Open senility has proven disqualifying. How about open lack of commitments?
The only way to stay sane in this line of work is to chant a little sutra to yourself, This all is maya and illusion / This all is illusion and maya / The king is pink with confusion / For the jack has been proven a liar. It’s not exactly what you’d call arya, and it doesn’t really work unless you read it in Brooklynese, but it generally wards off the wild-goose chases that get a journo all red, mad, and personally invested in a news cycle. There just aren’t many things that matter much.
Presidential debates aren’t an exception—usually. Polling changes following debates tend to be small and transitory. Most recently, the 2020 presidential debates, particularly the first one, did not change the campaign’s momentum so much as confirm what was already evident, an electorate that was sour on Trump and exhausted by the double chaos of Covid and the summer of Floyd.
Tonight’s affair may be different. This year of grace 2024 has been an annus mirabilis, with the first presidential debate ending President Joe Biden’s candidacy and launching the Democrats on the most daring political adventure since the Roosevelt era: Can a tabula rasa candidate beat a sufficiently unpopular opponent? Are there elections in which you can in fact elect a yellow dog?
This comes to bear on why tonight’s debate may change the race’s momentum. Kamala Harris’s lone interview since becoming the face of the Democratic ticket, a CNN-hosted affair which she shared with her running mate, Tim Walz, drew 6 million viewers; while she made no catastrophic blunders, the shoddiness of the production, absence of real statements about policy, and the conspicuous friendliness of the venue made it a much less splashy media launch than it might have been. By contrast, the ill-starred Biden–Trump bout of June 27 drew 51 million viewers; their first debate in 2020 drew some 70 million. This will simply be the first time since becoming the candidate that Harris will reach a double-digit percentage of the American voting public.
As the chattering class of the right has busily reminded everyone for weeks, Harris’s debate performance in the 2020 nomination race was uninspired at best. The conservative clickbait ecosystem has been sustained by a steady trickle of videos showcasing her goofy ad hoc pronouncements. An aggressive leaking campaign, of which the president’s own former chief of staff, Ron Klain, was apparently the prime mover, disclosed a vice presidential office in constant turmoil, mismanaged from the top down. People rarely rise to the vice presidency without some talent and skill, but there are real reasons to think this debate will not be Harris’s natural element—and it will be her first impression for something between a third and a half of likely voters. So perhaps something like the Biden-Trump cataclysm is in the cards. But it will be too late for the Democrats to change horses again; North Carolina has already started to mail out early voting ballots.
Perhaps the main question is whether she will face the downbeat, irritable Trump of the 2020 debates or the disciplined Trump of the June 27 debate. The singular moment that ended Biden’s candidacy, if you had to point to one, was when the enfeebled president declared that he had beaten Medicare. This happened only because Trump stood back and grimaced instead of rushing in to gloat and turn the moment into a moral victory for Biden. Harris will face questions that, no matter how softly couched, will be squirmy: Why and when did you turn against Medicare for all, for decriminalization of illegal immigration, for slavery reparations? If Trump holds back, Harris may knit herself into one of her classic verbal pretzels.
The June 27 farce showed that, contrary to what the pessimists among us believed, there may in fact be conditions too blatantly stupid for the American people to endure. This September 10 affair will be a similar test: Can any compos mentis candidate without any sure commitments besides party affiliation break the plane with sufficient institutional resources behind him (or, in this case, her)? It’s not melodramatic to say that it is a trial—perhaps the final trial—of These States’ mettle as a republic. After a century of effort, can pure technocracy come to power in America?
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