By Reagan Reese, Daily Caller News Foundation | March 13, 2025
Former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign became obsessed with the height of her chair during media hits and other appearances, according to an excerpt of “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for their first interview of their campaign in late August, more than a month in, taking questions from CNN’s Dana Bash. Observing that the former vice president looked smaller than Walz, campaign officials worried that would reinforce the ongoing criticism that she was “incapable, or afraid of answering tough questions on her own,” Allen and Parnes write in their book, set to release in April. So the campaign implemented strict rules on what chairs she was allowed to sit on while running for president, according to the excerpt.
“For the rest of the campaign, her team required that she be provided a chair that met certain specifications: ‘Leg height no less than 15 inches; floor to top of seat height no less than 18.9 inches; arms on chairs may not be very high, arms must fall at a natural height; chairs must be firm,'” Allen and Parnes write in an excerpt of their book.
Pressure mounted on Harris in the first month of her campaign as she avoided sit-down interviews and her staff were quoted reversing several of her policy stances. In her first interview, she brought her running mate along and continued to try to explain her flip-flops.
“When you were in Congress, you supported the Green New Deal, and in 2019, you said, quote, ‘There is no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.’ Fracking, as you know, is a pretty big issue, particularly in your must-win state of Pennsylvania. Do you still want to ban fracking?” Bash asked.
Harris responded by at first telling the CNN host that she no longer wanted to ban fracking and she had made that clear in 2020 when she was running for president. Bash countered by pointing out that Harris had previously said in a 2019 town hall that she did in fact want to ban fracking. The CNN host then asked Harris why she wanted to change her 2019 position in 2020.
On the campaign trail, chair height wasn’t the only reported issue. The Harris campaign reportedly wanted to distance itself from President Joe Biden, but instead the vice president struggled to do so.
“If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host of “The View” Sunny Hostin asked Harris in early October to kick off her lineup of friendly interviews.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I’ve been apart of most of the decisions that have had impact,” Harris began. “The work we have done, for example, capping the cost of insulin at $35 a month for our seniors. It’s something I care deeply about, about allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices and bring the cost of prescription medication down for seniors but my intention is to expand that for all Americans.”
The failure to distance herself from Biden reportedly occurred because of pressure from the president himself.
Ahead of her first, and only, presidential debate against now-President Donald Trump, Biden called Harris to give her some advice, Allen and Parnes write in their book.
“Whether she won or lost the election, he thought, she would only harm him by publicly distancing herself from him — especially during a debate that would be watched by millions of Americans. To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him,” the book reads.
“‘No daylight, kid,'” Biden said, according to the book.
Reagan Reese is a white house correspondent at the Daily Caller News Foundation
Original article link
