AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Tomorrow in Georgia, Vice President Kamala Harris will sit down with her running mate, Tim Walz, for a joint interview on CNN. It is the first interview Harris has agreed to since she became the Democratic presidential nominee. NPR has interviewed the vice president five times since she was elected, and our White House correspondent, Asma Khalid, has been digging through the NPR archives to tell us what we might learn from those conversations. Asma Khalid joins us now. Hi, Asma.
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so before we talk about those NPR interviews, I've got to ask you about this current moment because it seems like the question of when and where Harris would do an interview was becoming an issue itself on the campaign trail. Why was that?
KHALID: That's right. The Trump campaign has accused Harris of trying to dodge the press to avoid tough questions because she has not done a one-on-one interview or held a press conference. And the pressure for her, I would say, to do an interview was growing beyond conservative circles because it's been more than a month now since President Biden dropped out of the race. And during this time period, Trump himself has held press conferences.
You know, to me, what was notable, Ailsa, was that prior to becoming the nominee, Harris had actually taken a lot of questions from reporters. Her team points out that she has done 80 interviews this year alone. But in all of those conversations, she was selling President Biden's policies and sometimes sidestepping questions about what she actually thought. But now Harris is running for the top job, and there is an expectation that this CNN interview ought to be different, that she should be held accountable for her own policies and previous positions.
CHANG: Right. Well, in terms of previous positions, NPR has done five interviews with Harris since she was elected vice president. You did three of those interviews. And yeah, I'm wondering, over the course of those conversations, do you feel like you've gotten a sense of what she believes?
KHALID: I think in listening back to them, you get a sense of how she thinks about this current moment in American politics and even perhaps the framework of her presidential campaign. Ailsa, the clearest example is how she talks about freedom. This idea of reclaiming freedom is a central theme of her presidential campaign. And more than two years ago, when the Supreme Court struck down Roe, she was talking about this. Here's what she said at the time.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: It's an extraordinary thing, what has just happened, in terms of the significance to the essential principles, the essential to our nation and its founding, of freedom, of liberty, the right to privacy. It is profound in terms of where it takes us back. You know, we have a 23-year-old daughter who is going to know fewer rights than my 80-something-year-old mother-in-law.
KHALID: So you hear a glimpse of her broad vision, and, you know, you get a glimpse of how she thinks about solving problems broadly. Here she was talking about voting rights in the summer of 2021 with me.
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HARRIS: The other work that we are doing is - it's about convening folks. I've been to South Carolina and Georgia and Pennsylvania and Michigan to meet with people on the ground, leaders in their communities and their states, to get the feedback and to get an accurate sense of how people are experiencing this issue and what we can do to lift up their voices.
KHALID: She talked about organizing and coalition building. The challenge for her, though, was that when she speaks about lifting up voices, that was not necessarily sufficient for voters who wanted to see more concrete policy action from the administration.
CHANG: Yeah. Well, that's the thing. I'm hearing in those pieces of tape sort of, like, broad outlines about her approach, her vision in politics. But, like, do you get a sense of where Harris herself stood on key issues specifically?
KHALID: Not really - I mean, she often echoed President Biden, which, I would say, is to be expected because she is the sitting vice president. But one thing that stood out to me is that when I tried to press her on details about what she thought, for example, on overturning the filibuster, she did not answer directly. You know, I asked her about this when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and she said that she wanted to codify abortion access into law and was making this pitch to voters to elect more Democrats because there were not enough votes in the current Senate to pass such a law. But what I could not understand is that even if Democrats won control of the Senate, they still would not have enough votes to pass an abortion rights law through the normal process. So I asked her if she would support overturning the filibuster to codify Roe, and we spent a few minutes talking in circles.
CHANG: Wow.
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KHALID: So I want to make sure that I can...
HARRIS: To pass this law.
KHALID: ...Understand what you're saying, though. So you're saying that there wasn't Republican support for this legislation?
HARRIS: There was not.
KHALID: You're saying that - why not...
HARRIS: There was literally not. We...
KHALID: But why not push for overturning the filibuster, in that case, if - knowing that you're not going to have the Republican votes?
HARRIS: You still need the votes to overturn the filibuster, and the votes...
KHALID: And...
HARRIS: ...Don't exist.
KHALID: ...Do you individually support that idea, though? Let's say you don't have the votes.
HARRIS: Why are we talking about hypotheticals? The votes don't exist. What I support - let me tell you what I support. I support electing a pro-choice Congress to get the votes to pass the legislation to put into law a protection for women of America to make decisions about their own body without government interference.
CHANG: I mean, I hear you not getting a clear answer. Is that more about how she just doesn't want to answer the question, or is it she doesn't know how to answer the question? What do you think?
KHALID: Well, I played some of these clips for Joel Goldstein. He's arguably the foremost expert on the office of the vice presidency. And in his view, Harris was just doing her job as the No. 2.
JOEL GOLDSTEIN: You know, you're in the room, but part of the price for that is that when you go out of the room, your role is more to articulate the administration's position and not necessarily to speak in your own voice.
KHALID: At the time of that interview with Harris President Biden had not yet publicly come out in support of the filibuster for codifying Roe, and Harris, as the vice president, was not going to come out ahead of him.
CHANG: OK, so I get not wanting to come out ahead of him, but I remember when Biden - when he was vice president, he went on a Sunday show and came out in support of same-sex marriage before President Obama was publicly behind same-sex marriage. So there is some precedent for expressing personal opinions in public as a vice president, right?
KHALID: There is, but it's rare. And Debbie Walsh with the Center for American Women and Politics, specifically brought up that Biden incident from 2012 to explain why the dynamic, in her view, is different for Harris.
DEBBIE WALSH: I wonder, though, if when you are an older white man with decades of experience in the Senate - that it gives you a privilege to be able to step out as opposed - even though she doesn't talk about it as much - if you are the first woman, the first woman of color in that job, you don't have that same kind of privilege, and you might be more cautious about overstepping because that's how it would have been seen.
CHANG: All right. So white male privilege - is that the explanation there, that she doesn't have it?
KHALID: I mean, in all of these interviews, Ailsa, we clearly heard Harris as a loyal deputy, and that's what she has done these last few years in the job. But in conservative circles, she's developed a reputation for, quote, "word salad." It is true that Harris has sometimes given long-winded answers that can be difficult to follow. And a major question I've wondered is, was she constrained by the job, and will she be able to be more direct in this CNN interview? - because it is one of the first times she'll be pressed on how she would be different than President Biden if she were indeed the one in charge, making policy.
CHANG: That is NPR's Asma Khalid. Thank you so much, Asma.
KHALID: My pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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