Highlights from comments made by Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris during a CNN interview that took place earlier Thursday and will be aired this evening at 9 pm. ET:
• Harris insisted that her “values have not changed” even as some of her policies on issues including energy and immigration had evolved significantly in her first sit-down interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. “I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris said.
• But, Harris acknowledged, she had adopted feedback from “traveling the country extensively” as vice president — leading to some of the significant policy changes from her 2020 presidential campaign. “I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems,” she said.
• “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed – and I have worked on it – that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time,” Harris said.
• Harris said she was hoping to be a president for “all Americans” — and would look to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet as a signal she was pursuing bipartisan consensus. Harris said she did not have a particular person in mind. “I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” Harris said. “I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who was a Republican.”
• Harris took some of Trump’s criticism head on, including his assertion earlier this year at a conference for Black journalists that she had only embraced her Black heritage for political purposes. “Same old, tired playbook,” Harris said.