Vague, vacuous, and not flustered... 2 looks at that Kamala Harris interview.

"Kamala Harris didn’t hurt herself in her interview this week with CNN’s Dana Bash. She didn’t particularly help herself, either."

Writes Bret Stephens in a NYT piece with a meaner headline: "A Vague, Vacuous TV Interview Didn’t Help Kamala Harris."

But really, absorbing that meanness, isn't vague and vacuous what they were aiming for? I'm saying "they" not because I'm rejecting the she/her pronouns Harris has announced but because I presume her performance was developed by a team.

Stephens identifies pluses and minuses. On the plus side, "she came across as warm, relatable." (Did she?) 

On the minus side, we see the basis for that headline:

She’s vague to the point of vacuous. She struggled to give straight answers to her shifting positions on fracking and border security other than to say, “my values have not changed.” Fine, but she evaded the question of why it took the Biden administration more than three years to gain better control of the border, which it ultimately did through an executive order that could have been in place years earlier. It also doesn’t answer the question of why she reversed her former policy positions — or whether she has higher values other than political expediency.

We can infer the answer easily enough. What's she supposed to do, come right out and own it? 

The Stephens reaction is paired with a reaction from another NYT opinion writer, Michelle Cottle, who says, "I think that went pretty well, don’t you?"

Since you asked, I'll answer. Yes. Expectations were low, and there's no mistake for her enemies to feast on today. There were no big silences and no memorable passsage-of-time inanities.

Cottle gives Harris credit for not "ducking" questions or "getting flustered."

Flustered! To quote something I said in 2013: "That's a word that people have traditionally used — this is my observation — to portray a woman as incapable of standing her ground and dealing with emotional turmoil."

Why are you waiting to see if a woman gets "flustered"? It feels as though you're expecting her to prove her worth by not seeming like a stereotype of a woman. 

And Cottle continues with this "flustered" business:

The not getting flustered part was as important as the answers themselves. She absolutely needed to avoid giving any opening for the MAGA trolls — who are obsessed with machismo and performative toughness — to accuse her of being overly emotional or weak or easy to rattle. Amusingly, Bash looked more flustered than Harris did for most of the interview....

Yeah, why was that amusing... to Cottle? I'd have to guess that Cottle wanted Harris to win, and Bash's terror counted toward the Harris win. How presidential Harris was! She intimidated Bash. As if that means Putin and other dictators will be intimidated by Harris. But that inference is entirely unjustified. Bash was chosen because she was thought to be most inclined to help Harris. And Bash had the complex task of helping while seeming to be tough and properly journalistic.

Cottle projects her own worries about womanly inadequacies onto "MAGA trolls." Of course, they are out there, looking for material that can be used to attack Harris: They are "are obsessed with machismo and performative toughness — to accuse her of being overly emotional or weak or easy to rattle." But that doesn't mean Harris's own supporters are free of their own doubts and sexist stereotypes.