Eugene Daniels, co-author of Politico’s Playbook and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, has been one of the few reporters closely covering Vice President Kamala Harris since the 2020 election. And after President Joe Biden bowed out of the race on Sunday afternoon and endorsed her in a social media post, Daniels’ beat suddenly became the most important in American politics.
“The excitement this week, it’s insane. Not two, but three points in just a few days into Biden’s deficit is huge,” Daniels told Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club. “But I still think she’s starting this as the underdog, and honestly, they should probably lean into that.” With only 101 days until Election Day, Daniels describes the feeling within the Harris campaign as “cautiously optimistic.”
Polls show a mixed bag for the Harris campaign. One out Friday showed her trailing Donald Trump in a slew of key swing states. While she appears to be performing better than Biden, she remains in a tight contest with Trump.
“I don’t know that they’re happy to go against Donald Trump, but I think Trump and JD Vance give them an opportunity to create a very different contrast of what the country could look like, depending on what happens on November 5th.” Despite a major outspending by Trump’s campaign to Harris’ on TV ads this week, Daniels says cash is not a problem for the Democrats. “We’re talking about a billion plus dollars over the next hundred days that is likely to be spent by her campaign and the Democratic and Liberal apparatus. That will matter quite a bit.”
Daniels also spoke about Harris’ veepstakes, the DNC’s virtual roll call, and the difficulties of separating Harris’ run from Biden’s record while she still serves as his vice president. Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation, edited below for length and clarity.
Aidan McLaughlin: I want to start with President Joe Biden’s exit from the race last Sunday. How surprised were you when he announced? Were you hearing from anyone on the Harris team or the Biden team that this was going to happen?
Not surprised, but shocked, right? It’s felt like every day since June 27th, there were moments where it felt like he’s good. And then oh, crap. It’s bad again. It was this whiplash that the Democratic Party was taking us through. And then after that convention and you started to see how strong the Republican Party was, at least presenting itself, I was talking to Democrats who were like, it’s over. By the time they get back, and they being members of Congress, on that Monday after the convention, they’re going to come out in full force, more publicly than they had up until that point. We ended up finding out that on Saturday, his closest aides, Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, showed him the worst of it, told him that the bad was coming from members of Congress, showed him how the path had closed. And all of these swing states, it was just too much. And it became very, very clear to him. Everyone outside of a very small group, up until he pressed send on that letter, was saying, “You guys are idiots. Don’t you dare say this man is leaving.” And I don’t fault them. They were working with the information that they had. It speaks to, though, how insular the already insular Biden camp had become. That even people who if this was 3 or 4 weeks ago, you talk to them, they would have known what was happening, what was coming, and they maybe wouldn’t have been as full-throated. I was on a vacation with my husband’s family in Minnesota. I had just come from Milwaukee and went straight to Minnesota. I was drinking a delicious-ass strawberry margarita at Zorbaz when the letter came out, and immediately I started calling people to make sure it was real because you never know nowadays. People were crying because they were so surprised. One person I talked to was crying and said, “We were promised that this wasn’t happening. We were assured last night or this morning that this man was staying in.” So the speed at which it moved from him making the decision, to them writing the letter, to it going out, I don’t know that we’ve ever seen anything go that quickly. He called the vice president. There was the group of people that made the decision with him and wrote the letter. She was the first call outside of that group to let her know, it’s you, kid. I’m gone and I’m going to endorse you. And then her and her team and the Biden team were off to the races as of 1:46 p.m. Sunday.
I was shocked by how quickly Harris mobilized to consolidate support for her nomination in the hours after Biden dropped out. I’d say within 24 hours she had been crowned the Democratic pick. Even less. How did she pull it off?
Her team, as soon it became clear that Biden was going, she basically had her closest aides come to the VPR and didn’t really tell them why. I was talking to one of them on Sunday, right as Biden’s letter came out, and I was like, is this real? They were running and getting an Uber. And I was like, oh shit, you’re going to the VPR. Something’s happening. And so they mobilized her team. They had this list, which ended up being at the end of the day more than 100 top Democrats. And that’s members of Congress, governors, people like President Obama, for her to call and to make clear that she was running. And to make them feel good. These are the Grand Poobahs, so if you want to sew up a nomination that quickly, you need to let them know, hey, I know this has been a tough process, what people said to me was she said something along the lines of, I didn’t want this day to go by without you hearing from me. So that is an acknowledgment from her and her team, it wasn’t worry, but it was making sure that there wasn’t going to be some kind of fight. And then calls to people like the would-have-beens of 2024 and the hopefuls in 2028 for sure. It is surprising how quickly they did it because you’re talking about more than 100 calls in ten hours. She’s walking around the VPR in a Howard University hoodie and sweatpants. She was hanging out with her family who was in town. Her brother-in-law and other members of the family were in town this past weekend. They were eating anchovy pizza, she really likes anchovy pizza for some reason. I’m not sure why that is. That face you’re making of disgust is the one I had, I think it’s a bit weird. And so that speed was them acknowledging that they did not want this to be a fight and she wants this. This is a woman who has run for president. Also for Democrats, I think it is just less drama for them. They’ve been through a lot since June 27th. And so it’s been like, you know what? She’s already here. She has the money, access to his money. She is popular enough with the Democratic base. She changes the electorate a little bit. So let’s just not cause anything else.
I still get asked this a lot by people, and while I think the answer is obvious, I want to ask you because you’re plugged in: how certain is it at this point that she’s going to be the nominee?
She has all of the commitments. They’re doing a virtual roll call so we’ll know soon enough. I think it’s kind of over. Unless, I mean, fate intervenes all the time. That has happened a lot over this election, over the last few weeks. In the world in which we live in, when something crazy could happen, sure, it’s possible. I just don’t see how. The people who said they aren’t interested are already out endorsing, and talking about the party coming around her, and going out and wanting to campaign for her, sending emails asking for money on her behalf. And this is a party that is buoyed by black people. I never thought it was going to be anyone but her fighting left. We had all these conversations about whether there would be mini-primaries, but if there are, she’s going to be the nominee. The end result was always going to be the same because if you hop, skip, and jump over not just a black woman, but the black woman who’s been the vice president, if she was just a senator still, we would be having a different conversation. This is a woman who has been serving as the vice president this entire time. This is someone who had already been running with this man. So if you’re talking about the 14 million people who voted for him, they were also voting for her in turn. And there’s still a possibility that she could lose. So if I’m one of these other hopefuls who want to run, why would I only give myself 107 days to introduce myself to the American people? She doesn’t have to really do that. She’s already there. But if they were to hop in, let’s say Josh Shapiro hops in. Now, he has 107 days to do everything you’re supposed to do in two years. Getting all the money, introducing yourself to the American people, figuring out a convention, getting a running mate, getting around the country, doing all the interviews, all the sit-downs that you need to do for people to get to know you. It’s just the heaviest lift. And there’s no guarantee that you would win. So it’s like, maybe if we’re not going to win, I might just stay and keep my powder dry until the end of 2024, and see what happens here.
The Associated Press had this incredible stat, you guys quoted it in Playbook this morning, they found that Trump is outspending Team Harris 25 to 1 on television radio advertising this week. That’s $68 million versus $2.6 million. Is that a concern for the Harris campaign?
I think they’re in a honeymoon period, but they’re also aware they’re in honeymoon period. It’s also funny because you still think of it as the Biden campaign. As of today, Thursday, it’s still an x, y @JoeBiden.com. So they’re going to have to change their emails and all of these things. But I think they’re figuring out what that’s going to look like. They were already spending a lot of money against Trump, so I don’t think they’re going to have that issue. They also got $100 million in 24 hours. The cash is there. The big dollar donors who were saying, we’re withholding our money unless Joe Biden goes, have started to release that. So it’s not going to be a money question. It’s going to be a where question. Where are the places that they feel like they played the best against Donald Trump? I don’t know that they’re happy to go against Donald Trump, but I think they feel like if it was Nikki Haley, this would be a lot harder. I think Trump/Vance gives them, they believe, an opportunity to create a very different contrast of what the country could look like, depending on what happens on November 5th. Also the idea of running a former prosecutor against a convicted felon is already a part of the messaging. The ability to message something that clean and that easy is a huge part of how they’re feeling all hyped right now. Next week, that could change. Something could happen and change that. The party might start infighting again before the convention or something. Depending on how the convention goes, it also could change things. But they’re feeling cautiously optimistic, that’s kind of the vibe I’m getting from folks.
What’s the team that she’s putting into place like? Do you know how different that is going to be from Biden campaign’s team?
At this point, it’s not a fresh start. It’d be impossible to be a fresh start. You’re talking about hundreds of people across the country, not just like hanging out in Wilmington, Delaware, in the headquarters. They’re going to bring some of her old people back in. I’ll keep their names out of it, but there are conversations they’re having with folks who used to work for her that she’s very close to on the policy and politics front, that have already been a part of it, and were helping her even on debate prep when she was going to go against JD Vance, that are coming back closer. You can tell by some of the tweets that are happening and where some folks are that used to work for her, they are now with her at some of these events all of a sudden. She’s keeping Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Julie Chávez Rodríguez who were at the top there. Mike Donilon who was key, I think he was chief strategist. He’s not out. They bristle at that, the idea of him being out. He is there working through what his participation will look like. But it will not look the same as it did with Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. So there’s a world in which she needs to keep some stability, even at the top. But I would not be surprised if she can get some new friends in. There’s a conversation about people like Jim Messina, David Plouffe, Jim Margolis, who did ads for Biden and is a huge ad maker and mover and shaker in Democratic politics, because they also want to make sure that the donors feel safe the entire time. She’s not had the greatest relationship with the donor class, which is largely white men. And so getting some of the folks they’re comfortable with as a part of this and signing off on this Harris campaign is an important aspect of how her and her allies are thinking about this.
I think it’s safe to say that towards the end of Biden’s campaign, there was a lot of friction between the Biden team and the press. There were questions in the press shop about whether or not they were forthright about Biden’s age and his fitness behind the scenes. Is there a better relationship between the press and the Harris team, or is there a lot of friction there? How do they treat the press and what does the press think of them?
They have the normal tense relationship with the press, like we want to know stuff, they’re trying to keep secrets. Always good to have that adversarial. It’s healthy. I think it’s largely that the press doesn’t have really a relationship with her press team. And that’s because they haven’t been covering her like someone like me has, who’s been in these streets with her this entire time. And my relationship, we tussle now. We tussle a lot. But they are forthright and they have they make themselves accessible. That is going to be much more difficult with every human being that’s ever written a word in American media coming and asking questions of them. I do not see them having that same posture as the Biden folks had at the end, because a lot of that was anger and fear and frustration with the situation they were in. Some of those folks were always like that. But largely the team was feeling under siege, and they were by their own party. Things could change, they’re in this honeymoon period, and so they’re feeling alright. But if there’s a flub, if the VP pick is the “wrong person,” if something weird happens, and there’s something in that person’s background that they’re not able to find in the speedy vetting that they do, that could change. But I think largely they just don’t have a lot of press that has been covering them. And it’s really interesting, there’s less than ten of us, I’ve been consistently on the Harris beat this entire time. And a few of us were at a rally in Milwaukee and we were like, damn, nice to see you here everybody! It’s fully a different experience. And things that you used to get, conversations that you were able to have completely exclusively, now they send that message out to the larger group. So it’s all of these things that are changing the process in which her team has to engage with the press because there’s so much interest. A lot of people on her team have told me that some of the phone calls they’ve been getting were really surprising. They didn’t know those people had their numbers. And in the last couple of weeks, that’s changed. So it’s building up, that’s for sure.
When you start seeing ten New York Times reporters at the rally, the ship has sailed.
Something’s happened. It’s a bit different now.
So, who’s going to be the VP? Break some news!
I will say this. Obviously no one knows who the VP is. I don’t think they even know. They’re still vetting in the speediest way that anyone’s ever been vetted. It makes me think of the Sarah Palin decision where the vetting happened so fast and some of the holes that were there ended up being very obvious later. The vetting wasn’t that great. And people thought one group was vetting, another group thought that the other person was vetting, there was a lot of that. I don’t think that’s going to happen here. But the things that they’re looking for, I would be shocked if it wasn’t a white guy. Because this is America and the idea of putting two black people on a ticket, two women on a ticket, is something many people in this country are still uncomfortable with. And so it’s likely going to be a white guy. It’s probably going to be someone who she’s already been around a lot. Someone that she has some kind of relationship with. And then there’s the question of is there someone that can help her win one of these states that maybe she doesn’t play as well in? So you’re thinking about people like Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. If she’s able to get Josh Shapiro as the VP and you don’t win Pennsylvania, you are going to lose the election no matter what. He’s very popular in that state. Someone like Mark Kelly in Arizona. But now you lose a Senate seat. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, also very popular in that state, affable, plays in the cut, he doesn’t seem to have strong presidential ambitions for the future. All of those aspects are really important. The folks that are in the Sunbelt are really interesting, because now that it’s her, she can play in states that Biden had already closed the door on. Right. You’re talking about Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina. They have to pick so fast. They have a couple of weeks because of how the rules work for the party. So we’re gonna get an answer here very soon. The race is on. You see Andy Beshear from Kentucky, the governor, doing every TV hit. I ain’t seen him on TV this much ever. Doing TV hits, attacking JD Vance. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t in the delivery. But you can see the tryouts. Like Tim Walz doing a lot of TV. Folks who are making it clear they’re interested. You see people like Mark Kelly maybe shifting some of their policy ideas about labor, for example. All those things are happening because their allies are also working VP Harris’s team on like, “You gotta love him. You thought he didn’t like labor, well let’s go change that.” So those are the things that are happening right now. It’s been like House of Cards, Scandal, Veep all rolled into one.
Trump is historically unpopular as a political figure, and he had, to put it mildly, a fairly wacky presidency, left office on not great grounds. And yet a new CNN poll found that Harris is still down three points to Trump nationally, although that’s half of Biden’s deficit a week ago. What do you make of the polling at this point? Do you think that we’re going to start seeing more momentum for Kamala Harris, or do you think that this is still going to be a huge uphill climb for her?
I think she’s starting this as the underdog, and honestly, they should probably lean into that. If I’m them, you have 104 or 5, wherever we’re at right now, I would just lean into that. Don’t send the email that says, “We’re desperate. Give us the money.” Don’t be weird. But make it clear that this is a race that has started so close to the election that they have a lot of ground to make up in different states, and they need people to do things. Because if you make people feel comfortable, confident, they may stay home, they may not go out and knock on doors, they may not donate that money. I think polling has been difficult for a long time. I think it’s going to be really hard to get a sense of what the American people think about this race, because the fundamentals are changing in real time. My polling folks, they do a good job, they work real hard, but it’s just going to be really difficult because it changes the electorate. So what they were thinking, and the people they thought they should be pulling a lot for this election, now you have to expand that out to more young people, black people, brown people, people that she does better with. And that are maybe more interested in a Vice President Harris versus President Biden going back to the White House. And we are going to see her get a bump likely here. The excitement this week, it’s insane, not two, but three points in just a few days into Biden’s deficit is huge. And that’s before. They haven’t really done any paid advertising at this point. So you’re talking about a billion plus dollars over the next hundred and something days that is likely to be spent by her campaign and the Democratic and Liberal apparatus, that then will matter quite a bit. And if you mess up in three months, that’s a tough pill to swallow in a way. But the ability to focus on all of this right as the American people actually start paying attention to this election may or may not show up in the polls and we’ll figure out the real answer on November 5th.
Fox News invited Trump and Harris for a third debate. Given that she’s the underdog now, do you think that’s something that she should consider doing?
I don’t see why not. First of all, I’m someone who thinks they should debate all day, all the time. The American people deserve to see what they’re getting up close. There’s no better test of how these people are going to interact with world leaders across the stage, and what they’re going to do when things get tough than watching them debate someone who hates them. Understanding what they’re going to be doing in the future is is key. I think she should. I don’t know why she wouldn’t. I mean, it’s Fox News and they have their own feelings about Fox News. But I think if you want to prove that you will go anywhere at any time, then why not? When she was VP, when she was the running mate, she had only accepted a CBS debate with whoever Trump was going to pick. And I asked her, I did a phoner with her about the VP pick that Trump was going to be making and the debate. And I tried to get her to say, will you do it anywhere, anytime with them? And she said, “I look forward to that CBS debate.” So they’re still going to try and work that through. But there are definitely people in her inner and outer circle that are telling her, you know what, we should probably do it. We’ll probably get a decision here pretty soon.
Republicans are looking to cast Kamala Harris as the architect of the crisis at the Southern border, which is a big issue for voters. A poll from earlier this year found immigration is the top issue for voters. This became a media story this week because a bunch of outlets wrote fact checks insisting that Harris was never technically crowned border czar by Biden, that she was tasked with tackling the root causes of immigration in a few Central American countries. You’ve been covering Harris for all this time. Is that a silly distinction? How much of a role did she have in the response to the border? And are Republicans within bounds to refer to her as a border czar because of her role there?
She wasn’t the border czar. It’s just not true. And I’m not defending, if you go back, I’ve written some tough stories on the woman, but she just wasn’t the border czar. I’ll never forget, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot since they started the border czar talk, they had this press call, a background call about this before it came out. And they were very explicit that she is not handling the border. And if you look at the actual work she did surrounding immigration, she wasn’t dealing with the border. She was dealing with the root causes of immigration from Northern Triangle countries, that doesn’t really roll off the tongue as well as border czar. But when it comes to the messaging, it’s just hard to battle that, like she’s the border czar and you move on, versus, “Actually we were dealing with the root causes of irregular migration from these three countries.” That doesn’t roll off the tongue as much. She wasn’t involved, that we can tell at this point, in any of those immigration policy decisions largely. She had this very specific role that Joe Biden also had toward the end of the Obama-Biden administration. That doesn’t mean it’s going anywhere. They know that it has been a part of her arc this entire time. You can remember even when she was just the running mate, they were running ads against her and having her part of the ads because it’s a good tactic. Being like, both of these people messed this up. They already have a big runway, Republicans on this attack. It’s not true. But it’s 2024 and some of that sometimes doesn’t even matter.
Now, you reported last year that Harris, behind closed doors, was pushing Biden to speak differently about Palestinians and to get tougher on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who spoke before Congress this week. And Harris notably skipped that speech. But she met with Israel’s prime minister on Thursday. What should we expect from Harris when it comes to U.S. policy towards Israel? And do you think she’ll be able to thread the needle in terms of appealing to young voters who are appalled by the war in Gaza and still maintaining Democratic voters who want the next president to be supportive of Israel?
It’s going to be backflips, on backflip, on backflip, trying to figure out how you do this. The speed at which they have to figure out this messaging and how hard it’s going to be is something I’m very fascinated by. We did that reporting, me and my colleague Holly Otterbein, and it was clear to us, one, that the Harris team did not want that out there. They didn’t want it to be known that there was daylight between Biden and Harris on this. The White House did not want that out there, but there just is. There just is daylight between them on this issue. Biden has this really strong relationship and weird frenemy thing with Netanyahu, and has for a long time. And so she was saying things publicly about Netanyahu, and the way she was saying things was much different than Biden because they don’t have that relationship. And she was kind of playing bad cop to his better cop. And she was the first one to call it a humanitarian catastrophe, upping the ante on what was happening to Palestinians. She’s told her staff, she’s told President Biden and other aides and allies in the White House that they need to talk differently about Palestinians. That ended up happening. That they should be harder on Netanyahu. That ended up happening. I’ve been told that she is not going to flip the table because she’s still vice president. So there’s an awkwardness there. Biden has to be able to still get that ceasefire in the way that he wants to. I will say they were not frowning this week when I was saying that there was daylight between the two of them on this issue, the Harris team and her allies, they weren’t pissed about it anymore. So they want to make it clear, make it obvious. But how they do it is still uncertain for them. And it’s going to be fascinating to watch for us. I will say, on the issue of Israel and Palestine, or Israel and Hamas’s war, when you look at the polling, the amount of people who say it’s their top issue, is actually a subset of a subset of a subset. And so it’s going to be more about how you message what the future might hold. I’m not so particular about this war, but more about the treatment of Palestinians. What happens the day after, which is something Vice President Harris has been obsessed with from the beginning of this war. She went to Dubai and in her speech, talked about that. Like we need to figure out the day after and work with all the stakeholders. So she’s already moving forward with that, but I don’t know. That is a tough needle to thread because there’s one president at a time all in all things, but definitely when it comes to foreign policy.
It’s going to be so interesting to see how she runs for president while serving as vice president. That’s a really interesting point.
And it doesn’t happen often. You don’t have to go talk bad about the guy’s policies and then go in the Oval Office typically. Like Biden on debate stages during the primary talked about Obama and his immigration policy and basically said that they’d made a mistake in deporting too many people. He didn’t have to go hang out with Obama the next day. She has to go back to work every day that she does an interview, every day that she does a speech in a rally. So she has to, on all policy stuff, distinguish, but not distance. I’ve talked to chiefs of staff for Al Gore, and that’s the key. And the communication between the teams is going to have to be much more important. The good news for her is that there’s not a lot of time. There’s only so many times this is going to pop up and she’s going to have to do it.
Now I want to talk about you, Eugene.
I was enjoying talking about Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.
No, we have to talk about you. I want to get to the personality. I want to know what makes Eugene Daniels. I didn’t know this: Your dad was a lieutenant colonel in the US Army. You were committed to playing D1 football. You’re from Texas. You’re the star football player. Dad’s in the army. You’re the all-American dream, Eugene.
Thank you very much. My family likes to think so.
Why did you get into journalism? Where did that come from?
When I was a kid, I was a kind of a nerd. And so when people would ask what I wanted to do, I would actually say I wanted to be a lawyer. I want to be a politician. And I wanted to be the first black president. As a kid, I was saying that. They were like, okay, you don’t want to be an astronaut, nope, jet pilot, nope. And I kept that in my head until college, actually. And I’m sitting in a class called the Politics of Special Interest Groups. And I realize that I cannot in good conscience do the things that politicians feel like they need to often end up doing to deal with that. Hanging out with lobbyists too much, taking weird money, the dark money thing. It just really bothered me. So I left and I’d taken one journalism course as an elective. And the woman, I fell in love with her, she wasn’t an advisor of mine, but I was close with her, and I just thought she was so smart. Ms. Pam Jackson. I go to her and I say, oh my God, what I do. My dream is over. I have to leave college now. Meanwhile, I’m also playing football at the time at college, so clearly there’s other things happening. But she said to me, maybe you don’t want to be a powerful person. Maybe you want to hold powerful people accountable. And that was it, that clicked in my head. And I just dove headfirst into figuring out how I could do journalism. Not what it meant, I knew all that, but how I would be able to do it. I did everything at student media at Colorado State University where I went, I took all the classes. I did the radio. I had a radio show called Out of Sight, Out of Mind. I did the CTV, which was doing anchoring, I wrote for the newspaper, I wrote for the magazine. I had this late night talk show called Daniels After Dark.
Is that available still? Can we get Daniels After Dark online?
Beyoncé has been good to me. I have not been able to find it. Now that I said that, I know people are going to go look for it. But it was just about trying to figure out what did that look like for me and how did I fit into the larger question of journalism. Because even at that time when I was in the closet and I was just a big black guy, there still weren’t a lot of people doing the work at all. And so I went to local TV right after college in Colorado Springs, and I started as a producer. I did the overnight, which is way too much power to give a 22-year-old. We didn’t have any supervision. So we’d come in around 11 and just write the show, at 4:30 to 6, the folks were on the air. I did assignment managing. I did some MMJing and camera a couple of times. And when I was wanting to be on camera full time because I wanted to be a TV reporter at the time, I went through all the hoops that everyone did. I figured out how to do a package and the voice coaching. And after all of that was done, I went to the general manager. I was like, deal me in Coach. Everyone had been like, you got to get him on, he would be great, I had the support of the newsroom. And I went to the general manager of the station, and he said to me that my voice was too black to be on air full-time in Colorado Springs.
Oh my God.
Yeah. Weird, right? And so at the time, this is like 2013, maybe 2014. So it’s a different world now. Like now, I think a lot of young people would feel empowered to be like, oh hell no.
Tweeting it out, getting the guy fired.
Telling everybody. And so I just left and went back to work. And I thought maybe this isn’t for me, because he thinks that. At most obviously, it was racist and jacked up for him to say that, but at the very least, it was just bad advice. It didn’t give me anything to work with. So what I would learn from that is a lot of people are going to have a lot of opinions. You don’t have to listen to all of them. Not all of the opinions serve you. Don’t have blinders on and think you know everything, but if there’s an outlier, and he was an outlier, and has been an outlier for a very long time, then maybe you have it right. And I think about something my mom said when I was younger. I was going through a tough time. And she said, “Who cares about these local yahoos? One day the world will take notice.” I don’t know what she meant at the time. I don’t really know what she meant, but what I took from that is to stay focused. Stay focused on what you’re trying to do. Because a lot of people have a lot of opinions and you don’t have to take it all in.
You’re now co-author at Playbook, which is one of the most influential perches in American political journalism, so your mother was right. What’s your reporting process? Are you someone who just calls as many people as possible? Are you taking out sources to drinks? What’s your process for getting news and reporting it out?
I was on the video team at Politico before I joined Playbook, so the change has been head-spinning. And so I took a little from what everyone did. So all of what you said. Drinks, coffee, lunch, dinner. Not the club, because I’m too old. Phone calls all day. Something that Yamiche Alcindor told me before was she would wake up in the morning and just write down a list of people to call that day. And so I’ve done that, just checking in with people all the time. And I was covering everything Biden, Congress. At Playbook, we do it all. But I was the only person at Politico really that was tied to Vice President Harris this entire time. So I had a lot of leeway to play. And that was great. Because the storylines there went on forever and were themes that were always around. And so I think that made it made it easier. I didn’t feel like I was diving headfirst, I felt like I had jumped in. Figuring out how you do sourcing, who you should source up with, it changes depending on what you’re covering, and when you cover a White House, outside-in is always better. So lots of advocates, lots of allies of Biden-Harris. As soon as someone goes into that White House and we get one of those readouts of the folks in the meeting, I’m texting and calling and looking for that number. Because that’s the best way I have found of getting any kind of information. This White House, unlike the Trump White House, it’s not leak-proof, but it is really difficult to get things from inside there because of the ‘moving toward the same goal’ thing that they have going on. But it’s exhausting, but it’s exhilarating in all the ways that you can think of. I’m having fun. I’m exhausted. I don’t know if you can see the bags under my eyes.
No.
Thank you. That’s the concealer. But it continues to be this really exciting ride. And I am also lucky, not very gay black men do political journalism. And so I like that aspect of it. And the kind of little fraternity of us that there are, and getting advice, and talking to them as I walk through this journey, it’s good. And I always think about this advice that my mom gave me as a kid. She’s very good at advice. You don’t always know what it means, and sometimes you never figure it out. But it sounds good. She said, “You belong in every single room you find yourself in.” Leah Daniel shoutout!
The downside there is that I’ve been in some rooms that probably I shouldn’t be in.
Yeah. Weird rooms. It only works if you’re going in the right room. Exactly. But that aspect of it has made the idea of sourcing, and the idea of going and yelling a question at the vice president or the president, or sitting down across from them and doing an interview, it makes all of it less daunting. And that’s my favorite piece of advice that I’ve ever gotten. And that’s what keeps me normal, I feel like I’m pretty normal. This is a little crazy. And so I try to stay as normal as possible as it’s happening.
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