On their regular "Week In Politics" chat on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, host Scott Simon asked NPR senior Washington correspondent Ron Elving how Kamala Harris and Tim Walz performed in their sit-down CNN interview. Elving said you knew they were fine because conservatives trashed CNN and Dana Bash after it aired.
SCOTT SIMON: Vice President Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, gave their first broadcast interview since they became the Democratic ticket. I - you know, you have to ask it like you're asking a theater critic. How do you think they did?
RON ELVING: I'd say they held their own, and you knew they had because the conservative media sphere erupted in criticism of the interview and CNN and the host of the show, Dana Bash.
The only snippet NPR aired was Harris saying “my values have not changed” on the fracking question. Elving said that was natural. It’s “what candidates say when they’ve switched positions,” a “classic shift” when she joined Joe Biden’s ticket. “Now she's on her own, and she's sticking with the Biden view and saying she's learned a lot about growing the green economy without banning fracking.”
After the touting-Harris bit came the trashing-Trump part, more air time for NPR's campaign to damage Donald Trump for daring to visit Arlington National Cemetery when Biden and Harris wouldn't on the anniversary of 13 American service personnel being killed by a suicide bomber during the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. An anonymous cemetery functionary tried to block Trump from any photography, and NPR's happily kept this anti-Trump actor anonymous:
SIMON: The Harris campaign called the confrontation sad. Here's what J.D. Vance said. He blamed the vice president for the U.S.'s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, telling a rally in Pennsylvania...
VANCE: Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won't even do an investigation into what happened, and she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up. She can -- she can go to Hell!
SIMON: But, Ron, didn't President Trump deal directly with the Taliban to negotiate that withdrawal?
RON ELVING: It's not clear just what Senator Vance is proposing to investigate here. As for the Arlington incident, the Army has backed up the National Park employee who was pushed aside for enforcing the policy against political ads being made at Arlington. But if Vance is talking about investigating what happened in Afghanistan back before his own election to the Senate, there's no doubt the withdrawal was, in fact, negotiated and signed in treaty form in February 2020 by Trump's secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. And it was Trump himself who announced while still president that the remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan should be home for Christmas 2020, again, before Biden had even become president. And, in fact, in the spring and summer of 2021, he was still attacking Biden for delaying the withdrawal of U.S. troops that Trump had set in motion.
Just because Trump planned a withdrawal doesn't mean Biden and Harris can't be held responsible for the horribly botched withdrawal, especially the Abbey Gate bombing.
But hey, it's election season, and the taxpayer-funded radio network reliably campaigns for the Democrats with their "news" reporting. If we could see the voting records of anti-Trump cemetery officials, it might look like a hit job. That's why they need to stay anonymous.
Simon wrapped up the segment by asking how important the ABC presidential debate would be on September 10. Elving said the ratings will be enormous, much larger than the Dana Bash interview (with six million viewers). He predicted Trump would be a bully, but Harris could be close to victory: "Trump can be counted on to do all he can to bulldoze Harris off the stage. But if she holds her ground, she'll be closer than ever to being the first woman president."
