Minutes before Kamala Harris took to the stage for a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Thursday, the Trump campaign reached a decision. There would be no second debate between their candidate and the US vice-president. After a month in which the Republicans had drifted through a state of bamboozlement at the rebirth, through Harris, of the Democratic movement, at least it was decisive. And it was a message that Harris decided to ignore.
“Two nights ago, Donald Trump and I had our first debate,” she told the crowd in North Carolina.
“And I believe we owe it to the voters to have another debate. Because this election and what is at stake could not be more important. On Tuesday night I talked about issues that I know matter to families across America. Like bringing down the cost of living, investing in America’s small businesses, protecting reproductive freedom and keeping our nation safe and secure. But that’s not what we heard from Donald Trump. Instead, it was the same old show — that same tired playbook we’ve heard for years. With no plans for how he would address the needs of the American people. Because you know it’s all about him, it’s not about you. Well folks, I said it then, I’ll say it now, it is time to turn the page. Turn that page.”
It was a passage that encapsulated the challenge facing Harris. The euphoric August has passed. She won the presidential debate with flying colours. But there remains a certain vagueness or fuzziness about how she would implement the promises she is making. There remains also the tightrope to be walked in that she is the sitting vice-president in the waning days of the Joe Biden administration. And there remains the monumental fact that Harris has delicately and cleverly avoided overselling: that in a country where no black woman has ever been elected to governor, in any state, she is running to become the first woman to sit in the Oval Office.
The choice for Trump’s strategists over a second debate was clear. It could be argued that in a follow-up debate, Harris could hardly do as well and Trump could scarcely fare as badly. Still, as political commentator Paul Begala noted during the week, Trump has appeared in more presidential debates than anyone in US presidential election history and has performed terribly. Of his seven debates, his only win came in June, which was attributable to Biden’s epic malfunction.
“He is an awful debater. He should mute the microphone when he is speaking,” says Begala. Clearly, Trump reached the same conclusion. He fronted up on Tuesday night by making an unprecedented appearance in the “spin room” to tell the gathered, and stunned, media that he had won the debate. To quote an imperishable observation from another era, well, he would, wouldn’t he.
In fairness, the Republican representatives in Philadelphia got their story straight quickly that night: the debate had been a contemptible con job foisted on their candidate, with the moderators grilling him so much that it was three-on-one. It was a simple ploy: brazen it out.
“Will this debate have an effect?,” wondered former Bush administration adviser Karl Rove in his Wall Street Journal column.
“Yes, though perhaps not as much as Team Harris hopes or as much as Team Trump might fear. But there’s no putting lipstick on this pig. Mr Trump was crushed by a woman he previously dismissed as ‘dumb as a rock’. Which raises the question: What does that make him?”
Blithe and resilient, was the apparent answer when Trump appeared in Tucson Arizona for a campaign speech on Thursday afternoon. His mind was also on the fallout from Tuesday night’s debate. Standing against Harris for a second time was futile: it was clear she possesses the concentration, substance and verbal dexterity to match his tactics. And even a neutral could see that they have nothing more to say to one another. Instead, he returned to one of his enduring themes: the unfairness of a system rigged against him. The debate host ABC had declined to fact-check Harris on the night so he did so himself in front of his audience in Tucson.
“She talked about knowing — it was all false; she talked about the Charlottesville hoax ... which has been totally debunked ... Kamala Harris said that no state allows abortion in the ninth month which is a complete ... lie. They do, they do, and even after birth in some cases. She claimed I want to monitor women’s pregnancies, I don’t want to do that ... It’s a total lie ... she made it up. She’s a liar ... She said she worked at McDonald’s. She worked at McDonald’s and she was working so hard. There’s only one problem. She didn’t work at McDonald’s. She’s a liar. Liar.
“She claimed that I want to deny people IVF treatment when in fact I want to require insurance companies to pay for it. And I came out totally in favour of IVF — that’s fertilisation for men in the audience, of which we’ve got a lot of tough ones here. She claims she doesn’t want to ban fracking when she said repeatedly over a ten-year period, ‘I will not have fracking’, then a little while ago she goes, ‘I’d love to have fracking’ ... She claims she doesn’t support mass gun confiscation, when in fact she supported it entirely and through her entire career. Think of that. She wants to confiscate your guns. Does anybody in the audience have a gun? Raise your hand. Would you mind if this lunatic knocked on your door. ‘Hello, I’d like to take away your gun.’ ... If you wanna keep your gun, vote for Trump.”
So on a single afternoon, the distinct messages of both campaigns were framed. On the face of it, Harris’s message, one of optimism and generosity, should be the easier sell. But it requires a certain imagination on the part of the electorate because it is based on what she will do in the future — and is set against the nagging question that Trump somehow failed to catch her on in their debate: why didn’t you do it over the past 3½ years in the White House? Answering that to the right audience will be critical to Harris.
And she did at least attempt to do so in Charlotte: “An opportunity economy; we need to build more housing in America so we are going to cut red tape and work with the private sector to build three million new homes by the end of my first term.”
It was a start, but it was hardly a comprehensive explanation.
Trump’s advantage is that he is running on a memory, not a promise. His vision, the one to which his Maga [Make America Great Again] supporters are wedded, is that America 2016-19 was sailing well under his stewardship. And the national memory of a time when groceries and housing and routine costs were 25 per cent less expensive than they are right now remains sharp and real. Trump’s bid for a second term comes full circle to his original promise: to build that wall and seal the border. It was a theme to which he returned in Tucson as he once again claimed to have come out best in the debate.
“Polls clearly show that I won [the debate] against Comrade Kamala Harris. And ... when you say Harris, does anybody know who Harris is? Now, Ka-ma-la is a very different kind of a word, nice name, very nice name. But when you say Harris, everyone says who the hell is that, right? But she immediately called for a second debate which means that she was like a prize fighter that lost the fight. We had two debates though. I had a debate with Crooked Joe Biden, right? And another debate with her. She and Crooked Joe have destroyed our country with millions of criminals and mentally deranged people pouring into the USA totally unchecked, unvetted and with inflation bankrupting our middle class; it has gotten bad.”
This, then is the essence of the messages that Harris and Trump will campaign on over the next 55 days hoping to win over not so much the audience at their rallies but the disenchanted and undecided. Harris is right when she claims that she is the underdog in this war of ideology. Because promising as Tuesday night’s performance was, she still has to step forward into the national consciousness as a sharper, more clearly defined symbol and messenger between now and election day. And in the end, it may come down not so much to which vision for America the voters believe as to which they wish to believe.
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