Kamala Harris’ new media strategy is very old

But it does feature an important break with the past.

Before there was Alex Cooper, there was Jack Paar.

It might not seem like the two have much in common — the young woman with a very 21st century podcast; the middle-aged man who helmed the “Tonight Show” in the ’50s — but, as of Sunday, they share a common distinction. Both have played host to controversial interviews with presidential candidates.

Paar’s first question: “Would it be rude of me if I called you John?”

His guest was John F. Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who was then just a few weeks away from claiming the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy’s appearance made him the first presidential candidate to appear on a late-night talk show. By Election Day, his opponent Richard Nixon would follow suit, making a visit to Paar’s studio as well.

The mainstream press did not take kindly to the development. “The historians and the philosophers of this country would like to question [Kennedy and Nixon] on serious matters, but the comedians have priority,” James “Scotty” Reston, one of the era’s most influential journalists, groused in the New York Times.

“It takes people who have the proper background in news and public affairs to interview people like this,” said CBS president Frank Stanton. “I hate to see a candidate’s time frittered away by interviews of no consequence.”

Washington’s reaction to the interviews could be “expressed in one word,” syndicated columnist Ed Koterba wrote: “Revolting.”

I wouldn’t quite say that D.C. journalists were revolted by Vice President Kamala Harris’ appearance on Cooper’s popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast this week, but they (we?) were certainly critical. Politico Playbook, the Beltway’s morning Bible, said the interview should be considered evidence not of a media blitz, as Harris’ campaign as has claimed, but of the VP “still largely avoiding the media.” Reston’s journalistic descendants at the Times dinged Harris for retreating to “mostly friendly” interviewers. The Wall Street Journal called it an “unorthodox” strategy.

But there is nothing unorthodox about a presidential candidate courting a non-political audience — or about reporters responding in a huff. In 1960, after Nixon’s went on the “Tonight Show,” Koterba objected to a presidential candidate appearing on a show that advertisements were sold against. (Imagine that!) “Whether Nixon sold himself is debatable,” he grumbled. “But, commercially speaking, the Vice President no doubt sold a lot of beer and body deodorant.”

Eight years later, in the midst of his comeback president bid, Nixon stopped by the set of the comedy show “Laugh-In.” (“Sock it to me?” he famously asked.) Once again, the Times tut-tutted, complaining about the same indignity: “Admittedly, it is a forlorn hope, but one could wish that the supporters of Mr. Nixon, Vice President Humphrey and Mr. Wallace would keep tawdry advertising pitches out of the business of choosing a President.” (Once again, per the Times, deodorant was among the products Nixon had been unwittingly enlisted as a salesman for.)

Then there was Bill Clinton’s turn playing the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show”; that time, it was The Washington Post announcing that “dignity was one of the first victims of the 1992 presidential race.” And don’t forget Barack Obama appearing on “Between Two Ferns” in 2014, which led an ABC News correspondent to ask at a White House press briefing if the presidency had been “damaged” or “lost dignity.”

Candidates venture outside of traditional media spaces. The traditional media complains. Everyone acts like it’s a new phenomenon, even though it isn’t. It happens again. And again. And again.

Candidates have an obvious incentive to do this

A similar theme sounded by Reston in 1960 and Politico Playbook in 2024 is a shared confusion about why the presidential candidates in question had opted to go on either the “Tonight Show” or “Call Her Daddy.”

“Just who gains from all this and why these two deadly serious and tense young men want to prove that they are funny and relaxed is not quite clear,” Reston wrote. Playbook added this week that Harris’ appearance made them “wonder why she’s going back to a constituency” — young women — “that already favors her.” (70% of Cooper’s listeners are women; 76% are under 35.)

In both cases, though, the rationale was crystal clear. This cycle, both Harris and her rival, Donald Trump, have made a point to sit for interviews with non-political outlets, and they’ve done it for the same reason that Kennedy paid a visit to Paar: candidates do benefit from appearing “funny and relaxed,” as much as Reston may have doubted it, and these hosts provide the chance to look that way in front of massive audiences.

As Clinton strategist Mandy Grunwald wrote in a memo before her boss played the sax on “Arsenio”: “I understand that many people will say these kinds of things are ‘UnPresidential.’ Bull. This is how people get information.”

And a lot of people, at that. 10 million listeners tune into an average episode of Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast. Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend,” which Trump appeared on in August, commands 5 million monthly listeners. (By comparison, the highest-rated TV news show, “ABC World News Tonight,” averaged just under 7 million viewers last month. Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow averaged 2.6 million viewers apiece.)

For presidential candidates, entertainment shows have long offered a way to flex a different side of themselves — to promote their policy views by giving insight into their personal backgrounds. Back to Grunwald:

We know from research that Bill Clinton’s life story has a big impact on people. We know that learning about the fights he’s taken on (education reform, welfare reform, deadbeat dads, etc.) tells people a lot about his personal convictions. We know that moments of passion, personal reflection, and humor do more for us than any six-second sound bite on the network news or for that matter any thirty-second television spot.

The calculus is exactly the same for Trump and Harris going on podcasts. On “This Past Weekend,” Trump discussed substance abuse and his brother’s struggles with addiction. On “The Ramsey Show,” Trump detailed his plans on inflation for an audience interested in personal finance. On “Call Her Daddy,” Harris told the story of how her childhood friend being sexually abused inspired her to become a prosecutor. On “All the Smoke,” Harris let slip her basketball fandom. (Following in Kennedy’s footsteps, Harris will also make a late-night stop, appearing with Stephen Colbert tonight.)

Why do candidates keep doing it? Because it works. Kennedy’s appearance on Paar coincided with a bump in his polling, as did Nixon’s on “Laugh-In” and Clinton’s on “Arsenio.”

Candidates plainly benefit when they show glimpses of their humanity, especially in front of the numerous viewers these outlets provide (a large chunk of whom are typically checked out of politics, and therefore still deciding who to vote for — or whether to vote at all). People running for office always go where the voters go (especially the undecideds); right now, that’s podcasts — so it shouldn’t be surprising to see Harris addressing the “Daddy Gang” on the country’s second-most-popular pod.

But the presidency is more than vibes

Even though there is a lot of continuity in Harris’ media appearances with past presidential candidates (more than you might have guessed by reading most of the coverage), there is one important difference.

In addition to going on the “Tonight Show,” Kennedy also sat for interviews with some of the toughest correspondents of his day during the 1960 campaign, including Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood. He held 11 press conferences during the fall campaign, the same amount as his fellow Paar guest Nixon. In the final stretch of the 1992 election, Clinton graduated from Arsenio Hall to interviews on “CBS This Morning,” NBC’s “Today,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” ABC’s “Primetime Live,” CNN’s “Larry King Live,” The Atlantic, and other mainstream interviewers.

In her memo to him, Grunwald referred to appearances on “Arsenio” as a “parallel track” to be followed “in tandem” with more “high-road, serious” appearances.

What’s unique about Harris’ approach is that she has made entertainment shows her main track, rather than a parallel one.

Since joining the Democratic ticket, Harris has sat for just three national TV news interviews (with CNN’s Dana Bash, the left-leaning MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle, and “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker) and zero newspaper interviews.

In recent months, the vast majority of Trump’s TV interviews have been with the right-leaning Fox News, but he has also participated in print interviews with Time Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Detroit News, and the conservative Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen. In the time since Harris launched her campaign, he has held three televised press conferences — to her zero.

From a political standpoint, Harris courting undecided voters on “Call Her Daddy” and “All the Smoke” is perfectly understandable, and — as I’ve shown — normal.

“If you watch political programs,” Paar said when introducing Kennedy in June 1960, “[candidates] are asked political questions and the answers are political answers and sometimes, I must say, I watch shows for a half-hour and when it’s all over, no one said anything…But there is a chance that in this relaxed atmosphere of the ‘Tonight Show,’ you can meet people who aren’t on guard, not as tense, and perhaps not as political as you would meet them on other news-type shows.”

I have no problem with candidates appearing on shows like that; in fact, I think there is great virtue in presidential candidates showing their human side, in seeing them with their guard down. Part of being president is serving as a moral leader for the nation; it’s important for voters to know what makes them tick on a personal level. (And, as Paar also noted, entertainment shows also allow candidates to “reach people who wouldn’t ordinarily watch news programs.” Trying to include those less engaged voters in the political process is, in my opinion, a worthy pursuit.)

But the president isn’t just a national vibe-setter. They are also the country’s leading policymaker, which is why it’s also important that they subject themselves to scrutiny about their policy plans for the nation on those “news-type shows” as well.

It is true that Harris, in a political sense, might not benefit much from interviews with The New York Times or “Meet the Press”: their audiences aren’t that big (at least compared to the “Daddy Gang”); they’re mostly consumed by long-decided voters; and she could face tough questions that could hurt her campaign. But that has been true for every president and presidential candidate for decades. And they have all, uniformly, decided that the democratic norm of answering tough questions on policy supersedes the political comfort of mostly appearing on softer media outlets.

Kennedy, who started the tradition of sitting for apolitical and political interviews in 1960, explained himself this way the next year, referring to the “obligation” shared by both politicians and reporters:

And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people, to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well: the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program and the choices that we face.

…Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution.

I have no problem with candidates going on apolitical outlets to show their humanity. But it is distressing that they no longer view it as their parallel “obligation” to provide hard-news journalists with the “fullest possible information” about their policies, as Kennedy put it later in that speech.

In this, Harris is following the model laid out not by Trump — who insults the press but also craves their attention — but by Biden, her erstwhile running mate. It is Biden who has held fewer solo press conference than any president since the tradition began with Calvin Coolidge; it is Biden who is the first president since Herbert Hoover not to grant an interview with the New York Times. (Biden has also rebuffed interview requests from the Washington Post and the Associated Press, while joining Trump and Harris in giving ample time to influencers.)

Those norms exist for a reason: Americans deserve to know what their candidates for president will do once in office, and they deserve to hear answers about how it is going once they got there.

All three national figures on the stage right now show the importance of politicians sitting for tough interviews, even if it might be uncomfortable. With Biden, it is hard to imagine that his party’s eventual conclusion that he wasn’t fit to run for re-election wouldn’t have been accelerated if he had subjected himself to the media scrutiny that his predecessors did. With Trump, who made upwards of 30,000 false or misleading claims in his four years in office, the media plays a vital fact-checking function.

With Harris, the importance of media interviews can be seen in one that she did grant, a sit-down with “60 Minutes” that aired last night. (Trump initially accepted the request, and then declined it when the show said it would fact-check any false statements he made on air. He is the first presidential candidate in decades not to appear on the show.)

It’s a welcome step that Harris granted the interview — but she dodged almost every policy question that was asked, including queries about the U.S. relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, how she would pay for her proposals, and why the Biden administration waited so long to implement strict border measures.

On another important question, though — on why so many of her policy positions have changed dramatically since 2019 — she offered a much better (if still incomplete) explanation than in her August CNN interview, going from confusingly stating that her “values have not changed” to now explaining that her focus has evolved to “seeking what is possible in terms of common ground.”

This shows that, often, several hard-news interviews are necessary to get real answers from slippery politicians. If Harris did not give substantial answers on Netanyahu, or her economic plans, or immigration on “60 Minutes,” that only makes it that much more important that she be pressed on those topics again and again.

The presidency is a multi-faceted position. Harris should appear on shows like “Call Her Daddy” to introduce herself to the nation on a personal level. But it is my fervent hope that she will also give mainstream journalists the opportunity to question her on the aforementioned policy topics until she produces answers.

Is that comfortable for a candidate? No. But it is vitally important for the nation. “No president should fear public scrutiny of his program,” Kennedy said in 1961. “For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary.”

---

More news to know

AP: Tampa Bay hasn’t been hit directly by a major hurricane since 1921. Milton may be the one.

• NBC: Biden postpones trip to Germany and Angola ahead of Hurricane Milton hitting Florida

• CNN: DeSantis and Biden speak on storm recovery after reports GOP governor hadn’t returned calls from president, vice president

NYT: Trump Secretly Stayed in Touch With Putin After Leaving Office, Book Says

• WaPo: Trump secretly sent covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, new book says

• CNN: ‘That son of a bitch’: New Woodward book reveals candid behind-the-scenes conversations of Biden, Trump, Harris and Putin

NBC New York: Eric Adams’ top deputy mayor resigns amid flurry of City Hall exits

• AP: Former aide to New York City Mayor Eric Adams is charged with witness tampering, destroying evidence

Reuters: Israel says senior Hezbollah official probably dead, Hezbollah backs truce efforts

NYT: Trump Says He’s Visited Gaza, but No Record of Such a Trip Exists

The Guardian: Trump aide Corey Lewandowski said to have lost campaign power struggle

---

The day ahead

All times Eastern.

• President Biden will receive a briefing on the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and then deliver remarks on the topic (watch at 10:15am). Later, he will travel to two swing states, delivering remarks on replacing lead pipes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (watch at 1:45pm) and holding a fundraiser for Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

• VP Harris is in New York City, where she will continue her media tour with interviews on “The View,” “The Howard Stern Show,” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”   

• Former President Trump has no public events scheduled.

• Sen. JD Vance will campaign in Detroit, Michigan (watch at 2pm), while Gov. Tim Walz will campaign in Reno, Nevada (watch at 9:30pm).

• The House and Senate are on recess.

• The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a cases on “ghost guns” (listen at 10am) and attorneys’ fees (listen at 11:30am).