7 Takeaways From Harris’s Interview on ‘60 Minutes’

7 Takeaways From Harris’s Interview on ‘60 Minutes’

Pressed repeatedly, Kamala Harris stayed focused on the points she wanted to make. She also spoke about owning a Glock, and Tim Walz revealed she had told him to be a “little more careful” speaking.

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By Reid J. Epstein and Katie Rogers

Reporting from Washington

Vice President Kamala Harris sat for an interview with “60 Minutes” that was broadcast on Monday night and, in a departure from some of her recent appearances on cable news and podcasts, she was repeatedly pressed on questions she did not initially answer.

During a sit-down with the show’s correspondent Bill Whitaker, Ms. Harris did not reveal new domestic policy proposals or share how she would pay for some of those she has already put forward. But she did expound on her views about two foreign leaders causing enormous headaches for President Biden’s administration: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president.

Less than a month before Election Day, Ms. Harris’s interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” — the longstanding most-watched news program on television — came at a moment of increased exposure and pressure. She is set to appear on three major shows on Tuesday and at a Univision town-hall event on Thursday that is aimed at Spanish-speaking viewers.

Here are seven takeaways from Ms. Harris’s appearance on “60 Minutes,” which also interviewed her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

Harris was in control of her message, but avoided repeated pushback.

From the opening seconds, Ms. Harris seemed calm and in command of the points she wanted to make — and she did not stray from them despite repeated follow-up questions. She avoided pushback when asked to detail how to end the yearlong war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. And she declined repeatedly to say whether the Biden-Harris administration should have acted earlier to restrict illegal immigration into the United States.

When Mr. Whitaker asked her if the administration had lost all sway over Mr. Netanyahu, Ms. Harris said, “The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles.”

Mr. Whitaker pushed again: “It seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.”

Ms. Harris responded, “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end” — an answer that did not address the volatile diplomatic tension at the heart of the question.

She has a Glock, and she knows how to use it.

Since beginning her short, intense campaign, Ms. Harris has offered up few new details about herself, but on Monday she answered a couple of questions about being a longtime gun owner.

She said she owned a Glock, a popular pistol that is the handgun of choice for many in law enforcement — perhaps fitting for a former California attorney general, San Francisco district attorney and a local prosecutor before that.

“Look, my background is in law enforcement,” she said, “and so there you go.”

Yes, the vice president said with a laugh, of course she had fired the weapon. She quickly added: at a shooting range.

Harris was pressed about ‘dealing with the real world’ on some of her plans.

Ms. Harris was asked several times about her plans to pay for her economic proposals, including a $6,000 child tax credit for families with infants. She vowed to raise taxes on the highest earners before Mr. Whitaker pushed back: “We’re dealing with the real world here,” he said. She said she believed that congressional leaders were privately willing to engage on the issue.

“When you talk quietly with a lot of folks in Congress, they know exactly what I’m talking about,” she said, ignoring a reality she has encountered as Mr. Biden’s No. 2: Discussions in private that seem promising do not always lead to public policy.

Still, Ms. Harris said she would need Congress to act on several proposals, including legislation that would continue to restrict immigration to the United States.

She has warned Tim Walz about misspeaking.

When Mr. Walz has been in the news lately, it has been about his misrepresentations of his military record and travels to China.

It was perhaps an acknowledgment of these distractions from the carefully crafted Harris campaign agenda when Mr. Walz, after being asked about disagreements he has had with his running mate, said that she had told him to button up some of his loose language.

“She said, ‘Tim, you know, you need to be a little more careful on how you say things,’” Mr. Walz said.

He said any embellishments he had made paled in comparison to those of Mr. Trump, whom he called “a pathological liar.”

“I will own up to being a knucklehead at times,” he said. “The folks closest to me know that I keep my word.”

Neither Liz Cheney nor Harris can quite believe they are allies now.

During a brief exchange at Ms. Harris’s event last week in Wisconsin with former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Mr. Whitaker asked the vice president what she would have said if someone had suggested four years ago that she would someday be campaigning with the archconservative Ms. Cheney.

“That’d be great,” Ms. Harris said, laughing.

Ms. Cheney laughed, too. “She’s really diplomatic,” she said.

Mr. Whitaker then posed the same question to Ms. Cheney. Could she believe she was here, speaking at a campaign event for Ms. Harris?

The former Wyoming congresswoman couched her support as vital to preventing Mr. Trump’s return to office.

“I hope that if you had said to me four years ago, ‘Our Constitution is going to be under threat and it’s going to be crucial for the parties to come together and to support Vice President Harris because she’ll defend the rule of law,’ I know I would’ve said, ‘That’s exactly what I’ll do,’” she said.

Her foreign policy would look a lot like Biden’s.

Discussing the diplomatic crises that have unfolded throughout the Biden administration, including the expanding Mideast conflict and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ms. Harris signaled that foreign policy in a Harris-Walz administration would hew closely to the policies of the Biden-Harris one.

Ms. Harris said she would not meet with Mr. Putin about ending the war in Ukraine without involving the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

She again warned of what could happen if her Republican rival 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.”

But Ms. Harris did not hesitate when asked which foreign country was “our greatest adversary.” Iran, she said, is “the obvious one.”

“Iran has American blood on their hands,” she said, though she twice declined to engage in what she called hypothetical questions about what sort of military action she would take overseas.

Trump turned down ‘60 Minutes.’ Harris took advantage.

On the CBS show on Monday, Mr. Whitaker said Mr. Trump had agreed to an interview, then backed out, citing, among other things, the network’s promise to fact-check him on the air.

Ms. Harris pounced on the opportunity to point out that Mr. Trump “is not going to give your viewers the ability to have a meaningful, thoughtful conversation, question-and-answer with you.”

To get an idea of the substance of Mr. Trump’s policies, she said, “Watch his rallies. You’re going to hear conversations that are about himself and all of his personal grievances.”