Walz, Tim

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      Maybe We Are Asking Presidential Candidates the Wrong Questions

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      If the goal of the CNN interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was to relitigate the campaign controversies of the last month — to get the candidates to talk about the major narratives of the election so far — then it was a rousing success. Harris easily dispatched questions about her identity and gave a strong defense of President Biden’s record. Walz, likewise, made short work of the charge that he had misled the public when he spoke about using one fertility treatment when it was actually another, similar treatment.But if the goal was to learn something about a prospective President Harris — to gain insight into how she might make decisions, order priorities and approach the job of chief executive — then I think the interview was not a success. Not so much for Harris or the viewing public.It might be interesting to journalists to know how Harris explains her changing views from 2019, when she ran for the Democratic nomination, to now, when she is the nominee. But it is not at all clear to me that it is interesting to viewers, who may be less concerned with how she deals with the question and more concerned with the actual substance of what she wants to do as president. A soft-focus question about a photograph, however iconic, seems less valuable than a question about Harris’s view of the presidency now that she’s spent almost four years in the passenger’s seat as vice president.Speaking for myself, I am less interested in hearing candidates navigate controversies or speak to narratives than I am in hearing them talk, for lack of a better term, about their theory of the office. How does a candidate for president conceptualize the presidency? What would she prioritize in office and how would she handle an endless onslaught of crises and issues that may, or may not, demand her attention? How does she imagine her relationship with Congress and how would she try to achieve her goals in the face of an opposition legislature? How does she imagine her relationship with the public and what value does she place on communication and the bully pulpit? Are there presidents she most admires — and why? Are there presidential accomplishments that stand out and how so? What are the worst mistakes a president can make? Why do you want this job in the first place?I can think of other questions along these lines, but you get the gist. To know what candidates for president think about the office and their role in it is, I believe, a better guide to what they may do in the White House than almost anything else. The only thing better is prior experience. These kinds of questions may not make for the most scintillating television, but I think they could provide the kind of insights that could actually help Americans decide what they want out of a national leader.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Dana Bash Handled Past Interviews With Kamala Harris

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      Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview on Thursday with Dana Bash of CNN is the first major unscripted moment of her young presidential campaign. But it isn’t her first encounter with Ms. Bash.The CNN political anchor has interviewed Ms. Harris on three occasions in the past few years. In those past meetings, Ms. Bash was a firm-but-fair interlocutor: sometimes granting Ms. Harris time to meander through lengthy answers, and sometimes pressing her, repeatedly, when the vice president equivocated on tough issues.It was Ms. Bash, in 2022, who elicited Ms. Harris’s memorably odd description of herself as “the daughter of a woman, and a granddaughter of a woman.” (The anchor was asking about the vice president’s reaction to the Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade.)In the same interview, Ms. Bash pushed Ms. Harris on the Biden administration’s plans to secure abortion rights in the wake of the ruling. The vice president declined to give a full-throated endorsement of the strategies floated by Ms. Bash, like challenging state laws or an executive action.“But what do you say to Democratic voters who argue, ‘Wait a minute, we worked really hard to elect a Democratic president and vice president, a Democratic-led House, a Democratic-led Senate. Do it now,’” Ms. Bash asked.“But do what now?” Ms. Harris replied.A 2021 interview at the White House, conducted at a distance because of pandemic protocols, appeared less tense. Ms. Bash asked Ms. Harris about being the first Black and Indian person to serve as vice president — “How is that bringing itself to bear in the White House?” — and seemed to agree with Ms. Harris’s contention that Congress should act to restrict certain gun rights.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris Defends Ideological Shift to Center in CNN Interview

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      In her first television interview as the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday defended her ideological shift to the political center, saying she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet but promising “my values have not changed.”She also curtly rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claim that she recently “became” Black, according to partial excerpts released by CNN. The full interview will air at 9 p.m. Eastern time on CNN.Ms. Harris, taking questions Thursday afternoon from the CNN anchor Dana Bash in Savannah, Ga., sought to stake out political ground that would appeal to swing voters even as she assured progressive supporters she was still with them.“The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is: My values have not changed,” Ms. Harris said, adding that her past support for the so-called Green New Deal was reflected in the passage of a sweeping climate bill that Mr. Biden signed in 2022.Ms. Harris told Ms. Bash that it was “important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems,” according to CNN.Appointing a nominally bipartisan cabinet would be a return to tradition after eight years of more partisan White Houses. No Republicans are serving in President Biden’s cabinet. But President Barack Obama had a Republican secretary of transportation and two Republican secretaries of defense. President George W. Bush had a Democratic transportation secretary, and before that, President Bill Clinton had a Republican defense secretary.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      China Dominates the Situation Room But Not the Campaign Trail

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      The thorny issues raised by America’s most potent geopolitical challenge are reduced to platitudes.Good evening! Tonight, my colleague David Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent, is here with a look at what we are not hearing on the campaign trail about the nation’s biggest geopolitical challenge: China.Ask President Biden — or just about anyone in the national security firmament of the United States — about America’s most potent geopolitical challenge over the next few decades, and you are bound to get a near-unanimous answer: China.The argument is familiar. The United States has never before faced a competitor who challenges it on so many fronts. Xi Jinping’s China is America’s only real technological competitor, in everything from artificial intelligence to semiconductors, electric cars to biological sciences. The country has more than doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal in the past few years, and a new partnership it has formed with Russia could upend every assumption about how America defends itself.Then there’s the economy. If, a few years ago, American economists worried about China’s rapid rise, today they worry about its slowdown, and the overhang of industrial production that is flooding the world with excess goods, with potentially disastrous consequences.There’s also the very real risk of war over Taiwan. There’s TikTok. The list goes on.Yet when the issue comes up on the campaign trail at all, it’s framed chiefly as an economic threat. Thornier discussions of China’s role as a broad strategic competitor, with ambitions that are already forcing the United States to change how it prepares its workers, shapes its investments and restructures its defenses, have fallen largely by the wayside.China has fallen victim to what I call Situation Room-Campaign Trail disequilibrium. It works something like this: If there is a topic that is fixating Washington policymakers, it’s usually a good bet no one is talking about it, except in platitudes, on the campaign trail.This week was a prime example. While the campaign roared along, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was in Beijing, meeting with President Xi on a range of urgent issues, including China’s support of Russia’s war in Ukraine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Kamala Harris Interview Worth Revisiting Now

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      ‘She didn’t break eye contact. It was intense. You feel on trial.’Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, will sit down with Dana Bash of CNN tomorrow at 9 p.m. Eastern for the first major television interview of their presidential campaign.It’s a high-stakes moment for their nascent candidacy, a chance to define their campaign, defend their ideas and test their political dexterity in the run-up to Harris’s debate against former President Donald Trump on Sept. 10.It’s also an opportunity, following a month of rallies and campaign speeches, for the pair to tell a deeper story about themselves and their vision.But getting them to do that might not be easy.My colleague Astead Herndon, friend of the newsletter and host of the podcast “The Run-Up,” interviewed Harris as part of his reporting for a profile he wrote of Harris last year.The interview was contentious, but revealing, too, and I think it’s worth revisiting now. I called Astead to ask him what it taught him, and what he’s looking for from Harris’s interview tomorrow. Our conversation was edited and condensed.JB: Astead, thank you for joining me! You’ve held sit-down interviews with Harris twice, once in 2019 and once in 2023. How were those two interviews different?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Coach Walz’ Leads a Democratic Pep Rally

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      The vice-presidential nominee’s prime-time debut offered football analogies and an alternative to Trumpian masculinity.The United Center arena in Chicago is the home of basketball’s Bulls and hockey’s Blackhawks. But you would be forgiven, Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, for thinking it was a football stadium — or rather, a locker room.“I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this,” said Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate. “But I have given a lot of pep talks.”This was what Mr. Walz, a former high school football coach, gave, delivering a cheerfully combative speech in front of a sea of “COACH WALZ” signs. But his style, his biography and the production that the convention built around him also gave the Democrats something more.To a campaign headed by a woman and backed prominently by female validaters — Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and on Wednesday, Oprah Winfrey — Mr. Walz contributed an idea of masculinity that contrasted with Donald Trump’s performative, pro-wrestling-influenced machismo. He answered Mr. Trump’s coarse bluster with his own version of locker-room talk. He counterprogrammed Mr. Trump’s endless production of “The Apprentice” with a reboot of “Friday Night Lights.”Mr. Walz was introduced by Benjamin C. Ingman, a former student whom he coached in seventh-grade track, and preceded onstage by grown members of the football team he helped coach, stuffed into their high school jerseys.There was enough dad energy onstage to power a nuclear submarine.Not all coaches are men, but there are few pop-culture archetypes more male-coded. There’s the coach as paternalistic strongman — the my-way-or-the-highway leader whom you obey or you’re off the team. There’s the coach as icon — the Vince Lombardis and Tom Landrys whom fans hold equal to political leaders, or greater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tim Walz’s Unexpected Rise Has Minnesota DNC Attendees Overjoyed

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      The Georgia delegates danced with the rapper Lil Jon at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday. The Wisconsin delegates cheered in their Cheesehead hats.But across a party gathering where the word “joy” has become an unofficial mantra, perhaps no one exudes it more than the Minnesotans.After nearly four decades without representation on a presidential ticket, the sudden, stunning elevation of Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, has prompted a surge of excitement among the state’s Democrats. Minnesota attendees are celebrating Mr. Walz as a beloved state export on par with Prince or Bob Dylan.“The Minnesota delegation is, like, buzzing,” Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat from the state, enthused in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s like they can’t even complete a sentence because they’re so excited about what this means for their friends Tim and Gwen, and also what it means for the country.”Mr. Walz, whom Vice President Kamala Harris chose as her running mate, is set to address the convention on Wednesday. It will be his most prominent appearance yet as he continues to introduce himself to a nation that was overwhelmingly unfamiliar with him until this month.But Minnesota Democrats have long known Mr. Walz as a folksy former football coach who speaks a neighborly language of moderate Midwestern pragmatism even as he pushes a sweeping agenda of liberal priorities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris Holds Rally in Milwaukee, 80 Miles From DNC, in Show of Force

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      Democrats managed to be in two places at once on Tuesday night, holding a ceremonial roll-call vote at their Chicago convention to celebrate Vice President Kamala Harris as their party’s nominee, while she herself rallied supporters roughly 80 miles north in Milwaukee.Ms. Harris’s choice to appear in Milwaukee, the largest city in a crucial battleground state, was intentional and pointed: She stood onstage in the same arena where former President Donald J. Trump accepted the Republican nomination last month.For much of the evening in Milwaukee, the Harris campaign used the arena’s Jumbotron to pipe in the events taking place in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. But after Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced his state’s votes for Ms. Harris, ending the roll call of 57 states and territories, Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, marched onto the stage in Milwaukee.For a moment, she was speaking to two packed arenas at the same time, celebrating the roll-call vote in front of tens of thousands of people, with millions more watching on screens. The two-city rally represented a significant flexing of Democratic muscle with the presidential election just 76 days away.“We are so honored to be your nominees,” Ms. Harris said. “Together, we will chart a new way forward.”The Milwaukee rally was just the latest event at which the Harris campaign filled a major arena with Democrats. For more than a year, they had largely stayed away from events featuring President Biden, who drew crowds only in the low thousands.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More