PITTSBURGH — Vice President Kamala Harris heads back to Pennsylvania today to lay out her economic vision for the country at the Economic Club at Carnegie Mellon University and for an interview with MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle. Both events, like her previous ones here in Pittsburgh as well as Johnstown and Beaver County, are invite only for selected guests.
The New York Times wrote that the economic document Harris is set to deliver will be an 80-page overview, but it was not clear if the document would include specifics. To date, Harris has referred to her economic plan merely as an “opportunity economy.”
The Economic Club in Pittsburgh is well over 100 years old and has attracted economists from around the world as well as presidents and vice presidents to speak to its events. The last candidate for president to speak here was sitting president Gerald Ford on Oct. 26, 1976. Ford would go on to barely lose that race to Jimmy Carter just over a week later.
The interview with Ruhle marks Harris’s first solo network interview; she did a joint sit-down interview with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), with CNN anchor Dana Bash several weeks ago. She also did a sit-down chat with celebrity Oprah Winfrey, a reporter, last week.
Last week when Ruhle was a guest on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, she engaged in a vigorous conversation with the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens over Harris’s lack of availability for press questioning. Stephens insisted the public should “find out a little more about her” through interviews, saying, “I don’t think it is a lot to ask her to sit down for a real interview, as opposed to a puff piece in which she describes, like, her feelings of growing up in an Oakland of nice lawns.”
Ruhle admonished Stephens for suggesting people should know more about Harris while deciding whether to vote for her: “Kamala Harris is not running for perfect. She’s running against Trump. We have two choices. And so there are some things you might not know her answer to. And in 2024, unlike 2016 for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”
Now Ruhle, who doesn’t think we need to know more about Harris, is the only interviewer Harris will talk to. How interesting.
Carnegie Mellon University hosted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) a few days ago for a rally of around 200 students to encourage young people to vote in the election, saying the youth vote in Pittsburgh will shape the entire presidential race. Ocasio-Cortez was here to campaign on behalf of the Harris-Walz ticket. She was joined by Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, Allegheny County Chief Executive Sara Innamorato, and Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) of Swissvale, a Pittsburgh suburb.
Despite saying for years she opposed hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, Harris has said recently that she has changed her mind. No journalist has pressed her on how that change came about or, if she now supports it, why she hasn’t lifted the Biden-Harris moratorium on exporting liquid natural gas.
Here in Allegheny County, the natural gas industry has been an economic game changer. The decision by former Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald to drill beneath Deer Lakes Park generated over $15 million in revenue, which then in turn funded infrastructure projects through lease bonuses and royalties.
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Because of that industry, Pittsburgh’s regional economy has grown faster than other Rust Belt cities with “Ed’s and Meds” (universities such as CMU and the University of Pittsburgh along with technological and medical research and development), plus state-of-the-art medical facilities.
Just over a month ago, both the New York Times and Quinnipiac polls had Harris up 4 points over Trump in Pennsylvania. The race has tightened in recent weeks, with the RealClearPolitics polling average in the state having Harris up by 0.6 percentage points.