Harris interview - could not maintain eye contact and keeps looking down attentively at something

Just saying that it looked like she had notes that she was referencing when it came to rattling off anything specific

Perhaps this is the reason why the Harris team tried to get "notes" added to the debate rules. She appears to be looking at something every time she needed to be specific. If this was the best she could do with notes, I am not sure how she gets through a debate.

Whenever something of substance comes up in politics where there is going to be a clear amount of subjectivity to the issue, I try to take a look at what both sides are saying. From the left, I am reading the spin that she passed the test, or that there were no big mistakes, or that she crossed a hurdle. It was the low expectations of people hoping not to see a complete shit show. From the right, the spin was that it was a trainwreck, that Harris looked anything but Presidential, and that it was riddled with lies and deception. This came from people who simply don't see her as Presidential and wonder out loud how she can get away with changing so many previously well held positions over the course of a few short weeks. They saw a shit show.

I did not watch the interview live, but have watched multiple clips provided. These clips are almost exclusively being provided by the critics rather than supporters which tends to make me believe that the critics are more confident in their spin than the supporters. But they do confirm that this was not a well oiled machine here. Off the bat, Kamala answered Bash's question in such a manner than Bash had to asked the same question a second time, as if Kamala didn't actually understand it the first time. She seemed distracted and kept looking down as if she was (as previously stated) referring to some cliff notes. Many of her answers about policy (such as fracking) are clearly deceptive or complete lies. She obviously believes she can get away with it, and Bash does very little to push back on any of it.

Tim Walz was a joke or just possibly the punchline. Why was he even there? He didn't seem to answer anything tangible, and his physical presence next to Harris did make her look small, almost childlike. His answer to the question about carrying a weapon into combat had to be asked twice as he did not answer it the first time (much like Kamala's opening question). He was too busy playing folksy, explaining himself as a man of the little guy. When he finally got around to the actual question after being pressed a second time, he suggested that it was a grammatical thing and that his wife (an English teacher) called him out on it or perhaps she just calls him out on grammar as a whole. It was a bit unclear as an answer. Either way, I guess being a teacher who speaks with poor grammar makes him hearty VP material. All of this, of course, would beg the question as to why if he knew he misspoke that he wouldn't have done something to correct it, or why he never corrected others as they introduced him as someone who had been in combat. His answer was clearly a lie, and not a very convincing lie. He wants to brush it off as a non-issue.

Overall, I don't believe this interview helps Harris at all. It might get the press off her back about why she has not done any interviews (now that she has done one). I am sure there will still be questions about why this wasn't live or why she needed her emotional support man with her, but it might damper some of the overall criticisms about her lack of interviews.