Speaking during a Thursday, August 29, interview on Fox News Channel’s “Jesse Watters Primetime” with host Jesse Watters, Michael Larosa, the former press secretary to First Lady Jill Biden, commented on the campaign that Vice President Kamala Harris is running, arguing that she is making a huge mistake in how she is running her campaign.
His criticism of her campaign stemmed from how she has, in his view, attempted to limit her interactions with the press, something that Jesse Watters termed “the Biden playbook” of hiding out and avoiding the press as a communications strategy. Larosa argued that making the decision to avoid the press and interviews would undermine her relationship with the media and the public.
Commenting on the matter to Watters, Larosa said it’s “the worst thing” Kamala could be doing and that in avoiding the press Kamala is following in the Biden Campaign’s unproductive footsteps. He said, “It’s a process story which is the worst thing you could do. And one of the things that unfortunately the Biden team did was they ignored the press.”
Continuing, he argued that it’s unproductive because it means she will lose goodwill with the press and thus make it scrutinize her mistakes more. Larosa said, “And the problem with that is when you need the press, you lose goodwill, you lose trust. He had none of it by the end which is what really did him in. Every little thing you say is amplified and your mistakes are scrutinized even more.”
Larosa further argued that VP Harris, if she wants to win and win over the media, needs to get used to engaging with the members of the press and being willing to speak to members off the cuff. He said, “That’s unfair to do her frankly. She should be establishing a cadence of talking to the press off the cuff. Actually people connect voters connect when you do make mistakes and mistakes are forgiven.”
Watch Larosa comment on the Harris Campaign’s avoidance of the media here:
Larosa’s comments came after Kamala did the first interview of her campaign, a pre-recorded interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that Gov. Tim Walz appeared for alongside her, quite oddly to many who watched it. The interview, despite being pre-recorded and quite short, was still a mess for Kamala, who seemed to have trouble convincingly answering questions.
For example, when asked why Kamala’s campaign website is yet to add a policy section and why she has seemingly shifted on policy positions, she rambled about being consistent. Beginning, she told Bash, “I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is that my values have not changed.”
She continued, “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time. We did that with the inflation Reduction Act. We have set goals for the United States of America, and by extension, the globe around when we should meet certain standards for reducing house gas emissions, as an example, that value has not changed.”
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