Behind the Scenes, Courtesy of Bret Baier: Team Harris Tried to ‘Ice the Kicker’ Before Kamala Interview

Kamala Harris conducted a filibuster interview with Fox News host Bret Baier where she talked incessantly but said little, appeared to grow angry on several occasions, and simply said the name “Trump, Trump, Trump” over and over when peppered with tough questions. 

She’s so used to not being pushed back on by mushy corporate media outlets that she seemed wholly unprepared to deal with a journalist who actually followed up when she deflected.

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After the sit-down, Baier revealed some inside tea: namely, that in sports terms, the Democrat appointee nominee tried to “ice the kicker” by showing up late:

Dana [Perino], I’ll give you a little behind-the-scenes here. I know you love this, and it fits in with Dana Reads Sports. You know, when the kicker in football, they call a timeout right before he’s going to kick the field goal; they’re “icing the kicker.” 

So we were supposed to start at 5:00 p.m.; this was the time they gave us. Originally, we were going to do 25 or 30 minutes. They came in and said, well, maybe 20. So it was already getting whittled down and then the Vice president showed up about 5:15. We were pushing the envelope to be able to turn it around for the top of the 6:00. 

So that’s how it started.

Watch:

Baier continued, explaining that once they did finally start, the vice president’s strategy was to limit his questions:

I could tell when we started talking that she was going to be tough to redirect without me trying to interrupt. I did this with President Obama. At one point, I just said, Mr. President, I know you like the filibuster. I just didn’t even have the chance [this time], to sometimes redirect in those ways.

I had a lot of other questions.

What gamesmanship. But Fox’s Dana Perino had an excellent point: to what purpose? They may have thought they were “getting one over” on Baier and the network, but in reality, they were shooting their own selves in the foot:

Perino:

So what a missed opportunity for them, right?… I know she had that one event right before, but what’s more important than this interview today on your campaign schedule? If your goal as a candidate at this point is to win the day, win the news cycle of the day, then your interview with Fox is arguably your most important issue.

And I think you could tell at the end that you were having to rush through it so that you could get to the top of the show, and you were trying to be respectful of their time, but it would have been really interesting for her to be able to say to her team, “no, no, let’s keep going; Bret—what else do you have?”

And let it keep going.

She is right on about that. Harris’ supporters will doubtless be moved by her displays of emotion during this interview, but I imagine very few undecideds or independents will be swayed because she once again dodged the real questions that Americans care about.

Team Trump made very clear what they thought of the sit-down: they dropped the entire interview as one giant campaign ad. They’re nothing if not funny: