The debate’s unfinished business
“Well, that was fun. Let’s do it again in October,” wrote an aide to the Kamala Harris for president campaign on X, moments after the vice president left former president Donald Trump reeling Tuesday evening in Philadelphia; hers was a debate performance for the ages. Of course, she couldn’t have done it without Trump, whose ineptitude, incoherence and vacuous nature were on full display.
Thanks, Donald, Kamala needed that.
Whether the two candidates square off a second time is still an open question. Trump should want to, considering his miserable performance – a performance punctuated by his remarks about dogs and cats as the best of home cooking and his assertion that the vice president was MAGA when she wasn’t being a communist. (“She’s gone to my philosophy…. She’s a Marxist.”)
“Talk about extreme,” said Harris at one point about Trump, who further claimed that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” and that she presumably favored the murder of babies delivered by mothers, who despite the strength of the maternal instinct, were homicidal and hoping to have their newborns strangled in their hospital cradles, or maybe right there in the delivery room.
These are so insane that, once again, Kamala should give Donald a shout-out “thank you.”
Regarding a second debate, campaign advisers to Harris have suggested their candidate needs another big national TV audience. Voters, these aides, are still trying to figure out and feel comfortable with Harris who’s been, as all vice presidents are, in the shadow of the president; but, here, a word of caution: It’s not easy to sweep a doubleheader, even against an opponent who hits below the Mendoza line, not to mention below the belt.
It’s true that Harris didn’t finish the job on Tuesday. Despite her claim at the end of the 90-plus minute telecast that voters were offered a clear choice of two plans for the future of America, she failed to put much meat on the bone.
(Trump offered nothing as regards a program. Oh, there was, he assured us, a “concept” rolling around in his head for national health care, a replacement for the popular Affordable Care Act. Hmm, sounds like the never-realized Trump White House Infrastructure Day. Talk about “a bridge to nowhere,” again.)
The day after the debate, news stories appeared featuring a lineup of undecided voters in states whose electoral votes are crucial to the outcome of the election. These voters expressed concern that Harris had not provided the substance they were looking for.
For example, a 19-year old college student from Madison, Wis., told the New York Times that Harris hadn’t wowed her. “I’m still undecided,” she said.
And this from a 40-year from Las Vegas: “Nothing is clear to me,” he said, “and I’m really trying to follow it. I want to know how all of this impacts my family financially.”
Summarized the Times: “Undecided voters acknowledged that Ms. Harris seemed more presidential than Mr. Trump…. [Still] they wanted to know the fine print.”
It was clear, as The Atlantic’s David Frum wrote afterward, that “Harris’s debate prep seemed to have concentrated on psychology as much as on policy. She drove Trump and trapped him and baited him. Hemmed and harried, Trump lost his footing.”
The vice president, in the course of the debate, did mention an already released point or two about federal help for business start-ups as well as homeowners. She also made clear that she would sign a bill codifying Roe v. Wade, and that, as president, she intended to support sovereign Ukraine in its fight against expansionist Russia, a position Trump positively eschewed.
But she should have said more. She might have taken 10 or 15 or 20 minutes to flesh out her plans, say between 9:30 and 10 on Tuesday evening, with the rest of the time devoted to going after Trump.
Otherwise, she was magnificent.
She showcased her temperament, and exposed Trump’s. This campaign, like most campaigns, will be decided, as the great political historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, on the basis of the temperament of the two candidates, on the basis of “two types of styles, two types of expression and character.”
The question, therefore, is which temperament best suits the moment and the voters. This election is so close and the country is so polarized that it will likely come down to voters in just a handful of counties, including counties like this one, as to which they prefer.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.