Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t give off presidential vibes in her first TV interview since replacing President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, according to a body language expert.
“When I look at her overall demeanor, she does not carry the confidence or the presidential appearance in her demeanor to command in her position,” body language expert Susan Constantine told Fox News Digital. “So for everything that I saw last night, she definitely needs to make some tweaks into her body language to appear more confident.”
Harris, 59, awkwardly hunched over a table inside a Savannah, Ga., coffee shop as she answered questions from CNN host Dana Bash on Thursday.
The vice president, who was accompanied by her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, often looked down, avoiding eye contact, as she tried to answer Bash’s questions about her policy reversals and presidential agenda.
“The fact that she’s looking down a lot removes a lot of the fluidity and the authenticity,” Constantine said.
“When you’re breaking gaze, that is a form of deflection,” she added. “So when you’re removing an eye gaze, not making good eye contact, it’s just showing me that she’s not confident in what she’s saying.”
Early in the interview, Harris was asked about her “Day One” plans, if elected to the Oval Office.
But rather than list specific executive actions, Harris indicated that she hoped to “support and strengthen the middle class” and begin work on implementing her “opportunity economy” plan – which would require congressional action.
“When she struggles, you start to see a lot of the head bobbling. You know, the head bobbling is ‘what part of the file in my subconscious am I going to pull out? Which ones are my answers?’” Constantine said about Harris’ answer. “She couldn’t come up with a crystal clear answer, and that’s why she tends to bobble.
“When you bobble and waffle like that,” the body language expert continued, “that’s another signal that she’s not really… prepared. She doesn’t really have confidence in her own answers.”
Constantine also observed that Harris was “consistently looking for acknowledgment” from Walz, 60, during the interview.
“She is looking for that signal from Walz to see if he’s on board,” Constantine noted about Harris. “Many times when we see him, he’s got the pressed lips — that tends to be a more serious, more collected, expression in his mouth.”
In the lead-up to the sit-down, Republicans charged that the vice president planned to use her running mate as a crutch if Bash’s line of questioning became too challenging.
Walz ended up speaking for roughly a fourth of the approximately 27-minute interview.
Constantine’s overall assessment was that Harris, who is seeking to become the first female president of the US in November, did not “look like a woman in power.”
“Overall, you know, as one woman to another, I would say if you’re going to be a woman in power, you have to look like a woman in power,” she said. “And she doesn’t at this time.”
