I want to talk about your interview with uh vice president K Harris and her running mate Tim Walls you secured the first interview with them since she ascended to the top of the ticket and it created a lot of conversation what were your impressions of Harris and walls in that interview my impression uh was that these are two people who are still um in the early days of their relationship trying to figure out and in the early days of their candidacy each of them trying to figure out how to navigate it every day is like 12 News cycles and it's been like that for the past eight years but it's quickly to it's it's easy to quickly forget that even though she has been vice president for uh almost four years and she has been in the in public service she was obviously a senator AG so on and so forth this is the kind of of of uh of thing when you run for president that once you get to this time in the calendar you have been through your Paces right and you have you have your reps whether it is well first of all you have the the votes from the people who are voting in your party and um the Biden Harris ticket had the votes but not her but just in terms of what it takes to be a successful candidate you have um you have a lot of time not just to sort of of learn the performance and feel comfortable with doing an interview which actually she did a lot more interviews during the Biden Harris campaign then people realized because she just did a lot of it under the radar and nobody really F pay attention to bid which is what you kind of want yeah but when it comes to the policies uh she still quickly trying to she was shot out of a cannon so she's trying to figure out what do I want to stick with him on what do I not she for the most part didn't want to have any daylight with Biden on policies which I understand so the thing that that stuck out to me most and this this might be a little harsh on on Harrison walls but she seemed to have a hard time answering the obvious questions that she was going to get in this first interview uh she struggled to say what she would do on day one she had a sort of evasive answer when you asked her about fracking and walls I thought too his answer on on suggesting that he had served in combat was sort of evasive he said I speak candidly which is obviously he didn't speak candidly that was the whole problem did you get a sense that they were ready for these kinds of questions and you know this is you know obviously KLA Harris is going to have a debate next week with Trump I feel like she's going to need to have better answers going forward if she has any chance of success well on fracking and you know if you just came from the Moon and you said why is she asking about this very specific very um sort of mro question but we all know why I asked the question because she has to win Pennsylvania and this is like table Stakes right in Pennsylvania I actually thought she was really clear like she she said I will not ban fracking right what I think what she was less clear about and maybe what you're getting at is how she got there why she changed yes cuz you had to ask twice yeah you had to ask multiple times questions twice because the answers weren't necessarily answering the question they were they they were answering what they wanted the question to be which is often what politi do but I I don't it came off as a little evasive at times I thought um yeah and and so and that's why I wanted to ask the broader question which is if you've changed your position on X Y and Z how can you how can you assure voters that those positions won't change again once they elect you which I do think you know a lot of Liberals are like oh you're asking a republican talking points but that's like a fundamental question that if I'm a swing voter I want to know the answer to if I'm not sure if I'm going to vote for Trump or Harris or not vote at all that's something that will inform my vote there's also a difference between what every candidate in the history of American politics has done which is run to please a base in a primary and then move to the center in a general election Harris's the way she ran in 2020 feels and the way she's running now feels a little more extreme exe than that I would say not extreme in terms of policy just the the the turn is a little bit the differences yeah and I think again this is um in part because well there are two Dynamics at play here number one the 2020 Democratic race was in odd was in right it was in the middle of George Floyd and black lives matter and and it was also after the uh the Democrats did extremely well in the midterm before that and elected a lot of very Progressive very liberal Democrats right and so that's where the kind of zeitgeist was in the Democratic party I'm not defending it I'm explaining it and then you have Harris quickly have to you know absorb and be a part of not her own positions but Joe Biden's because he was the president and so that's why it's the the contrasting where she has been with Joe Biden who was elected because wasn't like those other Democrats who was running who were running against him um he was perceived as more moderate you can argue whether he governed like that but that's how he got elected and she has um has been part of that Administration so trying to assess out what she would do now that she's the boss and now that she's in charge is really the key yeah now as is often the case these days whenever there's a big high-profile interview like this you took some heat from the left as you noted some heat from the right right what did you make of that criticism I mean the right their problem was that you didn't necessarily they felt hold her down on some of her more nebulous policy positions what would you say to that I think you just said I I tried I mean you can't force somebody to answer a question and I asked I asked to followup I tried to get more um into the nitty-gritty and get the answer and sometimes I my experience in doing interviews is that once you ask once fine twice fine three times if you don't get it as a clear answer that's kind of your answer yeah what that's was one my next question actually how persistent do you feel like you should be yeah in these kind of interviews where you're speaking with the vice president or presidential candidate you know can you did you ask 10 times if you need to or on the question it totally depends on the question on the on the place you are in the count calendar on uh on the importance of it on I mean there are a million factors it's really subjective don't you think yeah I agree I think it depends on the question too yeah you know I had uh V ramaswami on this show a couple weeks ago and uh he got very upset with me because I asked him about his book from two years ago where he said that Trump was a threat to democracy and it was two years ago it's not that long ago he said you know why are we talking about ancient history and I kept asking about it and you got very upset that kind of thing I think is worth asking 10 times you know until you get a straight answer other questions like the questions that you had in the Harris interview I don't think you know one or two follow-ups well and also you have to people have to understand that you have a limited window of right and so you have to decide whether you want to just I mean throw everything out that you were planning which is which is fine I've done that many times if you just if you if you either hear something it could be the end of the interview if you just keep asking it because well because you'll run out of time um and uh but because this was I I viewed it as foundational because it was her first hopefully not her last I know she will she will do many others but um that I felt like I needed to have some touch points some basic touch points on a few different issues there definitely were hundreds of topics that I would have liked to asked about I just didn't have the time no just a little inside baseball here how does an interview like this come together because obviously there's a lot of competition quickly all of a sudden I mean every network was trying to get this interview how did CNN get it how did you get it um I I mean I just like everybody else was lobbying for it yeah I I had interviewed her several times during uh well I covered her in the Senate um she wasn't there very long but I did cover her there and uh when she was running for president and uh was in the spin room after the debates in the in 2019 during the 2020 cycle so I definitely have interviewed her many times and then um yeah and so I was I was pushing for it and my network was pushing for it and it just I don't have the answer I don't have the the answer of how you were chosen why but I'm I'm not questioning it now obviously there's been a lot of there was a lot of pressure on Harris to do an interview mhm which you hadn't done until yours and there's that pressure is I assume going to continue because we've got 606 days or so left and do you think that the Harris campaign is going to continue to be at least interview a verse going forward and do you think that's a mistake for them I don't think that they're going to be interview a verse I don't because I think that they understand and she understands that it's important and now it's all the focus is on the debate they wanted to get one done before the debate and you know even though it seems like it was a very long time and I think on paper and it was many many days between when she announced and when she uh or when she secured the nomination in those 24 hours and she sat down for an interview um you know because of the unusual circumstances you could make the argument like if if one was running her campaign that the longer you wait the higher the stakes yes and just to have like just done little ones do local interviews do they they didn't do that for whatever reason but I do think she'll do more 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