Yes, Kamala Harris is talking to the press more. Is it enough?

“She’s not sitting down for regular interviews or fielding questions from the press, certainly not to the degree that her counterpart, Donald Trump, is.” “She’s a very busy person.” “I think she should be doing more. This is the most exhaustive oral exam for any job on the planet because it’s for the most important job on the planet, and part of it is unscripted interactions.” “Kamala Harris is not running for perfect; she’s running against Trump.” “I don’t think it’s a lot to ask for her to sit down for a real interview, as opposed to a puff piece in which she describes her feelings of growing up in Oakland with nice lawns.” “When you move to nirvana, give me your real estate broker’s number and I’ll be your nextdoor neighbor. We don’t live there.” “I talk to swing state voters all day.… They’re not here for the soft interviews.… She needs more interviews.” “People should not read too much into what some have described as a shortage or a lack of interviews in the first six weeks of the campaign.”

Bar the time window mentioned at the end, this back-and-forth as to whether Kamala Harris should do more media interviews—all of it from the past few days—could have been lifted from a newsletter I wrote over a month ago, when that debate started to ramp up among commentators: some argued that Harris was dodging scrutiny (and opening herself up to political attacks in the process); others countered that Harris doesn’t need the press to get her message out and that the calls for her to do more interviews were less a function of high-minded concern for accountability and more one of self-absorbed elite-media whining. If that debate never quite went away in between times, it got a renewed jolt of energy last week—not least due to a story in Axios bearing the headline “The Harris-Walz media strategy: Hide from the press” (and an illustration reinforcing the point). By Axios’s count, since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, in July, Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, had taken part in seven interviews or press conferences, compared with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s combined seventy-two. Harris personally was credited with just three interviews: one on local TV, one on national TV, and one with a national print outlet.

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