The Great Debate

I’ve always been puzzled by the pundits who worried that Kamala Harris wouldn’t do well in a debate. Again, this is the senator who reduced Brett Kavanaugh to rubble.

Yes, her 2020 presidential campaign didn’t pan out, but that was largely because she was running in a very crowded lane of center-left candidates and had little opportunity to break out of the pack. Her debating skills had nothing to do with it. Her one bright moment in that race, in fact, was this memorable exchange with Joe Biden.

And of course, once Biden tapped her to be his running mate, she had a chance to show off her debate skills in the vice-presidential debate against Mike Pence. And once again, she came off very well.

So I had fairly high expectations for Harris in this year’s presidential debate. The line she repeats on the campaign trail — that she’s an experienced prosecutor, and she’s dealt with law breakers like Trump her whole life — isn’t just a good zinger; it’s an apt description of her experience and her style. She’s been preparing for this for decades.

As high as my expectations were, Harris managed to go even higher. Halfway through the debate, as I noted on Bluesky, I realized she had a brilliant approach to the debate, one in which the bulk of her responses were delivered directly to the camera and addressed specifically to the problems of voters and the solutions she’d proposed. But she always found time to slip in a slight jab about Trump — calling his rallies boring or noting he’d been convicted of so many crimes, etc. — and then would note how much he was focused on his own grievances. And then Trump, predictably, would ignore the actual question and the actual answer she gave so he could rant and rave about the deep personal slights that had been suffered by The World’s Greatest Victim, Donald Trump. He made her point for her and let all of her own points stand.

It was, as Amanda Marcotte noted, less that Kamala Harris the Prosecutor was making an ironclad case against the former president than it was Kamala Harris the Prosecutor endlessly baiting a hostile witness into melting down on the stand for the jury to see.

It was an incredibly impressive performance, and coupled with the night’s other big news that Taylor Swift was endorsing her, might just move the needle on the election.

But more than that, I think it might move the news media. There’s been a strong pushback against what Parker Malloy has brilliantly called the “sane-washing” of Trump’s rambling statements by the corporate media, but last night we saw a strong effort to call out his inanities and insanities for what they really are.

And, yes, thank God, that involved the ABC News journalists David Muir and Linsey Davis, who reminded us that debate moderators are, you know, supposed to moderate the debate. (There’s a reason we have professional journalists run these, and not some random celebrity host.)

There’s been predictable complaining from the right wing that their interventions were unfair, but fact-checking his obvious lies — about Democrats executing babies after birth, about Haitian immigrants eating dogs, etc. — absolutely needed to happen. The idea that moderators should be mute dummies in the room is a recent one and one that, as we saw with the disastrous CNN debate, informs and enlightens no one.

We’ll see if the media follows their example, or if they keep on trying to pretend that the emperor has cognitive abilities.