Does Harris Have a Glass Jaw?

The Democrats are entering into the upcoming presidential and vice presidential debates with false bravado.

That’s not to say there aren’t optics that favor Vice President Kamala Harris or risks for the former President Donald Trump.

But as the two campaigns have publicly negotiated the debate terms, Harris’s team has been eager to revive former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “Donald Duck” jibe against Trump.

“Say it to my face,” Harris said at rallies when responding to Trump criticism before the Republican had agreed to debate her. She also taunted Trump about his eagerness to debate the previous Democratic nominee.

“What happened to ‘any time, any place?’” Harris asked on social media. 

When Trump wanted to renegotiate the ground rules he had agreed to with President Joe Biden, Harris and company framed this as the Republican ticket backing out of the debates. The media largely went along with this narrative.

But the evidence is really that Harris is more of a stickler for the debate terms than is Trump. There was no “any time, any place” at any point in her debating posture.

Like Biden before her, Harris has flatly refused to debate Trump on Fox News at all. Her campaign also kept pressing on “hot mics,” asking that the microphones be kept on at all times, after Trump’s team had accepted the debate rules, though it does not appear likely to derail their showdown.

This is a reversal from Biden, who did not want to be interrupted. Harris is practically begging to be interrupted, in pursuit of an “I am speaking” moment.

It’s also a reaction to the fateful June 27 debate that led to Harris becoming the presidential nominee in the first place. When the Biden team made its debate proposal, there was clearly an attempt to neutralize things Trump had used to his advantage in previous debates.

But what happened instead is that the inability to interrupt effectively made Trump more disciplined in his answers and sound more measured in his tone. What Harris wants instead is for Trump to seem unhinged—which is always the former president’s biggest public speaking risk—and, if possible, racist and sexist. In his less effective 2020 debates with Biden, Trump came in much too hot.

Where there is common ground between Biden and Harris over how to debate Trump is that both Democrats projected an amount of confidence that they did not genuinely feel. Biden channeled Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry in challenging Trump to the original debates, a swagger belied by the multiple jump cuts on the social media video making this announcement.

Biden also called for fewer debates than the presidential debate commission, debates earlier in the election cycle, no networks or moderators deemed too conservative-friendly, and no live audiences in addition to no interruptions. 

It’s entirely possible Biden’s aides never expected Trump to agree to these terms in the first place, which would then lead them back to Donald Duck—with the implication that the real fowl in question was chicken.

Instead, having a debate before the Democratic National Convention had formally made Biden the party’s nominee proved so disastrous that it is now equally plausible to believe that Democrats engineered this to replace the president at the top of the ticket. (I don’t in fact believe this since Biden loyalists came up with this plan, but I can’t really fault anyone who does because of how spectacularly their maneuver backfired for Biden, if not the Democratic Party.)

Biden wasn’t stoked to debate Trump and probably wouldn’t have done so if he wasn’t trailing before the two of them took the stage. And for good reason, as it turned out.

Harris doesn’t have Biden’s problem of being old and infirm. She may present quite well on the debate stage, as she has at times done in the past. The contrast between her and Biden is largely to her benefit.

But Harris is extremely cautious and calculating. While this has probably helped her over the course of her political career overall, it has made her inconsistent at best as an extemporaneous speaker. This is one of the characteristics that contributed to her low ratings as vice president and it has hurt her in her two previous genuinely competitive races: her first run for California attorney general, where she barely won in a deep-blue state, and her 2020 candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, which ended in 2019.

It’s impossible for Harris to do as badly as Biden in a debate. All she probably needs is a few good moments or an unforced Trump error. But she and her campaign would still clearly prefer to stick to scripted moments until Election Day. 

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