‘Wouldn’t That Bother You?’: Jennings, Axelrod Duke It Out Over Harris’ Answer On Flip-Flops During CNN Interview

Republican strategist Scott Jennings clashed with former Obama administration official David Axelrod on Thursday about Vice President Kamala Harris’ answer to a question about policy changes.

Harris and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota sat down for an interview with CNN host Dana Bash on Thursday, the first interview Harris granted since President Joe Biden announced he was ending his reelection bid on July 21. Jennings questioned whether Harris’ policy changes indicated she could set aside values based on political advice during a panel airing on CNN after the interview. 

“You said she was in 2019, that she was taking the state-of-the-art political advice and that’s why she did what she did,” Jennings said to Axelrod. “Wouldn’t that bother, if you didn’t know anything about this person who wanted to be the president, wouldn’t that bother you to know that they might have certain instincts or values, but they’re willing to set those aside as long as the political consultants-”

“I guess my answer to you is I would take some solace in the fact that they have values and principles and that they’re not entirely transactional,” Axelrod responded. “And that is a distinction with the candidate she is running against, but even that was, that was a good… he’s a marketer and he throws ideas out and he sees what lights up the crowd and then he goes at all and that’s how the wall came about.”

Harris and Walz addressed multiple issues in the interview, including the vice president’s performance as “border czar,” her position on hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” and her insistence that Biden was “fine” in the wake of the president’s performance in a June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump hosted by CNN.