Vice President Kamala Harris had a bad night on Wednesday.
But more interesting than anything she said to Fox News anchor Bret Baier was what wasn’t said — namely, that reporters hadn’t bothered until this interview to ask her the most glaringly obvious question of 2024.
This is why she was so completely blindsided when Baier asked about the role she played in the sweeping, years-long conspiracy to hide President Biden’s declining mental fitness from the public.
The media’s failure to press her on this question until now goes beyond mere incuriosity or sloppiness. It’s outright malpractice.
Harris fumbled through her roughly 26-minute conversation with Baier before slinking away on complaints that her host had been too aggressive in his questioning.
By any reasonable measure, the interview was a disaster. Don’t take my word for it. The Democratic nominee and her team began the week hoping her appearance would help the make inroads with Fox’s male and on-the-fence viewers. By the time the cameras had stopped rolling, however, her team had adopted a new line: the interview, they insisted, would go a long way toward rallying left-wingers and Democratic loyalists. Nothing says “that didn’t go as planned” quite like a complete narrative switch-up.
“You told many interviewers that Joe Biden was on his game,” Baier said, “that he ran around circles on his staff. When did you first notice that President Biden’s mental faculties appeared diminished?”
Harris blanked. Then, after she had had a moment to recollect herself, she simply dodged the question.
This was the moment that stood above all others Wednesday for its implications. It is newsworthy that Harris froze. It is newsworthy that she declined to address his point directly. But the most newsworthy fact is that she had no good answers to the Biden question because, until Wednesday, nobody had ever made her answer it.
No one in the media cornered her on the issue. It was the only question that needed asking, yet for her, it was uncharted territory.
Baier is one of the only people in this business who has bothered to ask the Democratic nominee about her role in a plot that ended with the current commander-in-chief being jettisoned from his own re-election campaign, making way for his second-in-command’s unlikely accession.
For an industry addicted to the word “unprecedented,” and as we’re currently living through times where the word really does, it is baffling that journalists aren’t more curious about what Harris knew regarding Biden’s declining mental acuity when she promised repeatedly that he was fit as a fiddle.
If the vice president’s involvement in a White House-wide conspiracy doesn’t clear the bar for “public interest,” nothing does.
It was a lousy night for Harris, sure. It was also a bad night for the all-too-friendly political press, whose kid-glove treatment of the Democratic vice president has left her unprepared to answer even the most basic question about policy or the events that secured her own nomination.