Democrats are meeting in Chicago starting Monday to formally confirm their candidate for president of the United States.
The Democratic convention comes as Kamala Harris enjoys a tailwind thanks to weeks of campaigning that were so effective that her rival has lost all his strength.
Kamala Harris is running a dynamic, positive and optimistic campaign, aided by a running mate, Tim Walz, who demonstrates the same attributes. While Donald Trump sinks deeper and deeper into negative and incendiary rhetoric that spares no one, not even the elected officials in his camp.
So far, so good for the Democrats?
Not quite. Because Team Harris has a huge blind spot. The same one Biden had.
Like her predecessor, Kamala Harris has indeed chosen to turn her back on the media: she has not given any interviews since receiving Joe Biden’s endorsement a month ago, nor has she held a press conference.
The decision is understandable from a strategic point of view: Harris thus reduces the risk of missteps by limiting herself to “scripted” speeches and images of herself all smiles, in full control of her outings. And the risk exists, as those who saw the dubious interview she gave to the host Lester Holt in June 2021 know.1.
Similarly, one could understand Joe Biden’s tactical decision to never give interviews to the mainstream media and to limit the number of press conferences more than any other president before him.
But the decision of both may well be an electoral strategy that can be explained, but it nonetheless constitutes a democratic error.
And one could add a serious fault by seeing how Biden managed to hide from voters his true state of health, both mental and physical.
Is meeting with journalists a necessary part of any election campaign?
James Carville, the Democratic strategist associated with Bill Clinton, answers that no: it is not written anywhere that “you must sit down to give an interview with the press.” This is factually true, in the same way that nothing forces candidates to take part in debates with their rivals.
But these two exercises constitute trials by fire that any serious candidate for an elective office should voluntarily choose to undergo, especially for that of president of the world’s leading power.
Unscripted press briefings are a stress test. They allow candidates to show themselves as they are, without hiding behind publicists, speech and press release writers, “press line” specialists and social media specialists.
The interviews and press conferences thus represent rare moments of authenticity within electoral campaigns written and planned from A to Z.
Formal press meetings are therefore not about pleasing journalists. Rather, they are about ensuring that the person who is asking for the public’s trust lives up to it. They allow voters to really get to know the candidate, beyond the marketing operation that election campaigns constitute.
The confrontation with the media is in fact one of the rare moments in a campaign where partisan teams lose control of the outputs, and give it back to journalists, who then represent the electorate.
Let us recall the interview that Sarah Palin gave to Katie Couric in 20082 : a fiasco. But which allowed us to see the limits of the candidate for the post of VP of John McCain.
The candidate’s presence in front of the media represents a gesture of openness, but also a gesture of accountability and transparency. It allows journalists to ask the questions that the public is asking, beyond the chaos of the few press scrums (which we call scrums and the Americans, press gaggles).
Let’s hope that Kamala will show this openness, precisely, after the convention in the coming days, as she has suggested. And that she will do more than one or two interviews, without limiting herself to platforms deemed more favorable.
This is all the more important since Mme Harris has escaped the usual selection process for presidential candidates.
1. Mme Harris, to whom Biden had entrusted the file on illegal entries at the border, had given strange answers, half-admitting not to have set foot on the border with Mexico, nor in Europe.
Watch Kamala Harris’ Interview with Lester Holt
2. Mme Palin, for example, argued that Russia’s proximity to her home state of Alaska gave her foreign policy expertise. She also said that you can “see Russian land from Alaska.”
Watch Sarah Palin’s Interview with Katie Couric
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