The Remarkable, Unexpected Competency of the Harris Campaign
She out-debated Trump—and outran her caricature.
WHEN YOU’RE IN TROUBLE, you call a lawyer and hope for the best. America’s emergency call went to Kamala Harris, and she’s been a revelation at every step.
Tuesday night’s ABC debate was no exception. I had great hopes for Harris rooted in her experience as a prosecutor and Senate interrogator, and she did not disappoint. I posited years ago that lawyers, contrary to the constant jokes about them and the idea that governors make the best presidents, actually have invaluable training for White House races and service. They know how to evaluate multiple perspectives, build the strongest argument possible, and make their cases to an audience—a judge, jury, or country—with confidence and skill.
Not to be overwrought, but the current presidential race is akin to a death penalty case. It’s a relief that Harris is treating it that way, and that she’s turned out to be every inch the tough, confrontational prosecutor called for at this moment.
In its few short weeks, the Harris campaign has been deft at prebuttals and preemption—going after Donald Trump on issues he has used against Harris. I was ecstatic when Harris, in her first big rally, one of her first ads, her convention speech, and now the debate, talked tough on border security. She has bashed Trump for instructing his congressional allies to tank a bipartisan package that even the border patrol union supported and says she would bring back the bill and sign it into law. “What we have in the former president is someone who would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” she said at the debate.
More recently, on Saturday, the Harris team sent a sharp-edged statement marking the anniversary of Trump inviting the Taliban to Camp David for secret negotiations just two days before the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The statement reminded the country of Trump’s disastrous foreign policy and national security decisions, including how he cut the Afghan government out of talks and allowed the release of 5,000 imprisoned Taliban fighters as part of the deal.
Harris (and Joe Biden) were also vulnerable on Afghanistan. The question was whether Harris would home in on Trump’s weaknesses and hammer at them in the debate. And she sure did: “Even his national security advisor said it was a weak, terrible deal,” Harris said Tuesday night. “And here’s how it went down. He bypassed the Afghan government. He negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban. The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released. And get this—no, get this. And the president at the time invited the Taliban to Camp David. A place of storied significance for us as Americans, a place where we honor the importance of American diplomacy, where we invite and receive respected world leaders.”
This may seem like Politics 101, but I cannot count the times I’ve been frustrated to the point of fury over Democrats’ inability or unwillingness to play offense, play hardball, at the level of Republicans. The GOP has lived for decades by former party chair and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s advice to “ask forgiveness, not permission.” For Democrats, in my time covering campaigns, presidents, and Congress, that’s a rarity. Just over the last decade, we’ve had Barack Obama’s maddeningly low-key approach, bordering on passivity, in the face of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s ten-month blockade of Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. And then came Biden, who has accomplished so much but showed in dramatic fashion in June that he can no longer take the fight to Trump.
Suffice it to say my expectations were low for Harris. This was partly because for people outside California, she wasn’t on the scope for many of us until her unfortunate 2019 campaign. So that’s what we knew, followed by an early gaffe or two and stories about turnover on her staff.
As Harris grew into the job, however, there was another problem. “The White House press office has not served as her most avid publicist,” Slate’s Fred Kaplan wrote with dry understatement in an August 6 piece headlined “Kamala Harris Has Been Much More Involved in Foreign Policy Than We Realize.” The “biggest reveal” of her convention speech, he said in a subsequent article, was that “Harris understands the complexities of the world—the most challenging task for a president—a lot more than many have assumed. Until very recently, for reasons not entirely clear, this has been one of the tightest-held secrets of the Biden White House.” The article’s subheadline called her “uniquely prepared to step up to the job of commander in chief.”
Other vice presidents had higher national profiles before they took the job. George H.W. Bush had been a two-term congressman, an ambassador to the United Nations and to China, chair of the Republican National Committee, and head of the CIA. Mike Pence, a six-term congressman who rose to the no. 3 GOP House leadership position, was the governor of Indiana when Trump chose him as a running mate. Biden was a 36-year Senate veteran who had chaired both the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees when he became Obama’s vice president.
Harris’s visibility has skyrocketed in the past few weeks and she’s now under massive scrutiny. It’s gone surprisingly well, thanks to her newly disclosed active role on the global stage, and the re-emergence of the bold Senate questioner standing a few feet from Trump on the debate stage Tuesday night.
In one jam-packed exchange, Harris told him to his face that he’d been “fired by 81 million people” in 2020, that “world leaders are laughing” at him, that military leaders call him “a disgrace,” and that he does not have “the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact.” At another point, when he asserted that crime was skyrocketing (though in fact it’s going down), her response was: “This is so rich. Coming from someone who has been prosecuted for national security crimes, economic crimes, election interference, has been found liable for sexual assault, and his next big court appearance is in November at his own criminal sentencing.” She also told him Vladimir Putin “would eat you for lunch.”
I should also mention that Harris’s head-shaking bemusement, quizzical looks, and smiles of disbelief were an effective if tacit way of fact-checking throughout the split-screen livestream of the nearly two-hour debate. And there was never a moment when fact-checking was not needed. Her silent skepticism substituted for explicit corrections of fact and assertion that were never made. They couldn’t be. It was impossible to keep up. And really, it’s hard to envision the right response when Trump says of Biden, “I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her.”
Harris just shook her head. My take: Who exactly hates Harris and can’t stand her? This sounded like Trump projecting his feelings and thoughts on others, a special talent of his.
One of Harris’s best moments was when she nailed Trump on January 6th, after he had dodged a question about regrets and blamed the whole thing on Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The vice president noted that Trump had been “indicted and impeached” for his role in inciting the deadly attack on the Capitol and pivoted to an invitation to undecided voters:
For everyone watching who remembers what January 6th was, I say we don’t have to go back. Let’s not go back. We’re not going back. It’s time to turn the page. And if that was a bridge too far for you, well, there is a place in our campaign for you. To stand for country. To stand for our democracy. To stand for rule of law. And to end the chaos.
The arguments against Trump write themselves, but it takes a focused and unrattled professional to use them as effectively as Harris did. She’s fulfilling potential I suspect many people, including me, weren’t sure she had.
The Harris team said late Tuesday that she’s “ready for a second debate.” Trump, despite a CNN flash poll that found he lost big and the same consensus among many political analysts, nevertheless called his showing “my best Debate, EVER” and said Harris only wants another debate “because she lost.”
Both of them should resist the temptation to meet again. I have no doubt that Harris would do well. And I have no doubt Trump would be Trump: corrosive, dishonest, mired in conspiracies, desperately trying to sow hatred of immigrants in our nation of immigrants. Let’s not invite more lies, danger, and incitement beamed to a national audience.
As Harris says, let’s turn the page.
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