Until last Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, had not sat down for a formal interview nor any other type of interview since she named him her VP pick in early August.
It was no doubt a calculated part of the media avoidance strategy put in place by Harris herself, who for a month and a half after Joe Biden bowed out of the presidential race campaigned across the country without taking questions from the media before she and Walz sat down Thursday for a pretaped interview with CNN.
After the interview wrapped up (and presumably the moratorium on answering questions from the media lifted), Walz headed to North Carolina, where he was set to visit a local campaign office to talk to volunteers and then give a speech at a fundraiser alongside Gov. Roy Cooper, who was once floated as a vice-presidential possibility for Harris as well.
Oddly, local media outlets focused heavily on the milkshake flavor preferences of the man who could be the next vice president of the United States, with stories and tweets fast and flowing of what went down at the Cook Out restaurant Walz visited alongside Cooper.
Among the headlines were:
News and Observer: Cook Out is Gov. Tim Walz’s first stop on his first trip to NC. What did he order?
WRAL: Can you guess Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz’s Cook Out order in Raleigh?
WNCN: Tim Walz meets with campaign staffers in North Carolina; orders milkshake from Cook Out
WCNC: Can you guess what Tim Walz ordered at Cook Out?
For anyone curious, Walz had a mint chocolate chip milkshake. Cooper had his usual M&M milkshake, We know it’s his usual order thanks to all the other reports we’ve gotten about it from his past visits.
The coverage reminded me of another visit to a North Carolina Cook Out, the one then-Democratic nominee for President Joe Biden made in October 2020.
Biden was employing the basement campaign strategy that year, ostensibly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so — as it has been with Walz — it was getting increasingly difficult to get the opportunity to ask him a substantive question.
And yet with just a few short weeks to go before Election Day 2020, the burning question of what type of milkshake he ordered was asked by one of the reporters traveling with his campaign.
I get that we sometimes need good “filler” stories when there are slow news periods during which there’s not much going on worth reporting.
But last I checked, we are not in one of those slow news periods and, in fact, are deserving of more information on and about the guy who wants to be second in command in this country for four years.
That any time at all was spent on the visit to Cook Out, the milkshake purchase and the flavor choices is yet another negative mark against the press and provides us with the latest example of why so few people trust them and take them seriously anymore.
Harris no doubt will be visiting North Carolina in the coming weeks, this time as a presidential nominee rather than as the vice president stumping for Biden, which she did in mid-July during her last visit.
Let us hope that there’s much less focus on her food (and fashion) choices and more on policy when she makes those trips unless the questions revolve around why it’s so much more expensive to eat at Cook Out now than it was four years ago.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
