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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
Arjun Singh
From the levers. Reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh, the last time Kamala Harris was on the ballot was when she ran for Senator of California in 2016
Arjun Singh
in that stretch, Harris had a failed presidential launch, but one that vaulted her to the vice presidency, and now she's within striking distance of becoming a barrier breaking President and for now, the vibes seem to be good. Democrats have thrown cash her way. She's memed her way into the hearts of many, and polling shows that voters are more open to sending her to the White House than Joe Biden. But what's the real pitch? What kind of policy would Harris deliver as president? It's a question nobody really seems to know the answer to, and one Harris hasn't seemed eager to take this week, she tried to answer some of those questions by unveiling an economic agenda, one where she vowed to tackle corporate price gouging and eliminate medical debt. Views that also echo the Biden administration, but much of Harris's beliefs are unknown, and her fiercest supporters seem to be fine with that. In fact, a lot of them have argued Harris should continue to run on vibes and ignore calls from the press to brandish a more robust portfolio or even sit down for an interview, something Harris has yet to do today on lever time, we're gonna explore the enigma of Kamala Harris and how her new campaign has changed the equation for political reporters. Then David Sirota and I sit down with one of Harris's constituents, New Yorker columnist Jake haspian Kang to hear what he thinks of Harris's vibes only strategy.
Arjun Singh
So earlier this week, I needed the help of the Levers news editor Lucy Dean Stockton, like any good editor, Lucy knows how to help you find that last piece of a puzzle to really help your piece sing. And this week, I had a burning question for her. I needed to know, what is brat and why does it keep coming up? I
Lucy Dean Stockton
think brat was like the third most popular album in the US for a few weeks there, and before that, she had never really topped charts. She's always been like a little niche, which I feel like is relevant also to her own iconography and important to brat, I think she like speaks to like niche Mean Girls gay culture. She's a little off the beaten path. And brat is her sixth studio album, and in addition to being like what I think an excellent pop album, Charlie XCX is a brilliant marketer, brat is as much marketing and cultural phenomenon as it has been about the album itself.
Arjun Singh
This album has been tearing up the charts this summer, and like Lucy said, it's tapped into some niche subcultures that are having a moment. Of course, I didn't really have an idea about most of that. I learned about it when it became part of the presidential election, more specifically, when I saw Jake Tapper on CNN asking a group of veteran campaign reporters about it. You're
CNN
just that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things some times. End quote. So it's the idea that we're all kind of brat, and vice president Harris is Brad, I don't Well,
Arjun Singh
it's not just brat either. Now, supporters of Harris use terms like coconut pill to show their affinity for her a reference to a speech she gave where she said this,
Kamala Harris
my mother used to she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, I don't know what's wrong with you, young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree. You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,
Arjun Singh
and like Brad, this has just become part of the online zeitgeist, and something that the Harris campaign has also capitalized on. The coconut
Lucy Dean Stockton
quote was just so off kilter and before it was being used to make fun of her, but I think after she was embraced by rat and all of these young people, they started to just like, take it and run with it. And now people are coconut pill and people put coconut emojis in their Twitter BIOS to signify that they stand with Kamala Harris. There are just all these ways that I think the Kamala Harris campaign is embracing, like, clever branding and memes and running with them and not fixating on them, but these are all, I think, like responsive reactions to internet culture and really a way for her to try and get in on the conversation with young voters. I think they do a lot. To make it like fun and present. And I think a lot of her campaign is trying to be fun and present, which I think is double edged sword in all the ways that it's been fun and of the moment. And so brat, we don't have any policy from her yet. You know, it's all vibes. And the vibes, the vibes are Brett. And I think there are still so many questions about what parts of Biden's policy she'll carry on, what parts she's going to leave behind. A lot of questions you know, about how she's going to treat foreign relations, on the economy, but I would say that campaign building is charging ahead and things like like brat have been a big part of it. Look, I'm
Arjun Singh
a big believer in having fun, and I understand why a campaign would want to focus on memes or silly Tiktok videos. It's joyful and laughter, silliness and all combinations thereof are how we connect to each other. That's just human. But like Lucy said, a fun meme doesn't exactly tell us what Kamala Harris is going to do about the war in Gaza, nor is it an indicator of how she'd actually tackle rising health care costs. On Friday, Harris began to reveal some of those details. One thing she says she wants to do is seek a federal ban on price gouging by food companies and tackle the costs of living. When
Speaker 1
I am elected president, I will make it a top priority to bring down costs and increase economic security for all Americans. As President, I will take on the high costs that matter most to most Americans. The
Arjun Singh
same days that speech, Harris outlined plans to expand the child tax credit and provide tax relief for first time homeowners. These aren't insignificant, but it appeared to be in response to criticism that few actually knew what Harris wanted to pursue in office. One reason people are so curious about that is because even though Harris has been in public life for 20 years, it's incredibly difficult to nail down the issues that she's been passionate about throughout her career. Take her presidential campaign in 2019 for example, Harris came out as a supporter of Medicare for All and banning fracking. Now her campaign has signaled that she's not in favor of either one. Look, a lot's changed since then, and people absolutely change, but at a minimum, an elected official, especially one that's running to be president, should explain why they've changed. Harris has so far managed a campaign rollout that's received often positive coverage from the press, and it's indisputable that polling has shown a bump when crowds are packing rallies to see her and her vice presidential nominee Tim waltz speak and vibes and a vague enough vision of continuing the Biden administration's policies may be enough to win the day, especially given how short Harris's actual time on the campaign trail will be. What's been strange, though, has been to see how people, including elected officials and prominent public intellectuals, have chastised the press for pushing Harris to explain more of her vision and why she's flipped on previous positions. It's true, a lot of the press fixates on elections like their basketball games. Campaign reporters will frequently view important issues like abortion rights or war through the lens of which candidate or party will benefit more electorally from it. But there's also policy reporters who focus on the nitty gritty of how the government addresses major problems and uses its power. There are outlets like us the lever that examine how these policies play out in real life, and these dynamics have always existed in reporting, especially political reporting, but today, dark money funded Super PACs have flooded our feeds with partisan media that often looks like independent news, but is really a front for political operations, and a generation of independent but partisan media outlets are substituting the role of traditional journalism in many people's news diets. All of that has now changed how a candidate like Kamala Harris interacts or doesn't interact with the press, and it raises questions about whether she even needs to to win elections anymore, and that can have ramifications for how journalists approach covering powerful figures.
Max Tani
I think that Kamala Harris's relationship with the media is definitely better than the relationship of the other two people who were the major candidates running in this race, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. A lot of people think that just because, you know, he's not Donald Trump, that Joe Biden had a better relationship with journalists and the news media. Max
Arjun Singh
Taney is the media editor of semaphore and the co author of the semaphore media newsletter. HARRIS
Max Tani
does have a better relationship with the news media on the whole, it hasn't always been that way. I think that she also felt, and we reported this in semaphores media newsletter a few weeks ago, towards the end of her 2020 campaign. I think she felt she got a pretty difficult run from the media, but over the last several years, she's worked to really repair and actually. Build some of those bonds with with the Washington establishment media by doing a lot of off the record meetings and off the record briefings with journalists, inviting prominent television personalities over for dinner at the Naval Observatory, and just kind of getting to know people generally, you know, she ran for president only, you know, several years into her first term in the Senate. So she didn't really know that many, many of the kind of traditional institutional Washington journalists and big players in in the national media. And so I think over the last several years between her failed presidential campaign and this run, she's actually kind of gotten to know more personally a lot of the players who who would be coming covering her. And I think we're seeing in the first few weeks, that's that, that, I think is, is, is one of the things that's helping boost her at least a little bit,
Arjun Singh
you know, Max, like, I hate when people say, well, people on Twitter said this. But I'm going to just go ahead and say that right now, because there, there are people on Twitter, like, prominent people, you know, professors at well established journalism schools that are arguing that that basically all news outlets say from partisan ones have lost their privileges to sit down with candidates. Harris, for example, should only talk to friendly outlets because they won't ask proper questions. But I also noticed that mindset does seem to be cropping up within the subscriber base of these outlets. For example, I used to work at the Washington Post, and that was a problem, there people would hate an op ed or just the framing of an article and say they were going to cancel their subscription as a means to punish an outlet for newsrooms where subscriptions are really propping them up and sometimes the only real source of revenue. How do you think that factors into management decisions about how to treat coverage of someone because they risk often partisan threats from people in their audience. Like is there is the idea of audience capture, a real dilemma that newsrooms are trying to grapple with right now, as we're in the middle of a presidential election.
Max Tani
I think that's such an interesting question. That is something that I feel like a lot of media executives are, think about whether or not they're saying it in the way that you're saying it or not, or thinking about it more indirectly. I think that with the fragmentation of media and with the availability of so many different places where you can get your news or your perspective or the tone that suits you, just right? I think that it's both a good thing in terms of, you know, allowing upstarts to kind of, you know, break in and, you know, kind of find their audience and find their niche. It's more democratic in some ways, but I do think that it poses some challenges for the kind of big legacy media institutions that we count on to kind of be able to those are the places that can really wield their influence to get a hard hitting interview with a lot of you know, presidential candidates or whatnot. And we need those institutions, in my view, we need those institutions because they have the resources and the stature to cover the most important, biggest stories that like a cool YouTube podcast, which I might like more, you know, than whatever may not have. But I think that the legacy publications are attempting to navigate how to cover these topics with honesty and tell their audiences things that sometimes their audiences don't want to hear, because audiences too are, you know, let me give you a good example, right? Like the Washington Post, to where you used to work, is a great example of this. They really built up a huge subscriber base during the Trump years because people were fascinated by what was going on in the White House, and the post had some of the best coverage that was out there. And it really, really helped them to kind of grow. But as soon as kind of Trump went away, the post lost subscriptions, and furthermore, there were a lot of people, readers, audiences, who might be upset because they were there to read the very difficult coverage of Trump, and they were kind of left leaning partisans, and when they clicked into the Washington Post and read a difficult story about Joe Biden that that wasn't something that they necessarily wanted to pay for, and that's something that plays out across the ideological spectrum. It's the same reason why Fox stays in its lane as well. And so I think that that's one of the big challenges of media fragmentation, is, how do you hold on to a large audience that doesn't abandon you the second that you publish something that they don't like? What
Arjun Singh
is your sense of, you know, the of horse race coverage? Because it's a big term, and I'm noticing that it's starting to encapsulate what can sometimes feel like just the way that you cover campaigns. But I think for people who have never experienced political reporting, I hear the criticism that's like, why don't they ever ask about policy? Why are they asking about the horse race? Part of that reason is because, fundamentally, we're in the middle of an election, and the goal of an election is to win. Is it? Is there merit to the idea that critics say that the political press is just consumed by horse race, and that if they, if the New York Times, for example, get to sit down with Kamala Harris, they're going to only ask a bunch of questions about the horse race and no questions about policy. And, you know, I'll. Admit that where I'm seeing it is that the New York Times has a lot of phenomenal economic policy reporters, Jim Tankersley, for example, why wouldn't they allow some of these questions in the in a mix of also the horse race? But it's like, I feel like people are like, No, the whole political press only does horse race. Where do you think that comes from? Where does that critique come from? What are they referring to? Because the media, as we know, is like, not a thing that you can walk up to and be like, Hey, man, why are you asking questions like this? So I'm wondering what, what is contributing to that so much that that seems to be out there in the zeitgeist?
Max Tani
Yeah, there. I think that there's definitely merit to the idea that we do focus, you know, we in the news media. This is a broad, you know, overly general. We that there is probably a disproportionate amount of horse race coverage relative to, you know, the the Eat Your Vegetables kind of policy reporting. But I do think, as you kind of mentioned, it's much more complicated than just saying, well, the media just focuses on horse race and doesn't care about the issues the media writes, particularly when it comes to the presidential campaigns, there is so so so much focus on policy, all the coverage of project 2025 all of the coverage that that gets, that is a successful Well, first of all, it's a successful effort by the Democrats to get people to focus on what Donald Trump wants to do if he gets back into office. But that's a policy story. We're talking about all the policies that Donald Trump wants to put in back into place, or that people who are allied with Donald Trump want to put into place if he gets back into office. So I do think that there are policies people sometimes are reading campaign stories, and they or they think they're reading a campaign story and they're actually reading a policy story. But I do think that it is true that there is an entire ecosystem that is built just around, you know, the ups and downs, who's up and who's down in politics and and I think, I think it's fair for people to get upset with some of that, that being said. You know, I do, I do think that there is value to knowing that kind of thing. I mean, horse race coverage is arguably the thing that one of the things that pushed Joe Biden to get out of the race, they looked at the poll numbers, they looked at how the campaigns were going, and it actually made a big difference. So I think it's completely fair right now to be paying attention to the horse race. But, that being said, Yes, of course, I do think that there's a disproportionate amount of coverage, you know, to that, compared to, you know, like housing policy or something like that. Not every outlet has a housing or somebody who covers oil futures or whatever,
Arjun Singh
you know, have niche reporters. Yes, exactly.
Max Tani
I will say 111, last thing on this, though, is there is plenty of policy reporting out there, if you really go and look for it. I mean, Politico, pro you know, people get mad at politico all the time for, oh, they're just focused on the horse race politico playbook, who's up and who's down. They've got a great paid product that you can get if you want to read about what the House Subcommittee on agriculture is doing on a day to day basis, that which is all policy. And when you look in the White House briefing room as well, there's a lot of political questions that get asked there. But I've, I've been to some of those briefings, there are serious policy questions that people put to to the people in charge. So it's there if you look for it.
Arjun Singh
The challenge is knowing if people want to look for it, if news consumers really do reject journalists for being too adversarial to their preferred candidate. It could change the incentive to hold politicians accountable. In a cynical sense, it can drive up superficial reporting that emphasizes 2024 his favorite word, vibes. But are even ardent partisans comfortable with knowing so little about the policy portfolio of someone they're about to entrust with the decision of who gets to make it to the Supreme Court after the break, David Sirota and I'll sit down with the New Yorkers. Jay Caspian King to find out. We'll be right back. You.
Arjun Singh
On Friday, Vice President Harris was speaking in North Carolina. We
Speaker 1
all know that prices went up during the pandemic, when the supply chains shut down and failed, but our supply chains have now improved, and prices are still too high. It
Arjun Singh
was a notable speech because of how much of it focused on the economic policy she would pursue
Unknown Speaker
as President, I will go after the bad actors,
Speaker 1
and I will work to pass the first ever federal ban on price gaging on food. My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules and. We will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead.
Arjun Singh
That speech seemed to be a response to criticism the campaign faced for not having a policy platform to run on. One of those critiques came in the New Yorker where columnist Jay Caspian Kang argued that it was the role of the press to push Harris on what was in her platform earlier this week, David Sorona and I sat down with Kang to ask him what he made of the fierce pushback to reporters trying to get Harris to speak more about policy. We spoke with Kang on Wednesday before Harris's speech on Friday, and we had started by asking him what kind of a sense Harris had given him at that point about what policy should pursue. This is what Jay had to say before knowing what was going to come out in Friday's speech.
Jay Kang
I assume that a lot of it is going to be the extension of Biden's what Biden was running on, yeah, but I guess we don't know, you know, and maybe they don't know right now either. And it is interesting to me, I do agree with you. I think that a lot of the there's going to be expansion of social safety net or a proposed expansion of these programs, and depending on how you know, the House and the Senate go, then maybe a lot of those will be passed. I just think that maybe Lina Khan and the FTC were untenable for big, big Democrat politics and that that I'm not, I think Biden might have stuck by it, maybe just because he liked Bernie, no personally, like some small thing like that. But I just find, I think that that stuff is probably going to be very tough to keep around, and I'm not sure if it's just like people, I think that some people on the left are a little bit too quick to pathologize things on a personal level and say, Oh, it's because Kamala was always cozy with Wall Street or whatever. It's just like, Yeah, but the whole party is right. Like, like, we had this one blip, which was always surprising, the fact that, I mean, I remember Lina Khan was like academic and like writing, you know? And it was like, and it was, it's kind of like feeling, um, she's more like a it was like, what Elizabeth Warren used to do, right? And then suddenly she was like, has all this power. And it was really surprising. And so well, Lina Khan,
David Sirota
that I think was like a glitch in the matrix. And I would, I would also add the Rohit Chopra at the CFPB. I think these, these were glitches in the matrix that a small, well organized faction at the sort of the essentially elite level, or thought leader level of the party, pushed really hard, zeroed in on very smartly. Now I'm talking about the effectively, the Elizabeth Warren policy wonks who were throughout DC, and I think they did an admirable, laudable job of get of finding that glitch in the Matrix, getting it in there. But the fundamental political problem, as you allude to, is that there hasn't been decades of work building a popular movement so you can exploit a glitch in the matrix over the short term. But when, when the shit then hits the fan, right? The real pushback comes like the donor class starts screaming, if there hasn't been a popular groundswell behind your exploitation of that glitch in the matrix, then the glitch is going to get closed. And I think that's essentially what I think is going on here that you're now seeing, like the real pushback and and look, I think the people who support Lina Khan, I happen to be one of them. I think they've done, they're doing a good job of trying to spotlight this, to say, to make it kind of a litmus test issue, to try to keep her, or at least her policies, in there, I think that's really smart, but I think you're right, man, like, it's still a donor class Democratic Party, right? It still is,
Jay Kang
yeah. I mean, I was surprised every week by the Biden administration, a lot of stuff that they did, right? And I think that a lot of it was forced upon them because of covid, but I also think that a lot of it was just the people that Joe Biden hired. Very effective, as you said, is exploiting this glitch, right? The glitch was covid, right in a lot of ways, and that's, that's what they exploited. I think that some regression back to what it was like under Obama is certainly expected. But I do kind of agree with you that I don't necessarily think that it's so cynical where it's all going to go back to that type of politics, and that there's going to be a constant, that the motto of the party is just going to be moderation and punch hippies, right? I just don't think that that's going to happen. And the reason why I don't think that that's going to happen is because I think a lot of the young people who are on the staffs or the aides or the people who are working in politics actually are probably to the left of of the people are far to the left of the people that they're working for, and that I think that they will have influence to try and keep the party somewhat close to what was. Happening, I don't I also think that you know that they can point to certain electoral results and say that maybe this type of constant moderation, constant constant moderation, you know, like GO, GO tack further to the right tech, further to right, that maybe it doesn't work as much anymore. But don't you think the moderation
David Sirota
is is also this desire almost understandable from a politician perspective, this desire to sort of somehow both placate the donor slash owner class and the working class, right? If you're a politician, you're like, look the working class, middle class of voters, I need to appeal to them. I also need to appeal to the boot that's crushing the working class into a fine dust, because the boot that's that's doing that, aka the donor owner class, is where I get my money to run a campaign. So what the what the typical Democratic politician is trying to do is trying to somehow placate, appeal to both, which, in some, in some ways, I guess, I guess you sort of, you sort of can on some issues, I guess, right, like, you know, reproductive rights. Reproductive rights does not offend the donor owner class, and it appeals to a lot of regular working class, middle class people, like, okay, there you go. So that's why there's a lot of focus on it, among other reasons, right? But when you get to like, Okay, who should control the power in the economy, right? How much tax cuts do we give or repeal? Who should get the tax cuts? Right? Those are zero sum questions, and what I see in Obama style politics, again, that's just a proxy for what we're talking about here is the desire never to have to make a choice to be on one side or the other. I mean, fundamentally, that kind of is the theory of neoliberalism. You don't have to make a choice like rising tide lifts all boats. The donor class can be happy while the working class is happy, even though the donor class has created economic structures that are extractive of the working class, right? So, so I think of like, what would Kamala Harris be most inclined to do? It's like, okay, do the Venn diagram. What are the things that don't offend the donor owner class and appeal to pieces of the working class, and it's a pretty narrow agenda, but it doesn't deal with a fundamentally extractive economy. And I think that's the central problem here, is that, let's presume that she wins. There still hasn't been a choice on are we going to actually make this a less extractive economy? I mean, Joe Biden seemed like slightly interested in that. I'm not sure that Kamala Harris is. I mean, you followed her career. Do you think she is? Well,
Jay Kang
it's just hard to tell, just because it's always there's never anything that you can grasp. There's nothing to grab onto. San Francisco, she ran as a progressive prosecutor, and then she's kind of ditched that in the middle as AG, obviously, you don't really, you're not that public as AG, so it's not something that was happening. But it was interesting when she ran in 2019 that, you know, if you read her book, that her motto, Kamala Harris for the people, was supposed to at first be her, evoking the prosecutor role, right? Because that's what you say. You say, you know, Assistant District Attorney, I'm District Attorney for the people, right? And then other lawyer says, I'm for the defense. But then it became like this idea that she was running as a populist right. It was both things at the same time. And so there was very it was very hard to grasp onto any of it, especially knowing that her record as the district attorney was all over the place, right? Like, it was like, Oh, is she putting people in jail? Who are she obstructing acquittals, right? Like, is she doing all this? Those are the things that, when I was living in San Francisco, got a lot of news, right? And then there was a lot of, I mean, San Francisco during the time had a lot of violence, right? There's like a sort of a gang war that was going on when she was going when she was in office, that got a lot of attention, that ended up with, like, really horrific murder. And then she became, like, too soft on crime, right? And so then she tacked somewhere else. And so I don't know, it's just very hard to predict any of this, which was really why I was compelled to write this piece. Because it was just like, look, we need a little bit of something here. And I think it would help her, in some ways, to have a little bit of something right. But I agree with you. I think that when her campaign looks at and I think that probably at this point they're right, like maybe I was wrong, but they just don't see that type of incentive. I've just, how do you guys feel about the way in which she is avoiding ever really talking about being a woman or being black or being South Asian, because, like, like, I am a big, I don't know I'm, like, a critic of identity politics or whatever, and yet I find it strange how little she's talked about it, right? Because, um, there is a real. Well, I know that it does matter to people, and I think it especially matters to women. And I understand why it matters to women, because there's never been a woman president before.
Arjun Singh
One thing on that Jay, which is like, I totally agree with you in that if there is one area that Harris can actually distinguish herself, it is talking about her story, talking about being biracial. Because as much as I don't think a lot of the way Democrats have invoked identity and identity politics has been good. I do actually think in contrast to the way that Trump is really crassly trying to malign her race, but he's also basic. He said things like to be biracial is disrespectful, you know, and it's a Trumpian thing. Who knows what he means, disrespectful to who or what? Yeah, but what he you know, when I see that as an Indian American and someone you know who grew up with a lot of biracial friends, has a lot of biracial friends, that's basically she has the opportunity to be like this guy's completely out of step with what actual America is. And if there is a point to unify, I do think that there is a place that swats of people across the political spectrum. They don't like seeing that kind of crass racism on that level. But the other thing is, like her story of like, immigrant parents who come to, like, prestigious universities, build a life like, enmesh themselves in the American fabric. That's not only a relatable immigrant story. I think it's one that, like a lot of people, feel proud of. That's what America has been able to deliver to people, and people on the right and the left feel that. So I'm I'm really with you. I actually think that's one area she would probably do very well to talk about that identity and story in contrast to Trump. But instead, they seem to be more emphasizing Tim Waltz is like, I'm a white guy kind of identity. And I forget if you had written this, Jay or where I'd read this, but someone made a really good point where they were like, Tim Waltz is supposed to be like the Midwestern white guy who goes hunting, but is also, you know, in favor of abortion, is also in favor of these progressive values. And it's like this reminder to, I don't know who, but it's supposed to signal that it's like, hey, even the rural white guys who went to Trump are now on board with these things. And I actually think it shouldn't be that. It should be the opposite, which is like, Kamala Harris genuinely probably represents more of America in who she is, in her backstory.
David Sirota
I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take the, I'm taking the the opposite side on this one, as the resident white guy on this although, what white? White, Jewish. So Jewish,
Arjun Singh
you know, the minority, although I gotta throw up our cards.
David Sirota
I don't know if it's, yeah, right, right. I think on that right now they're doing the right thing from a campaign tactic, for this reason that it's so implicit in who she is that it's almost like every time I think they understand that every time The average person sees her, they see the the biraciality there, they see that she's obviously a woman, and that there's like a no win situation in certainly casually mentioning any of this, because it will be exploited as she's Going full identity politics, giving Trump away to go to double down on his disgusting, racist demagoguery. And so I guess what I would say is like, I'm sure they see it as a no win issue, a no upside issue for them, especially when they're sort of just vibing up in the polls. I will put one asterisk on it. I do think that at some point she may be compelled to do what Obama did in 2008 which was that speech that came, if I'm remembering right, sort of in response to the simmering controversy about the Reverend Wright. Remember he gave that civil rights speech moment in the campaign, and he was, like, sort of acknowledged, yes, I am the first, you know, African American biracial candidate who ever been nominated. And he did a whole like, so in other words, not doing it casually, like, doing a full like, here's, like, my one big statement I've, like, really worked on this. She may be forced and politically compelled to do that, and I think it can be a positive, but I think the fact that she's not sort of casually mentioning it, I think they just don't want to give trump any way to try to, like, portray her in all those ugly tropes that the right demagogic, demagogic, like racist tropes that the right has come up with, right? Oh, she thinks she should be president because she's a woman, or, Oh, she thinks she should be president because she's biracial, right? I mean, like, they must be saying, like, let's just not, let's just not talk
Jay Kang
about it. They do it in Spanish language. They have Spanish language identifier, yeah, it's like the dog. Daughter of immigrants. No, that's interesting. So, and that, and that was a big buy. So there's like, a big push within Spanish language media, yeah, and comma, the her social media actually put it out there too, as, like, on the main page. So it's not just like some pack, yeah, it was actually, but I think that basically, she gets the benefits of running, of women being excited, of people who want a woman to be president, who includes me, you know, like that. She gets all the benefits of it without talking about it. I think there is a sort of fear of Hillary Clinton looming, yeah, around some of the decisions to not talk about it, because it was so central to Hillary Clinton's campaign, and that they're just afraid that she's going to get associated with Hillary Clinton, which I do unders, I do understand. And so, yeah, I don't know. I think in the piece that I wrote, and generally, this is how I feel, it's like, look, they're doing a good job, right? Like, it is very hard to find something if the point of it, if my job was like, okay, my only job as a writer is to assess how this campaign is doing in terms of winning or losing, I'd be like, they're doing great, you know, like, it's they're doing much better than I ever thought that they would do, right? And so, yeah, um, but yeah, I don't think that that's our job, right? I don't think it's our job to just sort of be like to basically just always be playing fantasy electoral politics and, yeah, right, that's
David Sirota
a good place to conclude this conversation, which is, let's just take a moment. I want to hear from you about the whole like, what is the job of the media and of the journalist in this, in this situation. I mean, I think, I actually think that's, now, there's, there's a, clearly, a dispute over that, right? I mean, you've got some people who think the job of the of the media is to, you know, putting in quotes, defend democracy. Therefore, like take down Trump. Some people think the job of the media is the, you know, I'm sure conservatives think the job of the media is to take down the Democrats. I mean, then there's a question, okay, is the job of the average campaign reporter? Let's like, zero in a little bit further. Is it to be constantly assessing how well the campaign is doing, or is it to assess, what is the campaign promising that if it wins, it will do for the voters of America. Like, look, I mean, maybe it's all these things, but I just What if you could wave a wand or offer an answer on like, what? What is the job of the media in a situation like this, I think
Jay Kang
it's pretty simple. I just think it's that you have people who are running to be the most powerful person on earth, and that you should try and have as buttoned down and as locked down of an understanding of what these people think and what motivates them as possible. I find that the sort of logic puzzle that people do and they put together, and they say journalism is supposed to uphold democracy. The fourth estate is vital to democracy, and if Trump wins, there's no more democracy. Ergo, your job is to make sure that Trump doesn't win. I find that to be ridiculous. You know? I think that at that point you're asking for a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, and I, if that was the job, I would not be doing the job. There are much more lucrative jobs that any of us could be doing than being journalists. You know, like, like, basically any job is more lucrative than being a journalist at this point. And so I, I don't know, I think that it's, you have to hold these people to some sort of account, right? You have to. You can't just be cowed by what you want, personally, politically. And you should ask questions like, well, what are you like when, for example, one of the exams that I use in the piece is that, when Kamala Harris gives a speech in Michigan, she talks to the people, some of the lead organizers of the undecided movement beforehand, right? And she says that they asked her, would you favor an arms embargo, right? Which is would be way big departure from what Biden was doing. And she says, I would consider it. It's reported by the New York Times, right? The next day, immediately her campaign comes out and says, no, no, no, no, no, we would not consider that right? What happened in that moment? I think it's a very good question to ask people should know, like, what are her actual thoughts about this? It is a like, I know that it is a question that many young people it is a question that a lot of people in Michigan find very important, and to for people to assert that asking her that question without saying a whole litany of things about why Trump is bad first, right? Or somehow that if you ask her that question, that you are distracting from how bad Trump is, and therefore you should be tarnished on the internet or whatever, like, if that's the media world that you want. Want, then I don't want any part of it, you know, like the and that. I don't actually think that those people who are saying that want that media world, right? Like they have just been compelled, and they have been pushed to make these types of statements. And so in the end, it's hard for me to know how serious to take it, but I do find the proliferation of it in recent weeks to be a little bit concerning at this point, and I guess the one moment that and and I do think that people are trying in some ways to redefine what all this is, but I don't think it'll work, because I think that the institutions that they're talking about are quite stuck in their ways. And I think they're stuck in their ways, in a good way, right? Like, I don't think that there are a lot of report you can criticize the times all you want. They're bad reporters at times. Are good reporters at the times. Are great editors at times. Are bad editors at times. But you know, the times does take certain things very seriously, and there are a lot of people there who have basically turned this type of journalism into a religion, you're not gonna change their mind, right? And at the point where their audience gets all their information from this one outlet, like, maybe some of those people turn around and be like, The New York Times is bad, the New York Times is stupid, but they're still gonna read The New York Times, right? And they're gonna still trust the New York Times. And so it's hard to know how much to make out of it, but I think that journalism in the way that we do it right now with those types of questions, is going to be just fine. Well,
David Sirota
that's that is reassuring. I
Arjun Singh
do also think too to that point, Jay that like as right now, like as much as it can be disgruntling, that the press sees itself as its own class, and that if there is a bias. I do kind of get that there can be a negativity bias, which is the like, all right, like this person is doing well, what do we look at in their career, in their history, which even though it sounds like you're just trying to knock him down a peg, he's a fairly good instinct. Someone is running for power. They have power. What do we need to know? And yes, it might be often it's something negative that, you know, whatever.
David Sirota
Yeah, that is a good bias. Yes,
Arjun Singh
it's a good bias. And I think it's an adversarial, I
David Sirota
mean, there's a whole yes journalism,
Arjun Singh
I think at the press should always have this adversarial, even if you can pick out a handful of like, well, they took this too far. They made a big deal out of this, quote, whatever, the press should never just be an extension of a campaign. And think about, oh, well, you know, how is this going to affect this other guy in this that's the job of the campaign. You look at Biden's campaign, the press didn't bring him down the failed communicator. And, you know, frankly, a little bit of the arrogance earlier in the episode, we heard from Max Tani on semaphore about how a lot of White House reporters just said there was a haughty arrogance, and they didn't want to kind of play ball. Well, that's what's going to happen you. You don't, you don't have a good communication strategy. So I'm with you. I think, as much as it can be annoying, I'm glad that the institutions are sticking to those, those religious totems. Still, I was thinking
Jay Kang
about it this morning, and I think what's underlying all of this is a deep anxiety that, obviously, that Trump is going to win. But it's also like, I wonder if there's some anxiety about, well, we don't really know Kamala Harris that well, right? Because I, for a lot of the people who are responding to me, I was like, what is the harm of asking her a question about whether she wants Lena Khan still on the FTC, right? What's the harm? Yeah, you know, Do you not trust that she can answer one question, right? You know, and they'll say, Well, Trump is like, the answer is like, well, Trump is worse. Why don't you ask Trump just like, like, it's totally irrelevant, right? In terms of, it's like, Do you not trust that Kamala Harris. I trust that Kamala Harris can answer a whole lot of questions about all of this, right? And I am set. I am as a journalist and as a citizen, I'm interested in what she has to say, because we did not have a primary and, you know, and we didn't have any type of we didn't have the normal thing, this is just how we're going to go. It's 100 day campaign. We should get to know as much as possible. And when there is such intensive, intensive pushback against a very basic proposition, like, she should answer some questions, or will she answer some questions? Or could she answer some questions? Because we don't know all that much, it's a lot of vibes right now. I think it betrays a type of insecurity amongst the electorate as well, right? Like they don't want the vibes to fall apart. And I think that they are worried that they will the second that things start to get a little bit hard. And what they are hoping is that things never get hard until November and I, if I were her campaign, or if I was a Democrat voter who was not invested in any of this stuff. Maybe I would feel that way too, you know, because I would having not been, having had Kamala Harris as part of my political life since I was 20, whatever years old, 24 years old, living in like the Mission District of San Francisco, all the way to now, 20 years later, I would feel a little bit like, you know, there. Part of me that's like, well, could she do the whole thing? Because the last time we saw her try to do the whole thing, it fell apart before Iowa, right? And so I think that that is a base insecurity that people maybe not have processed it yet, but I think that that's floating around somewhere around here, and I understand it like I understand it, but it's, you know, it's as a journalist, you can't just be like, Oh yeah, I'll do that too, you know? I'll just hope for the I'll just hope for the vibes to continue. I won't ask a question, and I'll just make the road as like, uh, frictionless as possible for her. So I don't know that's that. That's what I was thinking this morning. No,
Arjun Singh
it's a great point. I mean, the best we can hope is that there, there is still a hunger amongst the electorate for more than just vibes. And you know, maybe we'll start to see those calls even from hardcore fans as we get closer to the election. Anyways. Jay, thanks for joining us, taking the time to hang out with us here on lever time. Jay,
David Sirota
thanks for doing this, man. Appreciate it. Hey. Now,
Jay Kang
thank you. You thanks
Unknown Speaker
for
Arjun Singh
listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me, Arjun Singh, with help from Chris Walker and editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton, our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. I'm Arjun Singh, we'll be back next week with another episode of lever time. You
Transcribed by https://otter.ai