In a
wide-ranging interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, the vice-president was questioned
on where her political positions had shifted
Lauren
Gambino in Washington
Mon 7 Oct
2024 23.40 EDT
Kamala
Harris defended her economic plans, refused to call Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu a close ally and said she would not meet with Russian
President Vladimir Putin for peace talks if Ukraine was not also represented,
during a wide-ranging sit-down interview that aired on Monday.
With the
presidential race between Harris and Donald Trump effectively dead-locked,
Harris has launched an unusually robust media blitz, which includes popular
podcasts, talk radio, a battleground state town hall, daytime television, late
night shows and Monday’s network sit-down on CBS’s 60 Minutes prime-time
election special.
Before the
interview with Harris aired, CBS correspondent Scott Pelley detailed his
attempts to secure a similar 60 Minutes sit-down with Trump.
“Unfortunately
last week, Trump cancelled,” Pelley told the audience. He said the Trump
campaign provided “shifting explanations” for why the Republican nominee
declined to participate, including that he did not want to be factchecked.
Instead, the
network broadcast an interview with Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer, a
Republican who Pelley said was “paying the price for Trump’s claims of a stolen
2020 election.” The election official lost his primary in July to an opponent
who called Maricopa county’s elections a “laughing stock.”
In the
interview with CBS’s Bill Whitaker, Harris was pressed on how she would pay for
her economic proposals, which include plans to build millions of new housing
units, tax breaks for new parents and $25,000 down-payment assistance for new
homebuyers. The vice-president vowed to raise taxes on the country’s
billionaires and biggest corporations, a solution Whitaker found dubious.
“We’re
dealing with the real world here,” he said, asking how she would persuade
Congress to raise taxes on the country’s highest earners. Harris insisted there
were lawmakers who would listen to her pitch if she were president.
An analysis
from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that
seeks lower deficits, released a report on Monday that found Harris’s economic
proposals could see the federal debt climb by as much as $8.1t through 2035, or
have no impact at all. Trump’s plans on the other hand could add as much as
$15.15t to the nation’s debt over the same period.
“I cannot
afford to be myopic in terms of how I think about strengthening America’s
economy,” Harris said in the interview. “Let me tell you something. I am a
devout public servant. You know that I’m also a capitalist, and I know the
limitations of government.”
Harris
navigated around the thorny question of whether Netanyahu was “a real close
ally,” saying that “The better question is: Do we have an important alliance
between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that
question is yes.”
The excerpt
was released on Sunday, ahead of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s deadly
cross-border attack on Israel. In a sign Harris intends to hew closely to
Biden’s approach to foreign policy, the vice-president said that Israel had a
right to defend itself, while adding that “far too many innocent Palestinians
have been killed.” Israel’s war has levelled Gaza and killed almost 42,000
Palestinians.
In an
exchange about the future of Ukraine, Harris categorically ruled out a
bilateral meeting with Putin to discuss ending the war without involving the
country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “Without Ukraine? No,” Harris said.
She also
again warned of what could happen if Trump were in office: “Donald Trump, if he
were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now. He talks about, ‘oh,
he can end it on Day 1.’ You know what that is. It’s about surrender.”
During the
interview, which was pre-taped and aired in full on Monday, Harris defended her
ideological shift to the political center, insisting as she has in the past
that her “values have not changed.”
She said
that travelling the country as vice-president, and working to pass bipartisan
legislation in Congress had emphasized the need to find “common ground.”
“I believe
in building consensus,” she said.
Harris was
also asked about the gun she talked about owning during an event held with
Oprah Winfrey last month, in which she declared: “If somebody breaks in my
house, they’re getting shot,” drawing laughs from the host and the audience. On
60 Minutes, Harris said she owns a Glock. Asked if she has ever fired it, she
laughed: “Of course I have,” she said. “At a shooting range. Yes.”
Part of the
interview included her running mate, Tim Walz, who was asked where he and
Harris disagree.
With a
bashful smile, Walz said Harris probably wished he was a “little more careful”
with his public comments. Since becoming the vice-presidential nominee, Walz
has had to clarify several past remarks, including his description of his
military service and whether he was in Hong Kong “when Tiananmen happened”, a
reference to the pro-democracy protests that culminated in the massacre of
hundreds of people in June 1989.
Walz brushed
off the remark during the vice-presidential debate last week, saying he had
been a “knucklehead.” But Whitaker pressed him, asking if it was a
misrepresentation and whether the American people could trust him.
Walz drew a
sharp line between himself and Trump, who he called a “pathological liar” and
said voters should feel confident trusting him.
“I will own
up to being a knucklehead at times, but the folks closest to me know that I
keep my word,” he said.
The 60
Minutes interview was part of a week-long media push by the Democratic ticket
that began with Harris’s appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast, which aired
on Sunday. She is also scheduled to participate in a Univision town hall in
Nevada on Thursday as well as an interview with Howard Stern on Sirius XM and
appearances on The View and Late Night with Stephen Colbert. From Los Angeles,
Walz was also making media appearances, including on the SmartLess podcast and
Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Taken
together, it represents a sharp change of pace for the vice-president after
two-and-a-half months in which she mostly resisted such exchanges.
Before
boarding Air Force Two, en route to New York on Monday afternoon, Harris
fielded a handful of questions from reporters.
Asked about
a report that the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, ignored the vice-president’s
call to discuss recovery efforts as the state braces for Hurricane Milton to
make landfall, Harris accused the Republican of “playing political games”.
“These are
the height of emergency situations, it is utterly irresponsible and it is
selfish,” she said.
She also
assailed Trump as “incredibly irresponsible” for spreading falsehoods about the
administration’s response to Hurricane Helene, which ripped across the southern
Appalachians, killing more than 220 people in six states.
“There’s a
lot of mis- and disinformation being pushed out there by the former president
about what is available, particularly to the survivors of Helene,” she said.
“It’s extraordinarily irresponsible. It’s about him. It’s not about you.”
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