The Week: Presidential Politics and the Hurricanes

• If Harris really will follow the Biden playbook, at least it means we’ll be done with her after one term.

• 60 Minutes asked the presidential nominees to face the kinds of serious questions this campaign has lacked. For neither candidate did it go well. Kamala Harris gave such a rambling, vacuous answer to a question about Israel that CBS edited it out of its broadcast. Bill Whitaker deserves credit for patiently demanding answers when Harris would not say how she plans to pay for $3 trillion in new spending and when her only answers to questions about this administration’s shifting border-enforcement policies were to talk about Congress. Even without a single unexpected gotcha question, Harris still can’t describe what her “plan” to bring down prices is, and claimed to own a Glock—the same sort of handgun she has repeatedly tried to ban. As for Donald Trump—who walked out of a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl in 2020—he backed out of an interview, leaving CBS and the Trump camp disputing whether he had agreed to it and Trump relitigating the network’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. To see a presidential nominee perform well in an exchange with an adversarial press, we will evidently have to wait until 2028.

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• If Harris really will follow the Biden playbook, at least it means we’ll be done with her after one term.

• 60 Minutes asked the presidential nominees to face the kinds of serious questions this campaign has lacked. For neither candidate did it go well. Kamala Harris gave such a rambling, vacuous answer to a question about Israel that CBS edited it out of its broadcast. Bill Whitaker deserves credit for patiently demanding answers when Harris would not say how she plans to pay for $3 trillion in new spending and when her only answers to questions about this administration’s shifting border-enforcement policies were to talk about Congress. Even without a single unexpected gotcha question, Harris still can’t describe what her “plan” to bring down prices is, and claimed to own a Glock—the same sort of handgun she has repeatedly tried to ban. As for Donald Trump—who walked out of a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl in 2020—he backed out of an interview, leaving CBS and the Trump camp disputing whether he had agreed to it and Trump relitigating the network’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. To see a presidential nominee perform well in an exchange with an adversarial press, we will evidently have to wait until 2028.