Takeaways from CNN’s interview with Harris and Walz

By Eric Bradner and Chelsea Bailey, CNN

(CNN) — Vice President Kamala Harris said she was “deeply touched” by a photo of her young grandniece, in pigtails, watching her speak at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week.

Though Harris hasn’t emphasized it — she said she is running to be president for “all Americans” — the photo captured the potential of her candidacy to make history.

“It’s very humbling. Very humbling in many ways,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday.

Her comments came during the first joint interview of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. The Minnesota governor added that he’d seen video of his son Gus emotionally reacting to his convention speech.

“Our politics can be better. It can be different. We can show some of these things, and we can have families involved in this,” he said. “I hope people felt that out there, and I hope that they hugged their kids a little tighter, because you never know. Life can be kind of hard.”

In the interview, Harris explained how her positions on issues including fracking and border security have evolved since she first ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019 — and offered a preview of how she’s going to explain those evolutions to voters when they come up in her debate with former President Donald Trump and at other moments as the race moves forward.

“My values have not changed,” she said.

She also sought to frame the 2024 race as one that offers the American people “a new way forward” after a political decade in which Trump — in office or out — was a central figure.

Democrats have framed Harris’ 2024 campaign as one of joy — a turning of the page from a former president who has cast his political rivals, the media and others as enemies and frequently tapped into dark themes with dire warnings about the nation’s future. That approach will soon face its biggest test yet, with Harris and Trump both preparing for their September 10 debate on ABC.

Here are six takeaways from the Democratic ticket’s interview with Bash:

Explaining flip-flop on fracking

As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris opposed fracking — a position that could have proven politically damaging in Pennsylvania, where it’s a huge employer. Now, she says, she supports it.

“As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking,” she said.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the process of breaking through dense shale to unlock natural gas. Progressives have opposed fracking due to concerns about climate change. However, under the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping $750 billion health care, tax and climate bill that Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass in the Senate and President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022, fracking has expanded in the United States, while also advancing clean energy efforts.

Harris said she had already changed her position on fracking in 2020, when she said during the vice presidential debate that Biden “will not end fracking.”

“I have not changed that position, nor will I going forward,” she told Bash, adding, “My values have not changed. I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate.”

She cited the Biden administration’s efforts to spur growth in clean energy, saying: “What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”

Appointing a Republican to the Cabinet

Asked if she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, Harris said, “Yes, I would.”

The vice president wasn’t ready to name any specific names, or roles they might play.

“No one in particular,” she said. “We have 68 days to go in this election, so I’m not putting the cart before the horse. But I would.”

There is recent precedent for Cabinet selections that cross party lines. Former President Barack Obama appointed several Republicans to high-ranking positions — including former Illinois Rep. Ray LaHood as transportation secretary and former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel as defense secretary.

For Harris, the pool of Republicans who vocally oppose Trump could be a pool of prospects. Several of them spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week.

“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” Harris said. “I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who was a Republican.”

Refusing to engage in Trump’s identity politics

Harris largely sidestepped questions around Donald Trump’s claims about her racial and gender identity. Last month, Trump questioned Harris’ racial identity at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago, suggesting she’d previously identified as South Asian but “happened to turn Black” for political purposes.

Shaking her head, Harris said Trump’s remark is part of his “same old tired playbook.”

“Next question, please,” she said.

“That’s it?” Bash asked.

“That’s it,” Harris responded with a smile.

Her refusal to comment further is in line with her campaign’s strategy to avoid leaning into identity politics following Trump’s remarks. It could also indicate how Harris might handle future challenges to her race and gender during her first debate with the former president next month.

The phone call that changed everything

Sunday, July 21, was a busy morning at the vice president’s residence. Harris said she was making breakfast for relatives visiting from out of town and had just sat down to do a puzzle with her nieces when the phone rang.

“It was Joe Biden, and he told me what he had decided to do,” Harris said, in her most extensive remarks to date on how she learned the president was ending his reelection bid and endorsing her to replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket.

That phone called upended the 2024 presidential campaign and fundamentally changed Harris’ life and career. But in the moment, she said, she was more concerned about the impact the decision would have on Biden, who’d spent weeks weathering calls for his resignation after a halting performance at CNN’s first presidential debate caused Democrats to question his mental and physical health.

“I asked him, ‘Are you sure?’ and he said ‘Yes,’” Harris recalled. “My first thought was not about me, to be honest with you. My first thought was about him.”

Harris said she believes history will show Biden’s presidency was “transformative” and view his decision to withdraw from the race as one that is reflective of his character. She described the president as someone who is “quite selfless and puts the American people first.”

She went on to defend the Biden administration’s record, touting their investments in infrastructure, as well as efforts to lower drug costs and renew relationships with allies abroad.

“I am so proud to have served as Vice President to Joe Biden,” she said. “I am so proud to be running with Tim Walz for president of the United States and to bring … what I believe the American people deserve, which is a new way forward.”

Blaming Trump on border security

Trump has made attacking the Biden administration’s handling of the US-Mexico border a signature issue, but Harris said Trump bears much of the blame for the border security problems he bemoans.

She pointed to his opposition to the bipartisan border security bill hashed out by a group of lawmakers that included Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, a conservative Republican.

“Because he believed that it would not have helped him politically, he told his folks in Congress, don’t put it forward. He killed the bill — a border security bill that would have put 1,500 more agents on the border,” she said.

Asked if she would push that bill if she is elected president, Harris said: “Not only push it, I would make sure that it would come to my desk and I would sign it.”

She also said she does not support decriminalizing illegally crossing the border into the United States, reversing another position she took during her 2019 presidential run.

“We have laws that have to be followed and enforced that deal with people who cross our border illegally, and there should be consequences,” Harris said, arguing that she had prosecuted transnational criminal organizations as California attorney general.

Walz says he owns his mistakes

Walz was also pressed on false claims he’s made in the past, including a 2018 video in which he addresses gun violence and refers to “weapons of war, that I carried in war.”

Though Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard, he was never in a combat zone. He said he misspoke.

“My wife, the English teacher, told me my grammar’s not always correct,” he said.

Walz had also said in his convention speech that he and his wife used in vitro fertilization to conceive their children, but has since clarified it was a different kind of fertility treatment.

“I certainly own my mistakes when I make them,” he said.

“I won’t apologize for speaking passionately, whether it’s guns in schools or protection of reproductive rights,” he said. “The contrast could not be clearer … I think most Americans get it.”

Walz said he would not insult Republicans, a comment that came the same day his GOP rival for the vice presidency, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, said Harris could “go to hell” in regards to the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Their drastically different approaches to the campaign will be on display when they meet for a debate hosted by CBS on October 1.

‘I’m talking about an era’

The response that Harris’ policy proposals and promises of a new day in American politics have been met with from many Republicans has been: Why haven’t those things already happened in the three-and-a-half years she’s been vice president?

The vice president said Thursday she is “talking about an era that started about a decade ago” — which is when Trump moved to the political forefront.

In the Trump era, Harris said, “there is some suggestion — warped, I believe it to be — that the measure of the strength of a leader is who you beat down, instead of where I believe most Americans are, which is to believe that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.”

“That’s what’s at stake, as much as any other detail that we could discuss, in this election,” she said.

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