“As journalists, we obviously care about media coverage and how much access reporters have to her. She is tracking well behind Trump and JD Vance in press conferences and interviews. What is the strategy here?”
That’s a question that journalist Eugene Daniels, Politico’s White House corrrespondent, asked Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior communications adviser, in an article dated September 21, 2024, here.
The rival Trump campaign and the media have noticed Harris isn’t talking to journalists very much. She hasn’t held a press conference, and most of what she says is scripted (see story here).
Former Atlanta mayor Keisha Bottoms said “she’s a very busy person,” pointing out she’s not only a presidential candidate but also the sitting vice president, which the conservative-leaning New York Post called “a lame excuse” (story here).
This this how Fallon answered Daniels’ question:
“But keep in mind all the things that she had to do as a candidate that was suddenly thrust to the top of the ticket: She had to merge a Wilmington operation that was built for a different candidate entirely and make it hers; she had to go through what would normally be a six-month process to vet and choose a running mate — she had to do that in basically three weeks; she had to plan a convention from scratch and plan a set of remarks for the convention that would be really her first high-profile opportunity to introduce herself to the public; she had to get ready for and succeed on the debate stage, which after the convention, was the next most important setting — 70 million eyeballs and we took prep for that seriously. And so she had a lot of work that she had to do in a very truncated schedule just to get the campaign off the ground. … Now we’re entering a phase of the campaign where we still have the imperative of needing to introduce her to a good swath of the electorate.”
Reasonable? Yes, as far as it goes. But how hard is it, and how much time does it take, to answer reporters’ questions now and then? Well, it’s harder more than time-consuming, because a slip of tongue could be costly in November, so spontaneous interaction between the candidate and press is high-risk, low-reward for the campaign, so avoiding these interactions obviously is part of their campaign strategy.
Is this fair to voters? The short answer is the Harris campaign’s tactics are changing as the election approaches, and Fallon told Daniels that,
“If you want to get a sense of the types of engagements she’s likely to do in the remaining 50 or so days of the campaign, look at what she was doing in the first seven months of this calendar year prior to the ticket switch … her communications office … had her doing a heavy rotation of daytime talk shows, national print interviews with magazines, national sit-downs with television outlets like 60 Minutes late last year, cable hits — she did like 80 plus interviews in the first seven months of this year. And so that is a default setting for Kamala Harris in terms of media engagement. And I think what the remaining 50 days of this campaign will look like is something closer to that.”
Notice he twice mentioned interviews. So what Fallon essentially is saying to the impatient press is, “Be patient, it’ coming.”
Jen O’Malley Dillon
There’s more in this Politico article than just press access. Fallon answers questions about Harris’s position changes (aka flip-flopping); showcases Harris’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon (photo, right), who also managed Biden’s 2020 campaign, as someone who’s “extremely decisive, extremely no-nonsense and .. does not suffer fools”; and a smorgasbord of other campaign questions and tidbits. If you’re a political junkie, or even if you’re not, the entire article is worth reading.