Last Thursday, standing on a tarmac in Michigan in front of Air Force Two, Kamala Harris took some questions from reporters. This was the first time she’d been in an unscripted situation since becoming the presumptive (and now official) Democratic nominee for the presidency, so it was a big deal—and one of the first questions she took was about whether she’d be taking more questions soon, in a more formal setting. (She said she’d try to set something up this month.)

What Harris is being hounded about—and not just by reporters on tarmacs, but by the Washington Post editorial page and the Trump campaign—is ultimately about more than whether she’ll answer questions live in public per se. It’s that she hasn’t committed herself in detailed terms to specific plans for her hypothetical presidency. As has been noted in more than one forum, there’s no policy section on her website; Politico’s Playbook complains that she has not released a “100-day agenda,” let alone a “detailed tax policy white paper.” The gripe is that her campaign has been all “vibe” and not enough “substance,” to use the Post’s formulation.

On one level, this is fair enough. It’s reasonable to ask someone who wants to be put in charge of the country’s most urgent life-or-death decisions to demonstrate that she can handle a few pointed inquiries about immigration from an irritating, 42-year-old Ivy League alumnus wearing a blue button-down shirt. It’s also fair for people who will be affected by the policy-setting power of the presidency to wonder what she might do with it. And she probably owes the public an explanation of why she’s backed off leftist-friendly positions from 2019 on issues including Medicare for All, although the explanation that is likely to be given—that voters have different priorities now, and therefore she does too—is unlikely to affect the race that much.

But the fixation on putting details in writing and answering hypothetical questions is also a bit beside the point. It ignores what we already know about how a Harris administration would look, and it isn’t actually likely to reveal much about how she’d change the country. It’s also definitely making Joe Biden want to choke........

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