Kamala Harris’s Full-Court Press
Notwithstanding the opinions of her critics, the vice president could not be doing more to make her case to the American people.
WHAT IS THE WORST THING ABOUT Donald Trump?
His cruelty, his lying, his dumb and damaging economic ideas, his fascistic tendencies, his cronyism and corruption, his narcissism, his misogyny, his xenophobia, his racism, his amorality, his greed, the normalizing of political threats, vengeance and violence that are his and MAGA’s hallmark and probable legacy?
This has always been the problem with Trump—a tsunami of awfulness that’s too big and incessant for anyone to get their arms around. It’s why almost all media coverage of Trump, no matter how critical, brings complaints that some other outrage wasn’t even mentioned. Maybe that outrage was spotlighted the week before. Maybe three people have been reporting and researching it for a month and their magnum opus is coming the following week.
The Trump barrage poses a similar but far more nerve-wracking dilemma in the presidential race, where the wrong choices can lead to existential consequences. Everyone—voters, pundits, activists, strategists both actual and armchair—seems to have advice for Kamala Harris, on everything from her tone to her messaging. The complaints in these closing days are often about the campaign’s alleged inattention to issue X, Y or Z, or, conversely, about her having too many arguments instead of one main closing theme.
The Harris campaign is addressing multiple reasons Trump is unfit, and that’s as it should be. The many threats he poses to the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law are all so grim and dangerous that it would be political malpractice to ignore any of them. But Harris, Tim Walz, and their allies are also making a positive case for their economic plans, with family-friendly tax proposals and a ban on corporate price-gouging on food. Their reproductive freedom theme is also fundamental, crucial, and deeply resonant across regions and parties.
The phrase that comes to mind is “all of the above.” It’s usually applied to energy policy. It’s even more appropriate for the Harris-Walz campaign, which must alert voters to a vast range of reasons Trump should never be president again.
After over 35 years of closely following national campaigns as a reporter, an editor, and an opinion writer, I’d judge the Harris campaign as one of the best I’ve seen. I’m not saying this because her arguments on abortion and immigration closely mirror suggestions I made in April (belated disclosure: I’m one of the obnoxious pundits offering advice). Team Harris comes up with plenty of good ideas all on its own.
Take the supercharged Harris appearance Friday night in Texas before a crowd of 30,000, the campaign’s largest to date. The state is ground zero for banning and criminalizing reproductive health care. And, as shown in a graphic new ad about one woman’s near-death experience, its laws have resulted in horrific suffering for women. “Texas is the stage for this event,” senior campaign adviser David Plouffe said before the Houston rally. “But for us, the most important audience are folks in the battlegrounds.”
This coming Tuesday, Harris has chosen one of the most memorable stages in the nation for her “closing argument.” Just a week before the election, she will appear on the Ellipse, where Trump told supporters on January 6, 2021, that the election had been rigged and stolen from him. “We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore,” he said that day.
We learned later, from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, that before the rally, Trump told security: “I don’t effing care that they have weapons. They are not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here." That was the plan, and they did—without Trump, but with weapons, to violently disrupt the ceremonial congressional vote finalizing Joe Biden’s win. It was not, as Trump recently said, “a day of love.”
The economy is not as dramatic as the rest of the Harris case against Trump. But it is also fundamental, and it has not been neglected. The campaign has run ads for weeks in the seven swing states and Omaha summarizing in a few sentences the ways Harris wants to lower costs for middle-class Americans. It is launching a new spot across the same states that highlights how her tax proposals would help families with young children, while noting that Trump will give “more tax breaks to the wealthy.”
Supportive political action committees are pitching in as well. In “Rebecca,” an ad from Future Forward, a woman with a Southern accent says that “I am not rich as hell . . . Donald Trump wants to give tax breaks to billionaires, but Kamala Harris has plans to help us.” The PAC spent $21.5 million running the spot in six swing states for a week in mid-October, according to CNN reporter David Wright.
Threat to democracy, threat to personal freedom, more interested in helping the rich than the rest—that’s what Harris needs to communicate about Trump. And she is focusing on all three. As she puts it, he has an enemies list, she has a to-do list.
PEOPLE KEEP ASKING ME what I think.
When I watch the emails fly back and forth, and when I watch Harris and Walz campaign, what strikes me is the exhilaration of the candidates and their supporters. They are happy warriors; they’re fighting the good fight. It feels like riding John McCain’s Straight Talk Express in 1999 on the way to a New Hampshire primary blowout against George W. Bush. It’s like watching McCain with Fred Thompson and the Lindsey Graham of yore (his Senate colleagues and “partners in anti-establishment mischief,” as I wrote in a McCain appreciation when he died in 2018), whooping it up to Centerfield on the banks of the Piscataqua River.
I think it is inexplicable, as my friend Tom Nichols writes at the Atlantic, that what’s most alarming and offensive about Trump is what so many millions most like about him—and want from him.
I think they don’t get the huge risks of Trump as commander in chief. I don’t think they get how physically, emotionally, and psychologically dangerous Trump’s world is for women of every age. I don’t think they get how little he cares about what happens to them or how little he understands what his policies will do to them.
I think about what Walz said: “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.” I think that anything could happen, but that whatever happens, Harris could not be doing more. We could not ask for more.
 | A guest post by
|