America This Week, August 30, 2024: “The Campaign Rebrand”

Listen Here to Episode 102

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week, I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, what’s going on?

Walter Kirn: Sitting here in Montana as it gets suddenly cold. It could tip over into winter at any moment. And that brings a more serious tone to life which is why I have the pen in my hand. I’m grateful that you’re wearing the County Highway hat, it’s-

Matt Taibbi: Got to represent.

Walter Kirn: Well, it’s subscription season for Gold County Highway, America’s only newspaper. We’re about one-year-old and we’re finding that there is a point in the life cycle of a magazine when people have to renew their subscriptions but have changed credit cards and that kind of thing so they drop out. And so, you have to make a new push almost as though you’re starting over, which I’m doing, but it’s really hard right now. Anybody out there who hasn’t subscribed, I’m going to ask you to do so. Or, if you’ve wondered if something has happened to your subscription, maybe you changed credit cards. But in this time of growing censorship, our paper only newspaper, I think, is especially valuable. We promise not to go back and change and stealth at it or memory hole any of our stories.

Matt Taibbi: Because we can’t.

Walter Kirn: We can’t, no. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. No, and only half joking about the paper.

Walter Kirn: No, it’s true, it’s true. But anyway, other than that and it being wintry, we’re getting into the meat of the presidential election now and the big rah rah conventions are over and the attacks are flying for every little thing. And the much-awaited interview of Kamala Harris by an actual member of the press is looming.

Matt Taibbi: And Tim Walz.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, and Tim Walz. Tim will be there too.

Matt Taibbi: Just in case.

Walter Kirn: Just in case. And in a somewhat condescending role, it seems to me. Why shouldn’t she be able to pull this off on her own?

Matt Taibbi: Well, look, there was reporting that, after the Lester Holt interview, the infamous Lester Holt interview about the border, that she went into a funk for a year, that there was significant apprehension within the White House about having her do unscripted interviews because that one didn’t go so well. That seems rather extreme to me. This is a person who’s obviously appeared in court over pretty weighty matters for most of her life, I don’t really understand. Unless it’s a new phobia, it doesn’t really make sense to me. But she seems to be doing quite well in terms of reading campaign material, she’s definitely upped her game from 2020. But we’ll have to see what gets said tonight because, frankly, there’s some suspense about what that could be.

Of course, it’ll be over by the time you see this but the interesting thing about this campaign is that, suddenly, the Harris-Waltz campaign is saying things that they never said before and then they’re saying them casually as if that’s always been their opinion about things which is really fascinating. The paradigmatic example of that … And we had some hints about this leading into this week. So, there was the child tax credit thing where it was essentially they were doing the same proposal that J.D. Vance had done. What was the other one? I’m trying to remember. The …

Walter Kirn: No tax on tips.

Matt Taibbi: No taxes on tips, right. Those are small things. But the bigger thing was not so much the policy on the border but a commercial about the border. And let’s take a look at an interview, this is a fascinating little clip between Jonathan Karl of ABC who is … He’s in the front line of your boot looking media figures, I would say he’s got a smidgen of something, a journalistic instinct in there somewhere but it’s dying. And here he is interviewing Bernie Sanders about a bunch of things but he brings up the border policies at the end.

Jonathan Karl: And on immigration, when Harris ran for the Democratic nomination against you and others in 2020, she said she favored decriminalizing illegal border crossing, she even suggested she would be in favor of abolishing ICE. Now, of course, she’s taking, at least rhetorically, a much tougher line on border security. Take a look at this, one of her very first ads as the presidential nominee.

Speaker 1: Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border. As vice president-

Matt Taibbi: Look at those pictures.

Speaker 1: … she backed the toughest border control bill in decades. And as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking. Fixing the border is tough, so is Kamala Harris.

Jonathan Karl: What do you make of her transformation on this issue?

Bernie Sanders: Well, I don’t think it’s a question of transformation, we have a crisis at the border, we’ve got to make sure the fentanyl does not get into this country-

Matt Taibbi: Poor Bernie.

Bernie Sanders: … we have to crack down on illegal immigration. But what we need is comprehensive immigration reform. You got God knows how many young people in this country, as a result of DACA, who deserve to gain citizenship. We need skilled workers and we need workers in this country, a lot of labor shortages all over America where immigrants can play an important role. So, keeping people from illegally entering the country, obviously, is the right thing to do but we need comprehensive-

Matt Taibbi: He’s trying to run away from the coverage here.

Bernie Sanders: … immigration reform and I suspect that is what the Vice President supports.

Jonathan Karl: But if you take a look at that ad, and one thing that I found striking is, if you look, and I think we have the images here, there are at least three points in that ad that show the border wall, Donald Trump’s border wall. Is it now the position of the Democrats that they favor the border wall?

Bernie Sanders: Well, you can ask the Harris campaign about that ad. That’s the first that I’ve seen it.

Matt Taibbi: Okay, all right. So, that’s that. And look, the headline there is that she ran an immigration ad that made her sound tough on the border and she used images of the much-loathed Trump border wall. You can see there are countless tweets and comments in the past of her decrying that exact same wall. This controversy, even before the commercial came out, really rose to the floor with an Axios story that came out that says Harris flip-flops on building the border wall. And it has all these quotes in it which explained basically that the bipartisan border bill that she hyped during the convention would include the Trump border wall. It wouldn’t include nearly as much money as Trump wanted but it would include the wall. And that same story included quotes like Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and it won’t make us any safer and also Harris saying that the wall is a stupid use of money, I will block any funding for it. So, this is thing number one, is it a big deal or is it not, Walter?

Walter Kirn: Hard to tell, very hard to tell with Kamala at this point. She’s like a quantum particle that, until it is measured, you can’t tell its exact position. Maybe tonight the measurement of interview will give us a fix on her momentum and her position as they say in physics but I can’t tell. She wants to be all things to all people so far it seems. Toughness, however, is a motif that keeps coming back and every opportunity to be tough seems to be one that she is taking lately.

Matt Taibbi: Look, electorally, that’s smart, I think.

Walter Kirn: Well, electorally, it’s smart to do the things that polling shows America wants you to do rather than the things that the administration she’s a part of has been doing, a lot of which aren’t popular. Why is she suddenly this person? Those go out the window. It’s a new Kamala, it’s a new dawn and that’s how she’s presenting herself. And because she was so submerged in the last administration, I guess it’s possible. The only thing that I can think of that she did walk point on was the border a little bit at one point.

Matt Taibbi: Well, the response to that would be that she didn’t manage to negotiate a border, a bipartisan border compromise which in itself was only done because it was the price for Republican support for Ukraine funding but that is a long and convoluted story. What’s actually in that bill is part of the backstory to this whole thing, it’s a watered down version of a variety of border plans. But this whole business of ignoring your past and now seeing something else and what does that mean is interesting.

So, when she ran for president in 2020, there was a significant amount of controversy about her position on Medicare for All among the base. There were people who were saying, who were critical because they thought that she was for Medicare for All but critical of it at the same time. But she also gave interviews like this one with Jake Tapper, where she’s just flat out said she’s against private health insurance.

Walter Kirn: Mm-hmm.

Jake Tapper: So, just to follow up on that and correct me if I’m wrong. To reiterate, you support the Medicare for All bill, I think, initially co-sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders, you’re also a co-sponsor onto it. I believe it will totally eliminate private insurance. So, for people out there who like their insurance, they don’t get to keep it.

Kamala Harris: Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care and you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require. Who of us has not had that situation where you got to wait for approval and the doctor says, “Well, I don’t know if your insurance company is going to cover this.”

Matt Taibbi: Okay, we get it. She is basically talking about being in favor of Medicare for All, there were news stories back then to the effect with headlines that said Harris comes out against private health insurance. And this was one of the things that Jonathan Karl talked about shortly after, I think, his interview with Bernie Sanders or in the same general time vicinity, I’m not exactly sure of the chronology. He had an interview with Tom Cotton, the Republican, the much maligned Tom Cotton where they had an exchange about her policies on private health insurance.

Tom Cotton: Kamala Harris who has supported things like decriminalizing illegal immigration or giving taxpayer funded health insurance to illegal aliens or taking away health insurance on the job for 170 million Americans, banning gas cars, confiscating firearms. If you’re in a position to-

Jonathan Karl: Wait, what do you mean taking away health insurance? What are you talking about?

Tom Cotton: She said when she ran for president that she wants to eliminate private health insurance on the job for 170 million Americans, Jon.

Jonathan Karl: Yeah. But that is not her position now, she knows

Tom Cotton: How do you know that’s not her position? How do you know that’s not her position?

Jonathan Karl: She says she no longer supports Medicare for All.

Tom Cotton: She has not said that, she has not said that, she has not said that. Maybe anonymous aides on a Friday night have said that but the last thing that she said on most of these topics-

Jonathan Karl: But this was not a radical convention. As you heard me go through with Bernie Sanders, she is not taking the positions of the far left of her party, she’s clearly making an effort to move to the middle.

Tom Cotton: I did hear what you said to Senator Sanders and I thought it was clear that he’s very disappointed that she’s taking these efforts not to change her positions but to hide her positions, Jon. The American people are totally justified to conclude that Kamala Harris is a dangerous San Francisco liberal based on what she campaigned on the last time she ran for president and what this administration has done for the last four years. Again, you would have thought watching the-

Matt Taibbi: Okay. Yeah, okay. So, look, when John Kerry ran the flip-flopping thing, it became a huge meme in the media. I thought a lot of it … Some of it was interesting, some of it was, I thought, unfair and it was a self-generated news phenomenon. A lot of politicians go back on their word especially when they go from a primary season to a general election season but this feels a little bit different and what Cotton’s talking about is an interesting distinction. Is this hiding your past … Is it hiding your true intentions or is it an actual move? I cannot believe that it’s an actual move toward any of these positions because-

Walter Kirn: Why?

Matt Taibbi: Because they’ve been so consistent in embracing the opposite point of view on so many other things. That was the backstory, for instance, on the border czar controversy which was that Kamala Harris did not want to deal with having to say that there are people coming into the country illegally and that this was bad. She wanted to talk about the desperation of people who are forced economically, by their circumstances to come across the border and she wanted to show sympathy with immigrants and she talked about abolishing ICE and decriminalizing the move and all these other things. And it was not an unpopular position among a certain kind of Democrat at the time, it was … By the way, it was very different from Barack Obama’s policies, he had very aggressive immigration policies. But I’ve heard her talk too often about that issue to really believe that, suddenly, she’s become like a hawk on border issues even if she’s moving toward the polling on that.

Walter Kirn: Well, it’s possible to be a multiverse candidate nowadays the way things work in communications. You can say to your base I’m the same person I always was, you can leave the feeling that you are a change actor and you won’t go back and you can emphasize that side of yourself and you can go out to the general public and the electorate and claim to be this tough nose centrist at the same time. And who’s going to reconcile that? Who’s going to force you to reconcile that? Karl didn’t, he actually bridged the gap for her and he had no reasoning other than she seemed to be a centrist at the convention so why would she be for this Medicare for All business. To which Cotton said, “Well, she used to be and she’s never formally changed it that I can see.”

So, it’s arguing about which facet of Kamala you are focused on is a losing game until she puts up a policy board on her website, say, or goes through things in a speech in the way that we expected she would in her acceptance speech which was billed as an economic policy speech that would roll out her ideas. We still don’t know what they are. Every day I look and see is she for this unrealized capital gains tax or not? It seems hard to get an answer on that.