Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast interview with Vice President Kamala Harris was largely a love-in. But when you have been actively avoiding the media for the majority of your presidential campaign, even the most innocuous of questions can accidentally bite.
‘You don’t do too many long-form interviews,’ Cooper put to Vice President Harris at the start of their 45 minute podcast recording. ‘What made you want to do Call Her Daddy today?’
It made complete sense to kick off Harris’s ‘media blitz’ with a long interview
One answer is listenership. Republican circles may scoff at the platform Cooper gives to sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, but those topics – and her business savvy – have roped in millions of listeners, transforming the podcast into a $100 million (£76 million) media venture which boasts some of the highest podcast downloads across the United States.
Yet Cooper’s question still hung in the air, made even more pointed (again, accidentally) by the introduction that came before the interview. ‘No topic was off limits,’ Cooper tells the Daddy Gang (her listeners) in her preamble to sitting down with Harris. ‘I prepared seven different versions of this interview. Do I talk about the economy? Do I talk about border control? Do I talk........