Photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters
Kamala Harris faced a tricky task in the first presidential debate. Her training and skills are as a prosecutor, but her main task was not prosecutorial. It was to define herself to an electorate whose decisive bloc still knows too little about her to feel certain she is worth supporting.
Harris’s response to this dilemma was either a brilliant strategy or serendipity. She baited Donald Trump into losing his temper, then used the visual contrast between them to establish herself as not only a plausible president but the only plausible president onstage.
Harris tipped her plan early on in the debate, when she invited the audience to watch a Trump rally. Here, she was letting on to something that only political obsessives know: The Trump who performs at rallies is a terrifying, rambling clown whose incoherence can hardly be captured in the short clips that appear in news coverage.
Harris also did something clever by noting that the audience leaves his rallies early because they’re bored. Trump is weirdly obsessed with his rally crowds (as Barack Obama noted during his Democratic National Convention speech) and challenging their size makes him spiral.
From that point on, Trump began to perform exactly as he does at rallies. He shouted endlessly, ranted and raved, had difficulty staying on topic or defining his concepts in a way non-superfans can follow. He made bizarre, false claims about illegal immigrants eating pets, blamed the January 6 insurrection on “out-of-control police officers,” and repeated his false claim of having won the 2020 election.
Harris’s engagement on issues was largely, though not uniformly, successful. She failed to explain all the issue-position reversals from her 2019 campaign. On several early questions, she resorted to filler words to keep her sentences going. She forcefully asserted, “You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me,” but did only a middling job of distancing herself from a president who has poor approval ratings. (On abortion, she carved Trump to pieces and watched as he squirmed away from questions about whether he would veto a national abortion ban.)
The clearest success Harris registered was in performing the role of president. She repeatedly touted her economic plan, rebutting the charge she lacks ideas, which is intended to present her as a lightweight. She also did this by citing her foreign-policy experience, meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and organizing a NATO response to Russia’s invasion. The importance of these validators might be overlooked, but many Americans have old-fashioned views of presidential qualifications, associating it with masculinity.
Most important, she established herself as presidential by appearing calm and confident, in vivid contrast to the bellowing lunatic on the stage beside her.
The response from Republicans tells the tale of the outcome. Conservatives complained about the moderators (who, in fact, allowed Trump to have ten minutes more time than Harris). Reince Priebus gamely offered that Trump’s numbers never move, which is a defensive response to the implied fear that his numbers would fall. Trump seemed to recognize he was losing, a realization that may have angered him further.
Harris’s debate plan could not have gone much better.
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