What Motivates Kamala Harris?

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

4.2 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the final stretch of Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign, including a recent media blitz on podcasts and television shows. The Vice-President has never been entirely comfortable with the interview format. “She doesn’t ruminate and reflect,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “I think it’s the self-protection that comes with being aware of people who are always going to doubt her capacity to make history.” Plus, the panel deconstructs the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” about Donald Trump’s relationship with the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This week’s reading:

“The Harris-Trump Endgame Is On: Is It Time to Panic Yet?,” by Susan B. Glasser
“How Podcasts Are Transforming the Presidential Election,” by Brady Brickner-Wood
““The Apprentice,” Reviewed: The Immoral Makings of Donald Trump,” by Richard Brody
“Has the Presidential Election Become a Game of Random Chance?,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“J. D. Vance and the Success Stories of Bidenomics,” by John Cassidy

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Did you see Obama last night?
0:02.0	He was amazing.
0:04.0	Yes, absolutely.
0:06.0	Where's that dude been?
0:08.0	Really?
0:09.0	He still got it though.
0:10.0	When he gets up and he wants to talk he can do it.
0:12.0	I thought for me anyway it was like this great reality check. It was like you know
0:17.2	Rip Van Winkle came back and woke up and said my God what has going on with you people and he was like he was saying you know my fellow my When did it become okay to just lie like this and to sell junk from the White House?
0:36.7	We know exactly the cohort that he's talking to.
0:39.7	You know, all three of us have encountered folks like this.
0:42.3	These are typically, in my experience,
0:45.8	centrist sort of lightly Republican, lightly Democrat. They probably voted for Obama.
0:50.8	And the truth is right now in private a lot of them are sort of saying in the
0:57.0	coded ways that people do that they basically are worried about their pocketbooks.
1:05.0	Their grocery prices.
1:07.0	I mean I think he's trying to make them say,
1:09.0	what kind of person are you if you vote for a person like that?
1:13.2	I do agree, Jane, that if we're the lobsters being boiled,
1:17.3	Barack Obama is saying, I'm not getting in that pot.
1:19.8	Right.
1:20.8	No way, please.
	...

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