And then, a few days later, came an announcement from the Harris campaign. The candidate would do her very first one-on-one network interview, and it would be with…Stephanie Ruhle. To outside observers, it appeared that Ruhle got the nod by publicly assuring Team Harris that she didn’t really want to know Harris’s answers.

The interview took place on Wednesday. It wasn’t live, and it wasn’t long — just 25 minutes. Everybody knew going in that it would be a softball interview — friendly, open-ended questions, few if any follow-ups, avoiding any inconvenient details of the vice president’s record. But still, Ruhle asked questions, and Harris (sort of) answered them. And in the text of their exchanges can be found a few bits of information about the vice president’s short-on-content campaign for the nation’s highest office.

“Madam Vice President, you just laid out your economic vision for the future,” Ruhle began. “But still, there are lots of Americans who don’t see themselves in your plans. For those who say, these policies aren’t for me, what do you say to them?” Ruhle was telling Harris to go anywhere she liked. In response, Harris said nothing and used a lot of words to do it. It can be burdensome to include a long, unedited answer in a newsletter, but maybe it’s worth doing it here, just to give you an idea of how to use so many words to say so little. Here is her answer:

Well, if you are hardworking, if you have the dreams and ambitions and aspirations of what I believe you do, you’re in my plan. I have to tell you, I really love and am so energized by what I know to be the spirit and character of the American people. We have ambition. We have aspirations. We have dreams. We can see what’s possible. We have an incredible work ethic. But not everyone has the access to the opportunities that allow them to achieve those things. But we don’t lack for those things. But not everyone gets handed stuff on a silver platter. And so my vision for the economy — I call it an opportunity economy — is about making sure that all Americans, wherever they start, wherever they are, have the ability to actually achieve those dreams and those ambitions, which include, for middle-class families, just being able to know that their hard work allows them to get ahead, right? I think we can’t and we shouldn’t aspire to have an economy that just allows people to get by. People want to do more than just get by. They want to get ahead. And I come from the middle class. Look, my mother raised my sister and me. She worked hard. She saved up. By the time I was a teenager, she was able to buy our first home. And homeownership for too many people in our country now is elusive. You know, gone is the day of everyone thinking they could actually live the American dream. So part of my vision for the economy is, let’s deal with some of the everyday challenges that people face and address them with commonsense solutions, such as affordable housing.

If you made it through all that — what did she say? It’s hard to tell. The only concrete detail she included came at the end, when she mentioned homeownership and affordable housing. She touched briefly on that in a later answer. In any event, you’d have to say that given the chance to make her case, she stayed at the highest level of generality, the upper stratosphere of generality.

Ruhle moved on to a question that was even easier than her opener. “Over the last four years, there have been tremendous economic wins,” she said to Harris. “And you have just laid out a big plan. But still, polling shows that more — most likely voters still think Donald Trump is better to handle the economy. Why do you think that is?” It’s a classic of the softball genre — why do the bad people dislike you? And Harris took the cue to go after Trump, who, she said, “left us with the worst economy since the Great Depression.”

On taxes, Harris got into a little more detail, claiming, as President Joe Biden did before her, that her proposed tax increases would not affect anyone making less than $400,000 a year. Harris’s tax plan consists mainly of her vow to “make sure the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share.” Indeed, she said “fair share” six times in the brief interview. On the flip side, she touted tax credits by which she would give new parents $6,000, first-time homebuyers $25,000, and small-business starters $50,000. Much of that will take the form of straight-out government payments, so Harris’s pitch is, essentially: I’m going to tax the rich and give you the money, unless you are rich, too.

But at least those were a few actual features of her plan — nothing we didn’t know before and no details about the implementation, which would be extremely important. But still. 

On the question of prices, Ruhle asked Harris, “As somebody who supports free markets, who’s a capitalist, how do you go after price gouging without implementing price controls?” Harris answered almost indignantly: “Just to be very frank, I am never going to apologize for going after companies and corporations that take advantage of the desperation of the American people. And as attorney general [of California], I saw this happen. In the midst of an emergency, whether it be an extreme weather event or even the pandemic, we saw it, where those few companies, not the majority, not most, but those few companies that would take advantage of the desperation of people and jack up prices.”

The answer was pure, unadulterated malarkey, as the president might say. The issue in the campaign is the inflation that people have suffered since 2021, not price gouging connected to a tornado or something. It is inflation that Harris herself helped fuel, with the Biden administration and the Democratic Party’s massive, unwarranted spending measures. And it is inflation that she doesn’t want to talk about, choosing rather to confuse the issue by talking about price gouging. 

Two more examples, briefly. On tariffs, Ruhle asked Harris to comment on Trump’s proposals. “It … would be a 20% sales tax, in essence, on basic necessities for the average American worker, average American family,” Harris said, “totaling almost $4,000 a year.” That’s all in her talking points. Ruhle, in one of her few follow-ups, noted, “Tariffs aren’t unique to President Trump. President Biden has tariffs in place. He’s actually looking to potentially implement more. Where do you come out on — is there a good tariff, a bad tariff?”

Harris said, “You don’t just throw around the idea of just tariffs across the board. And that’s part of the problem with Donald Trump.” Would she keep the Trump tariffs that Biden kept in place, plus additional tariffs Biden is imposing? She did not say. What makes a tariff bad, other than being proposed by Trump? She did not say that, either.

On the border, Ruhle asked an ever-so-gentle question about the disaster Harris and Biden have created: “What would a Harris administration do for those communities who’ve taken in many, many legal immigrants but are at capacity?” The question ignored the massive problem of illegal border crossers, 5.6 million of whom have been allowed by the Biden-Harris administration to stay in the United States. It also ignored another 1.7 million illegal crossers, the so-called gotaways, who entered the country without engaging with U.S. authorities. 

Harris’s answer, as it always is, was to cite a Senate bill introduced in February 2024, this year, that she says would have solved the problems at the border, had Trump not stepped in to stop it. It is a complete counterfactual. The bill never got anywhere near being introduced in the House and faced significant Republican opposition in the Senate before Trump ever spoke out about it. And it would have actually routinized a huge daily flow of illegal crossers into the U.S., something that is anathema to GOP lawmakers. Yet Harris always cites it as what she would do about the border — she would somehow force passage of the bill and sign it into law. 

Harris did add one more element to her border answer. “We need a comprehensive plan that includes what we need to do to fortify not only our border but deal with the fact that we also need to create pathways for people to earn citizenship,” she said. Adding a “path to citizenship” has been a feature of failed comprehensive immigration reform efforts in the past. And now that there are millions more migrants in the U.S. illegally, there are a lot more for Harris to make citizens. And that, of course, would create a powerful magnet for even more millions to come to the U.S., confident that President Harris would 1) let them in, 2) allow them to stay, and 3) help them become citizens.

So what can be drawn from 25 minutes of softballs and non- and semi-answers? Not much. But a few scraps: First, with a friendly, supportive interviewer, Harris can mention things like wanting a “path to citizenship” for illegal border crossers without fear of further questions. (Harris has supported the “path” policy for years and included it in her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech.) Second, again with a friendly, supportive interviewer, Harris won’t even make an attempt to answer questions she doesn’t want, such as the difference between inflation and price gouging and her role in creating the Biden-era inflation. And third, again with a friendly, supportive interviewer, Harris will not or cannot give a better answer than her first long soliloquy about aspirations and ambitions and dreams and whatever. 

Yes, those are small benefits. The public deserves to see Harris facing a true interviewer, one who would question her statements, her premises, her assumptions, who would put her on the spot. But that will probably not happen. The candidate, after all, decides who gets an interview and who doesn’t. And there’s no reason to think Harris will submit to serious scrutiny anytime soon.