Sonny Hostin shares fresh insights from Kamala Harris interview
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Sonny Hostin said she feels 'terrible' that she 'took down the Democratic Party' by asking Kamala Harris to name what she would have done different to Joe Biden in the White House. Harris infamously told the liberal gabfest that there was nothing she would change from how her boss governed. 'There is not a thing that comes to mind,' Harris said.
Harris justified her reason for keeping to Biden's record by noting: 'I've been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.' Speaking to the show's producer Brian Teta on its 'Behind the Table' podcast, Hostin claimed she was right to ask the question but hated the impact it had on the election. Teta asked if she expected it to become a viral moment, to which Hostin answered: 'I knew it instantly when she answered it.' The left-leaning host admitted she desperately flailed to try and save Harris with another question on the subject. 'Which is why I asked the follow-up question, 'is there one thing?' Because I knew, I could see the soundbite and I knew what was going to happen, but I thought it was a really fair question and I thought it was a question that she would expect.'
Hostin, who was openly rooting for Harris, felt even worse when she learned the anecdote ended up in Jake Tapper's bombshell book about the cover-up of Biden's senility. 'And now Jake Tapper wrote it in his book? I feel terrible.'
Hostin refused to say it cost Harris the election but Alyssa Farah Griffin, one of the show's conservative panelists, disagreed. 'The Trump campaign put so much ad money behind that specific clip and what they were trying to do is tie her to Biden's unfavorabilities, but more than that, just simply the right-track, wrong-track of the election… They used it to say, Well, she's not going to do anything different,' Griffin said. Appearing on the popular daytime show just a month before the elections during her truncated campaign, Harris was unsteady in several of her media appearances.
Her comments were made to the hosts of ABC's The View when she appeared on the show in October for a softball interview where she was fawned over. Whoopi Goldberg introduced her as 'the next president of the United States.' The Democratic nominee was just as friendly, posing for pictures with the hosts during commercial breaks. On the view, her advisor Stephanie Cutter was floored when Harris got asked if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden. 'What the hell was that?' Cutter said she thought at the time. 'That's not what we practiced.'
Her response was also chronicled in the new book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, by reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. It also tells of other key moments, like a 'cringe' video clip where Harris had to feign surprise at picking up the endorsement of Barack and Michelle Obama. Failing to identify a single issue where she parted with Biden yoked her even more to the president, who had bowed out after his debate disaster but was also unpopular in opinion polls going back years.
It denied her the opportunity to hold up a policy difference that might define her as something different beyond being a younger alternative. 'It provided the money shot' for negative ads that would tie link Harris and Biden. 'And it was her own bad moment. When she gave us the gift of the View interview, we were able to anchor her to the Biden administration in her own words, which is something we were trying to do anyway,' a Trump advisor told the authors.
Donald Trump, Jr. was even more forceful, as DailyMail.com reported at the time. 'And just like that, Kamala's entire bull[expletive] campaign about being a 'change agent' collapses. You can't call yourself a change agent when you not only agree with every single disaster Joe Biden is responsible for, but you brag about being involved in all those decisions!,' he wrote on X. Aides had given Harris a list of items that made her 'proud of her work with Biden.'
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