As if in direct response to the nonstop taunts from the likes of FOX NEWS that have provided a daily updating of how many public appearances she has made in contrast to her opponent since she was anointed as the Democrats’ savior, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are seizing upon a down week for the entertainment industry to do an old fashioned car wash. Yesterday was Harris’ busiest day yet as she traversed through Manhattan, starting out with an early morning gig on Howard Stern’s Sirius XM program and culminating with a late night appearance on THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT. In between, a short trip down the West Side Highway to chat with THE VIEW’s cast in their new digs, but otherwise a fairly compacted schedule that likely only frustrated a few midtown Uber drivers.
The gap is still significant, to be sure, but no doubt the Harris-Walz team can’t help but notice that there are still an uncomfortable (to them) number of undecided voters who simply need some sort of connection with someone who has hardly been a significant presence as veep or has gone out of her way to change that. Colbert at least provided her a chance to try and did his best to provide the proper setting for it, as NEWSWEEK’s Ewan Palmer reported early this morning:
Vice President Kamala Harris cracked open a beer and repeatedly attacked her 2024 rival Donald Trump during her interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday. Harris also discussed hopes for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, and reacted to allegations that Trump secretly sent Russian President Vladimir Putin COVID-19 testing kits in 2020. Harris’ friendly and joke-filled interview with Colbert was part of a planned media blitz for the vice president in the final few weeks of the 2024 campaign.
“So would you like to have a beer with me? So I can tell people what that’s like?” Colbert asks before bringing out two cans of Miller High Life, which is brand the vice president asked for beforehand.
“The last time I had a beer was at a baseball game with Doug,” Harris said referring to her husband, Doug Emhoff.
“The champagne of beers,” she added in reference to Miller High Life’s nickname.
“So that covers Wisconsin,” said Colbert, in reference to the key swing state where the Miller Brewing Company was founded.
And so it went, with occasional harder discussions and rhetoric, such as her assessment of what she thought about Trump’s gifting of those at-the-time rare as hensteeth testing kits:
“I ask everyone here and everyone who is watching, do you remember what those days were like? You remember how many people did not have tests and were trying to scramble to get them?” Harris said.
“You remember people by the hundreds were dying every day, we would watch the number every day being reported of people who were dying…and this man is giving COVID test kits to Vladimir Putin?
“He thinks Vladimir Putin is his friend. What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”
“Donald Trump openly admires dictators and authoritarians. He has said he wants to be a dictator from day 1 if he were to be elected again as president,” she said. “He admires so-called strongmen and he gets played because they flatter or offer him favor.”
It was indeed light entertainment, nothing even close to the temperature that Stern, historically the outlet for such histrionics as contestants competing for prizes by eating vegetables straight out of people’s buttholes, set at the top of the day, as HUFFPOST’s Daniel Marans shared:
In a live interview on “The Howard Stern Show” on Tuesday afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly sought to reassure host and supporter Howard Stern that there is still hope for the country’s future.
The most common theme…was Stern expressing some combination of disbelief and horror at the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency, and Harris responding with on-message optimism about Americans’ goodness and her determination to do all it takes to win.
“It seems like the country is so angry right now,” Stern said.
“We should remember the good,” Harris responded. “And I don’t mean to sound naive, but we have to remember the good — with so many hardworking, good people who I have the great experience of meeting every day.”
But amidst all of that, as Marans also related, there was a far lighter side that Colbert viewers did not see:
Stern’s hourlong conversation with the Democratic presidential nominee on his Sirius XM show followed the casual, stream-of-consciousness style the seasoned broadcaster has used with countless other politicians and celebrities. In a nod to Harris’ love of the late pop star Prince, Stern played her in with Prince’s “Batdance,” prompting a brief discussion of her and husband Doug Emhoff’s musical tastes — Emhoff is more of a Depeche Mode guy, but Prince is one case where the couple overlap — that gave way to friendly queries about Harris’ feelings about her portrayal on “Saturday Night Live,” the psychological burden of her candidacy, Harris’ upbringing and early career, the stakes of the race, and her policies.
Given the bar that previous Presidential candidates set for her on their late night appearances, I kind of wish she had saved something like for her beer chat. POLITICO’s Claire Rafford chronicled a couple of them in a writeup from late 2021:
Perhaps the most memorable on this list, President Bill Clinton’s appearance on the Arsenio Hall show had him playing the saxophone with Arsenio Hall.
Clinton, then-governor of Arkansas, sported sunglasses while he performed a jazzy saxophone rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel.”
While the saxophone performance was the most notable part of the night, in a sit-down interview with Hall, Clinton discussed topics like his presidential campaign, the Los Angeles uprisings and the economy. Hillary Clinton also joined for part of the interview.
Heck, even her opponent had been more entertaining and accessible when he was a first-time candidate:
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump allowed Fallon to ruffle his hair, creating a look an observer might call “windswept.” Trump, who was headed to a campaign rally in New Hampshire after his appearance on the show, addressed rally attendees before his hairdo was “done.” “I hope they’re going to understand,” Trump said.
Fallon received a lot of criticism for his hair tussle, saying in 2018 that he regretted the move and that he did not intend to “normalize” Trump. The former president tweeted a response, which ended with, “Be a man Jimmy!”
Walz handled the LA part of things the night before when he chatted with Jimmy Kimmel. DEADLINE’s Ted Johnson recapped that, with a reminder that Walz didn’t need alcohol to make him accessible:
As Kimmel asked Walz about being a social studies teacher, he mentioned also supervising the lunch room.
“This is no good deed goes unpunished,” Walz said. “One of my first years there, I went over to the freshman table and they were getting kind of loud, and I’m like fellas, calm down. I look over and a kid has got milk coming out of his mouth and turning kind of blue. I look down and there is half a Polish dog there, and I realize he’s choking on the Polish dog. So I grabbed him … and I gave him the Heimlich and I popped the Polish dog across the room. I got lunchroom duty every year after that.”
Kimmel’s “endorsement” was almost understandable after that exchange:
“I can come up with no greater compliment than this, but you seem to me like the kind of guy who cleans the lint out of the dryer after every use,” Kimmel said at the end of the segment.
Needless to say, the Trump team’s “review” which forced an update to the Newsweek piece was anything but laudatory:
“Kamala Harris showed herself to be a stone-cold liar and fraud, unable to answer any questions truthfully or intelligently,” a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign told Newsweek about the interview.
“She repeated false claims and tried to gaslight the American people, but the reality is that she can’t run from the disastrous policies she oversaw for the past four years that have caused pain and destruction.”
So I guess the need for her to get out there a little more is probably still top-of-mind. She clearly has nicer hair for Fallon to tousle should he desire. She’s quite close with Kimmel’s ultimate boss, so I’m sure he could uncover a scenario where she did something more heroic than the Heimlich.
Or perhaps she could take up a musical instrument. Richard Nixon played piano, and he began his retribution tour with an appearance on Jack Paar’s show soon after he lost his bid for governor of California. Rafford reminder her readers of that otherwise forgotten visit:
Paar, ever the comedian, invited Nixon to perform a song he had written himself, along with “15 democratic violinists” to accompany Nixon on his “hinky-dinky song.” Before performing, Nixon jokingly addressed the question of whether he would run for office again. “The Republicans don’t want another piano player in the White House,” he said, likely a dig at President (and pianist) Harry Truman. Nixon’s concerto lasted just a few minutes, but earned him raucous applause from the crowd.
CHOPSTICKS can be learned quickly, C’mon, Kamala, get those fingers working.
Until next times…