Harris set some traps for herself that might take the polish off her performance in the coming days.
National media is focused on Donald Trump’s performance in Tuesday night’s debate, and for good reason. He made a spectacle of himself.
Trump responded indignantly to every goad. He defended the captivating showmanship of his rallies and his honor from the criminal and civil charges juries found meritorious. He failed to levy a cogent, detailed, and measured accusation against Harris for concealing her far-Left instincts from voters. Instead, he barked, “She’s a Marxist. Everyone knows she’s a Marxist,” and let the epithet do the work. He performed an ill-considered audit of Harris’s racial identity. Is she black? Is she Asian? “Whatever she wants to be is okay with me,” he graciously allowed. Trump produced the night’s defining soundbite when he outsourced his critical thinking faculties to the internet, alleging that ill-mannered migrant hordes are absconding with household pets and eating them. That allegation compelled weary Republicans across the country to roll over in their beds and summarize for their less plugged-in spouses a naughty social-media meme that was maybe 36 hours old.
All these moments ate up the finite minutes that might have been devoted to more salient themes this election’s voters actually care about. Republicans are aggrieved this morning over the mishandling of their interests by their party’s standard bearer, and they’ve projected their frustration onto ABC News’s moderators. The Right is amply justified in its resentment of the lopsided efforts by ABC’s on-air talent to fact-check Trump, which usually occurred as an aside before they changed topics. But Trump didn’t make the most of those opportunities either. He failed to object to the moderators’ interventions or displays of bias as, say, Newt Gingrich or even Mitt Romney had. Trump would have paid no penalty for chiding the moderators insofar as mistrusting media as an institution has broad, cross-partisan appeal, but he didn’t do that. Maybe Trump was flustered. Maybe he was focused exclusively on his opponent. Or perhaps he was simply lost in the fog of his own grievances. Either way, Trump failed to knock Harris off her game.
But just because Trump turned in a bad performance doesn’t necessarily mean Harris hit her marks. She went into this debate burdened by the impression that she is a relatively unknown quantity. The latest New York Times/Siena poll found that about one-third of voters nationwide don’t think they know enough about the vice president of the United States — an apprehension that may be contributing to downward pressure on her support in polls. Voters’ misgivings are even more pronounced at the swing-state level. Last week’s CBS News/YouGov surveys found voters in Michigan (37 percent), Pennsylvania (40 percent), and Wisconsin (42 percent) say they don’t know what Harris “stands for.” Harris’s prime directive wasn’t to make the umpteenth negative case against Trump but to proffer a positive one for herself.
She certainly tried. That’s why you heard Harris say the word “plan” approximately 600 times in the span of 90 minutes. Her opening remarks were devoted to promoting her small-bore plans to cut taxes and promote the growth of small businesses. Indeed, her “passion” is small business. For someone who has never worked in the private sector, this must be a source of profound regret. She painted a portrait of a Biden administration no fair observer would recognize — a White House that is hawkish on the border and a proactive supporter of America’s embattled partners abroad. When pressed — both by ABC’s moderators and Trump directly — to explain her radical conversion to centrism or her outlook toward unpopular late-term abortions, Harris scurried out of the spotlight.
Trump couldn’t turn the tables on Harris. “She has a plan to defund the police,” he insisted in conclusion. “She has a plan to confiscate everybody’s gun. She has a plan to not allow fracking in Pennsylvania or anywhere else. That’s what her plan is until just recently.” Indeed, it was only in his closing statement that Trump articulated what should have been his central argument: that Harris is a member of the administration whose record she is implicitly running against. And yet, even though he failed to land the haymakers he spent the night windmilling in her general direction, Harris set some traps for herself that might take the polish off her performance in the coming days.
Harris insulted her voters’ intelligence when she was asked how the administration is supposed to secure a cease-fire deal in Gaza when “there’s not a deal in the making.” To this, Harris merely restated her support for a cease-fire deal in the abstract. Harris pretended as though the administration in which she serves has been uniquely responsive to Ukraine’s request for U.S. ordnance, which it was not, and she articulated a case for Ukraine’s victory the Biden White House is actively obstructing. She undermined the administration’s claim that the Afghan debacle was the inevitable result of the Doha Agreement negotiated under Trump (by which we now know Biden never believed himself to be bound) by calling it “one of the weakest deals you can imagine.” Then why did the White House insist it was beholden to it?
When they are remembered at all, debates are memorable for their moments. Harris did not produce a soundbite-friendly line that will haunt her in the coming weeks. By contrast, Trump generated many. And the vice president can take solace in the fact that, while she declined to clear up the cultivated ambiguity around her governing agenda, Trump didn’t imbue voters with confidence in his plans, such as they are. Phrases like “I have concepts of a plan” and “if we come up with something, we are working on things, we’re going to do it” muddy the contrast Trump hoped to establish. But Trump’s maladroit debate performance only renders Harris’s presentation strong by direct comparison. It will take some time for voters to review the night’s exhibition with a more critical eye. But when they do evaluate Harris on her own merits, they may conclude that they still don’t know enough about the woman who would be president. And that confusion is going to persist through to November.