Debate Musings

Random thoughts on the Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump slugfest

(Image via Shutterstock)

I’m going to be busy with other meetings most of the afternoon, but I wanted to get some quick hit thoughts on here about the debate last night. Perhaps I’ll be back with more either tonight or tomorrow. But for now, here are a few random, initial thoughts off the top of my head.

Kamala Harris Has Game

OK, I take back everything I said about Kamala Harris being a 4A ballplayer. She had a rough run in the 2020 campaign and early in her vice presidency, which didn’t inspire any confidence in her ability to navigate a presidential campaign. But she’s obviously learned and grown in the past four years. And kudos to her for being able to grow on the job. Or maybe these skills were there all along and she merely had to get more comfortable in her own skin. Whatever, something worked.

When Barack Obama gave the 2004 convention speech that launched his national career, he said to one of his advisors: “I have some game. I can play at this level.” Well, last night’s debate was Harris’ coming out party. She showed she has game.

I still think she could be more adept in unscripted situations, and particularly interviews, but hey, find me a candidate who is good at every single aspect of the job. He or she doesn’t exist. I mean, just ask Donald Trump about his debate skills.

Speaking of which, what was Trump thinking?

Harris no doubt benefited from hours of tape that exist of Trump in past debates. She and her advisors must have been like NFL coaches, studying that tape for weaknesses, because she baited Trump with scalpel-like precision and Trump took the bait. Every. Single. Time.

Crowd sizes? Being fired as president? Inheriting millions of dollars and turning it into multiple bankruptcies? A good candidate seethes inside, but laughs it off. Not Trump. He engaged, erupted, and veered off message. By the end of the debate, he was reduced to a caricature of a sputtering, angry, incoherent old man.

Which, to be honest, gives me almost as much pause about Trump’s candidacy as his authoritarian tendencies. Because Trump entered the debate a (slight) favorite to win the election. All he had to do was stay disciplined for 90 minutes and make an argument about why his policies were better for the country than those of the Biden-Harris administration.

That’s all. Be boring. Or be controversial, but stay on message. It’s not hard. Except, apparently, when in your mind everything is all about you and when your opponent knows how to trigger you into angry outbursts. And if Harris can manipulate him in this way, what tricks do you think former KGB agent Vladimir Putin has up his sleeve?

Two TKO debates in one campaign

I noted in yesterday’s post about how a majority of debates don’t make a great deal of difference to the final outcome. It’s the rare debate that swings an election.

One such case was the June debate between Trump and Joe Biden. Trump wasn’t exactly masterful that night but he didn’t need to be. Biden was so godawful that Trump crushed him. If it were a boxing match, Biden would have been pulled for a TKO (a technical knockout, when the referee determines the boxer is no longer safe in the ring). And indeed, that debate precipitated Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

I don’t know if Harris’ performance last night will be anywhere near that impactful. But if one event could transform the campaign, this debate is a possibility. In 2016 and 2020, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were both judged by viewers to have won their debates with Trump. Still, Trump held his own in his own unique way and the race trajectory wasn’t much altered.

But what Harris did to Trump last night was something no other candidate, Democrat or Republican, has ever been able to do. She knocked him out. This time, it was Trump that should have been pulled from the ring.

Don’t believe me? Ask Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump supporter, who judged the former president’s performance a “disaster.”

The moderators

Lots of chatter about how the moderators were on Harris’ side last night. But look, the sports cliche holds in politics too — if you’re complaining about the refs, you’re probably losing.

These complaints seem to boil down to two main points. One, Harris got easier questions. Two, the moderators fact checked Trump but didn’t do the same for Harris.

One

I disagree about the toughness of the questions. Go back and look at what Harris was asked. Why has she flip-flopped on issues? Why did she change her mind on fracking? Why did she change her mind on Medicare for all? Why was the Afghanistan withdrawal so chaotic? Why did the Biden administration wait until the past few months to get tough on the border? This is just off the top of my head, perhaps a transcript will show more.

So this is an example of going easy on a candidate? Sorry, I don’t see it. Now, did Harris answer all those questions? No, she didn’t. And yes, it frustrates me too. I want to hear answers from candidates, and some of them, frankly, should have been pretty easy to deflect with an honest answer.

Such as: I’ve learned so much in my time as vice president. I’ve learned from working with President Biden, and from working on a bipartisan basis with Republicans in Congress to negotiate things like an infrastructure bill and a border security bill. So while my values haven’t changed, I see now that there are diverse ways to solve the challenges that face us.

Really, she didn’t have to give non-answers to some of these questions. But then again, Trump did the same thing. Did he answer a question about whether he’d sign a national abortion ban? Whether he wanted Ukraine to prevail in its conflict with Russia? Why he killed the bipartisan border security bill? No. He deflected and refused to answer these questions also. It’s what politicians do when they don’t want to say something controversial.

I don’t like it either, but let’s not pretend that this was a one-sided affair with the moderators in the bag for Harris.

Two

I agree that moderators fact-checked Trump and didn’t do the same for Harris. But, uh, maybe there’s a reason for that? Let’s consider what Trump was fact-checked on. That women do not bring a baby to term and then execute it after birth? That Haitians are not stealing and eating family pets in Ohio? Should they not be fact-checking such lunacy?

Trump spouted many more falsehoods than these, most of which were never fact-checked. The U.S. has experienced its worst inflation ever under the Biden administration? Not even close to being true. The Biden administration destroyed Trump’s energy policies and the country now doesn’t produce enough oil? We actually produce more oil now than ever before, and more than any other country. Not a peep from the moderators in any of these cases.

Moreover, multiple news outlets have fact-checked the debate and the best most of them can come up with for Harris is that she exaggerated and said things without enough context. Such as, she claimed the Biden administration has created 800,000 manufacturing jobs … when the real number is 739,000. I know, horrors.

The media has always tried to be a bystander in these events and to let statements stand on their own. But things have changed in the past decade and perhaps there are times when ridiculousness shouldn’t go unchallenged. Truly, if Harris said some of these things, she should have been fact-checked in real time too. The reality is that last night’s moderators seemed to save their fact-checking for the most egregious statements and they let everything else stand on its own, whether it was true or not.

The state of the race

We’ll find out in the next few days or week whether the debate had much impact on the state of the race. I imagine Harris will get a bounce, but whether it will be enduring only time will tell.

The thing is, Trump has such a high floor of support that it’s hard to imagine any event could turn this election into something other than a close contest which goes down to the wire. A few days ago, Dan Pfeiffer wrote that the election was “likely decided by fewer people across several states than the number who attended the Michigan-Texas football game on Saturday.”

The 2016 race was decided by 78,000 people in three states. The 2020 race was decided by 43,000 people in three states. So sure, Harris’ performance could change the trajectory. But until the polls tell us otherwise, this is still the type of finish we’re headed towards.

They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!

Beware of Haitians, apparently. Sorry, couldn’t leave without replaying this, uh, bizarre moment from the debate.

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