myopic mindset on certain issues was not what the race was going to be about. So at a certain point, we had to decide ‘is this helping us or hurting us?’” Cutter said.
Jen OMalley Dillon, campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate US Vice President Kamala Harris, agreed the mainstream media did not ask questions voters cared about during the election. ((Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images))
Dillon followed up, saying, “I am not a media hater by any measure. And I think that we women don’t get far in life by talking about double standards, so that’s not the point.”
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She continued, “I do think a narrative, 107 days… two weeks talking about how she didn’t do interviews, which you know she was doing plenty, but we were doing in our own way, we had to be the nominee, we had to find a running mate, and do a roll-out, I mean there was all these things that you kind of want to factor in. But real people heard, in some way, that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump, that I think that was a problem.”
Dillon later said the claim that Harris was “afraid to have interviews” was “completely bulls—” and part of a standard that “Trump never had to worry about.”
“We would do an interview, and… the questions were small and process-y and about like…” Dillon said.
Members of Harris’ campaign team resented the idea that the vice president avoided interviews. (Fox News Channel)
“Dumb. Just dumb,” Cutter interjected.
“They were not informing a voter who was trying to listen to learn more or to understand. And I’m not here to say that the whole system was focused on us incorrectly. I’m just saying, again, of the things we need to explore as we move forward as a campaign and as a country, that does a disservice to voters,” Dillon said.
Dillon and Cutter’s comments were mocked across social media as “excuses” for failing to win the election.
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“Republican leaders dream of winning power and implementing their agenda, Democratic leaders dream of getting their oped published in the New York Times and being interviewed by the Pod Save America guys,” The Lever News founder David Sirota commented.
Caveat Podcast co-host Ben Yelin wrote, “Listened to the @PodSaveAmerica bros interview the Kamala campaign team and it was….somewhere between disappointing and enraging. I would not hire these guys if I was running the next D campaign.”
“Excuses. Lame ones,” National Review contributor Pradheep J. Shankar wrote.
“One of the many complaints here is that the public was led to believe that Kamala Harris wasn’t going to do interviews. Gee, maybe the fact that for nearly two months she didn’t do a single solo interview had something to do with that?” National Review editor Philip Klein asked.
Substack writer Jim Treacher wrote, “Just because everybody could see it happening doesn’t mean it was happening.”
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