She needs to make the race a referendum on Trump, not the Trump administration.
She needs to make the race a referendum on Trump, not the Trump administration.
I am a contributor at Fox News, where Bret Baier is rightly revered as a pro’s pro. This assured that the interview Vice President Kamala Harris deigned to sit for earlier this week would be civil but challenging — oh, hold on, just got the media-Democratic complex’s guidance on this: I mean the interview was sure to be testy. (Better?)
The general take on the center-right is that Harris did poorly. I don’t mean to be contrarian, but this assessment conflates what voters wanted to hear during the interview with what the candidate was trying to accomplish.
Harris has been cloistered from the electorate: tightly scripted, insulated from normal campaign settings that tend toward spontaneous remarks, which professional pols, even the inarticulate ones, customarily handle with at least some aplomb. This is because she is a vapid progressive weathervane: the daughter of academics who grew up in Berkeley and Montreal, she studied law in San Francisco then worked in public-sector lawyer’s positions which, though they stamped her as a prosecutor, left little evidence that she did much actual litigator work — such as trying to persuade juries and judges, as opposed to taking direction from fellow bureaucrats until she was finally senior enough (and connected enough) to give direction. (The tell: She’s a lot better at sternly declaring, “I’m speaking” than at the actual, you know, speaking.)
She’s not the only weathervane in this tale. President Joe Biden, whom Harris supplanted at the direction of Democratic big-wheels when his mental deterioration became impossible to conceal, has always been one, too. But, unlike Harris, he’s glib. Sure, the sea of malarkey he has spewed over the decades was invariably ill-conceived (and, as with Harris, occasionally plagiarized), but he was quite capable of spewing on any subject, skewed in any direction he sensed the Democrats’ base was headed at any moment in time. That’s not Harris. It’s not just that she lacks developed ideas of her own; she doesn’t know the lines — or even the cues.
She would never be the Democratic presidential nominee but for accidents of our deranged moment in history.
It would divert us to trace how she lucked into her Senate seat. But as this occurred in California, she was in 2020 an extremely well-financed Democrat, best positioned to be the party’s nominee. Except . . . she never got out of 2019. Simply stated, she proved to be an exceptionally awful candidate. After an impressive but highly scripted roll-out, she was incapable of doing candidate things, like speaking spontaneously with voters, debating off-the-cuff with competitors, and defending positions she had taken as a wet-finger-in-the-progressive-breeze prosecutor.
When she dropped out of the race, one might have hoped that she’d be thinking about some line of work outside electoral politics. But she was still a senator from California. The Democrats having become full-bore slaves of identity politics — and Biden being Biden — she lucked into the vice presidency. Biden had vowed to pick a black woman as opposed to the most qualified candidate; on the Democratic side, the bench of black women elected or appointed to high office was not deep, so Biden fell on Harris, despite the fact that she had awkwardly limned him as a fellow-traveler of segregationists just months earlier.
The Republican opponent was Trump, an A-lister in our Cult of Celebrity age, but one whose charisma and often useful bluntness remain, in the estimation of most Americans, outweighed by his dark sides, incorrigible unruliness, and exhausting solipsism. Still, Trump had a successful presidency . . . until a once-in-a-century pandemic called his competence into question and made the 2020 election a historically strange affair, with dramatic changes in voting rules and Biden seemingly able to campaign from his basement — hiding his senescence and reducing the race to a referendum on the reeling Trump.
In the Biden years, Harris was the most consequential co-conspirator in the scheme to conceal the president’s mental and physical deterioration. The 25th Amendment makes the vice president the central actor in the process for sidelining an incapacitated chief executive; Harris, instead, misled the public, making like Biden was playing eight-dimensional chess while training for an Olympic decathlon in the copious spare time he spent away from the Oval Office. By the time his brain-freeze at the Trump debate took place in late June, Biden had already locked up the Democratic nomination. Party eminences became desperate to swap him out; yet, in the thrall of identity politics, they couldn’t bring themselves to edge aside a black woman who would never be ready for prime time. Ergo, Harris was reluctantly anointed, and everyone agreed to pretend she’d been joyfully elected.
In reality, through two campaign cycles, she has never won a primary vote. There are several polished Democrats who have nailed the winning formula: keep your Fabian progressivism tucked behind a moderate, populist façade. If Harris had had to vie for the nomination against one of them, even in an abbreviated contest, she’d have been wiped out.
So yes, she’s the nominee . . . but she’s also still the same 2019 flame-out. That is, Harris cannot be unburdened by what has been — to wit, the Biden-Harris record.
Hence, there was only one way for her to run — or, to be more precise, there was only one way for Obama-era handlers to choreograph the campaign of a clueless candidate. She had to ride the vibe-wave Democrats felt, at least for a time, once they no longer needed to try dragging Biden across the finish line. (Joy, it turns out, is a synonym for relief.) But this burst of contrived elation, even elongated by a well-run convention and an all-in media, could not be sustained once September rolled around and things got serious. Thus the Democrats’ three-part gameplan: (1) Keep Harris on-script and visible, to remind voters that the infirm, tongue-tied Biden had been replaced by a younger, attractive, ostensibly vivacious woman; (2) avoid extemporaneous utterances, especially “testy” exchanges with reporters who are not on the team (because she even flubs exchanges with NBC and CBS, the Democrats’ teammates); and (3) keep the spotlight on the only issue that gives Harris a decent shot at winning: Donald Trump.
That’s why I don’t think Harris did poorly in the Baier interview. That tête-à-tête was not held in a vacuum. Harris’s execution of her advisers’ plan — including showing up late, then filibustering to run out the clock they’d shortened — has to be judged in the context of the campaign’s dynamics.
Was it frustrating to watch Harris avoid answering direct questions about her record? Of course it was, but to complain about this implies that Harris could have offered satisfactory answers that would have survived Baier’s follow-ups. I don’t see that.
For example, when challenged at the get-go on her immigration record — the willful, systematic dismantling of U.S. border security, the resulting strain on housing, education, health care, and law enforcement posed by over 10 million illegal aliens loosed on urban centers in violation of federal law — Harris’s idea of a response was to point to the bill she supported at the inception of the Biden-Harris administration . . . and then bristle when Baier inevitably pointed out that (a) this was an amnesty bill designed to forge a “path to citizenship” (i.e., to mint millions of new Democratic voters), and (b) it was so unpopular that it had no chance of passing despite Democratic control of both congressional chambers at the time.
For Harris, there are no good answers to questions about border security, murders committed by alien sociopaths who should not be in the country, inflation, support for publicly funded “gender affirming surgeries” for inmates and illegal aliens, the Afghanistan debacle, and enriching Iran while knowing it would use the funds to underwrite anti-American jihadist proxies. It is only natural that voters wanted to hear Harris engage on these matters; but even smooth-talking Democrats would have flailed if asked to defend these positions, and Harris is the opposite of smooth-talking.
So what did she do? She talked over Baier, which ran out some clock and made it difficult to hear his pointed questions. Beyond that, she brought everything back to Trump — even things that had nothing to do with Trump, such as the record she compiled while he was a private citizen.
Some of this seemed parodic — the word “Trump,” it seems, has become this month’s “I was raised in a middle-class family” (in Canada!).
Question: Why did you issue three years of executive orders that eviscerated border security and let millions of illegal aliens enter the country? Answer: Because in the fourth year Trump derailed a bipartisan bill (a bill he wasn’t needed to derail because it would have normalized and encouraged illegal crossings by the millions — but that’s another story).
Question: Why did you cover up Biden’s incapacity? Answer: Trump is on the ballot, not Biden.
Question: Why did you enrich Iran? Answer: Because of Trump (apparently, his starving Iran of funding for its terrorist clients was a problem).
Question: If you’re a change agent, how would you be different from the administration you’ve been the No. 2 in for nearly four years? Answer: I’m not Trump.
I am sympathetic to the suggestion of some friends that, in the months leading up to the Baier sweat session, Harris did herself no favors by avoiding tough interviews. It’s true that politicians get sharper from hostile grillings, and that even smart Democrats are led into lazy mistakes, including indefensible positions and statements, because their media confederates make them too comfortable.
Still, this practice-makes-perfect wisdom underestimates the breadth of Harris’s problem. If she had done challenging interviews earlier on, she’d have been irremediably terrible, undermining the scheme to run on joy for the first few weeks. As poorly as Harris performed on Wednesday evening, she actually is better now than she was in July – after repetitive stump speeches, unscripted interviews with friendly hosts, and an uncomfortable, though not adversarial, 60 Minutes interview (that CBS did what it could to splice into coherence).
Even if Harris should be marginally more skillful by now, how was it reasonable to expect more than the non-responsive, Trump-centric answers she gave Baier? Harris’s record is indefensible. If she is going to be elected — which is still a significant possibility — it has to be because enough people in the country believe Trump is unfit for the presidency. She must therefore talk about Trump at every opportunity, even when asked to talk about something else, and especially when asked about her policy preferences and performance in office.
It’s not a crazy strategy. Many people who have resigned themselves to vote for Trump nevertheless believe he is unfit. Trump has a decent chance to be elected (more on that presently). But the race is still very close, and Harris may yet eke out a win with a coalition of partisan Democrats and other voters — including a fair number of Republicans — who follow what once seemed the irrefutable logic that if (a) a candidate is unfit for the office then (b) voting for him is out of the question.
I don’t think Harris will pull this off. In part, that’s because she’s reeling at the wrong time, when it becomes too late to change momentum. (Obviously, if her advisers thought she was winning, they wouldn’t have agreed to the Baier interview.) But mainly it’s because of something deeper about the race that I missed — even though I have less excuse than most analysts for such an oversight.
Which brings me to my concession. Countless times, I’ve said, “Trump can’t win”: He’s unpopular, he’s got a low ceiling, and it’s hard for a guy who historically can’t get over 46 percent to win what is essentially a two-candidate contest, even with quirky Electoral College math. I also believed the Democrats’ lawfare strategy would succeed in tying Trump to courtrooms and getting him convicted in the January 6 case — it was going to be the most intensely covered trial in history, at which damning testimony would have been provided by former top Trump administration officials, including the vice president. I didn’t see how Trump’s candidacy could survive that. It never happened, but even without it, I was convinced that Trump’s numbers would be so low, a Democrat with the power of incumbency and the media wind at his back — or, as it turned out, her back — would win, probably comfortably.
Here’s what I got wrong: Harris is not running against Trump. She is running against the Trump presidency.
Many people who despise Trump personally liked his administration. The economy was good, compared to 40-year inflation highs under Biden-Harris, and real wages rose, especially for lower income rungs. The border was secure. Trump himself was a full-time tempest but the world was not on fire, Russia was not annexing territory, and the Middle East was gradually uniting against Iran rather than besieging Israel on seven fronts. And after watching the Biden-Harris stewardship of America, Trump’s management of the pandemic — the crisis that, along with the radical Left’s George Floyd riots, rocked his term when he appeared headed for reelection — looks better today than it did in November 2020.
Trump’s presidency is not ancient history. It was just four years ago, and people not only remember it but can compare it — and it compares favorably — to the Biden-Harris term. When Harris, Democrats, and anti-Trump commentators rail hyperbolically about the perilous things Trump will supposedly do as president, the public remembers that he didn’t do them when he was president — he said crazy, cringe-worthy things and he was a 24/7 drama queen, but most people’s lives were better. You could say this was because he had solid people around him (people he chose, several of whom now say he is unfit for the presidency). But again, having just lived through four years of Biden-Harris, people remember how their lives seemed during the Trump presidency; they don’t much care about the critiques of disgruntled former subordinates, who were happy enough to take powerful posts under him when his downsides were well-known.
Trump’s attempts to steal the election, culminating in the Capitol riot, were shameful — in my mind, disqualifying. But the choice is not Trump in a vacuum; it’s Trump or Harris, and all that portends. Democrats have a long history of denying they lost elections, attempting to delegitimize Republican administrations (including Trump’s), and rioting when they don’t get their way. They have no moral high ground on election denial and political violence — the points they are trying to run on. And once you move beyond the Trump-obsessed — both pro and con — normal Americans have no trouble both condemning Trump’s post-2020 election ignominy and weighing how much it upsets them relative to high costs, over 10 million unvetted illegal aliens, surging urban crime, the ascendant antisemitism of the Democrats’ Islamist and Marxist cohorts, trans extremism and other woke indoctrination, and a world that is in tumult while our out-of-it president lies on the beach and while his vice president tells the country that she’s the “change agent” who can’t think of anything she’d actually change.
As I say, I should have known this. Four years ago, I argued for Trump’s reelection in the pages of NR — “Trump: Yes” (in contrast to Ramesh Ponnuru’s “Trump: No” and Charles C. W. Cooke’s “Trump: Maybe”). My thesis in a nutshell was that Trump is personally indecorous, but his administration was solid and a Biden-Harris administration would be catastrophic. The only thing that’s really changed is that the stop-the-steal coup attempt further confirmed Trump’s indecorousness, and the catastrophic Biden-Harris term is now proven fact rather than educated speculation. To be clear, I’m out of the endorsement business (I’m sure you were all on the edge of your seats). My point is that I shouldn’t have been so convinced Trump couldn’t win, because the main change between 2020 and now is that people have experienced the Biden-Harris administration and can readily contrast it with a real Trump presidency rather than the Trump presidency of Democratic rhetoric.
Here’s an additional irony: It’s not just that most voters don’t believe what Democrats say Trump will do if he’s elected; they also don’t believe what Trump says he’ll do if he’s elected. They know Trump is “transactional” (i.e., bereft of principle and ideological moorings) and that what he says is never bankable five minutes after he says it. No one actually believes he will even try to push through a tax break for every constituency he panders to in every battleground state. No one believes he is going to sic the armed forces on political dissenters. Trump supporters have convinced themselves that if he just gets into office, regardless of what he says toward that end, they will have the Trump presidency again. The rest is noise.
In dodging Bret Baier’s questions, Kamala Harris was trying to do what she has to do. She needs to make the race a referendum on Trump’s personal fitness for power. In that race, her own defects fade into the background. Her predicament is that the electorate appears to see the race as a referendum on the prior Trump administration versus the administration she has helped lead for the past four years. If that is the ballgame, then her own defects come to the fore. That’s why she’s in trouble with just two weeks to go.