Kamala Harris won the debate — but missed a critical opportunity.

Andrew Sullivan

Sep 13, 2024

∙ Paid

In 90 minutes, she methodically cleaned his clock. The media and the public were as one on this. “Donald Trump’s freewheeling approach spun wildly out of control in the first presidential debate as he was forced on the defensive during a chaotic clash with Kamala Harris.” Only 24 percent of the viewers said he won.

Josh Barro noted: “A CNN panelist who gave the win to Harris noted, approvingly, that she ‘took control of the situation.’ This is true.” Karen Tumulty observed: “Trump appeared thrown off balance by Harris’ frequent needling, and at times he shouted back at her. But she persisted, baiting the real estate mogul again and again.” The polling was unanimous: “The CBS undecided voter focus group, run by Frank Luntz, gave it to Harris by a margin of 16 to six; CNN’s gave it to her by 18 to two.”

Josh Marshall wrote: “Harris was poised and unflappable … Trump was scattered, swaggering and stumbling. He lied a lot and repeatedly refused to answer big questions in a way that was fairly obvious and transparent.” Jon Chait, also in campaign mode, noted: “The contrast between an obviously and eminently qualified public servant and a ranting bully was as stark as any presidential debate in American history.” Ezra: “The debate was a collision between Donald Trump’s politics of dominance and Kamala Harris’ politics of preparation. Harris’ politics of preparation won.”

You might have guessed by now that all of the above quotes are taken in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s first debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016. I just switched out “Clinton” with “Harris”. In fact, Clinton in 2016 won every debate handily. She was very narrowly ahead of Trump in the polls before the first debate and then opened up a comfortable lead by mid-October. She never polled lower than the man who ultimately beat her.

I mention the 2016 debate example not because the debate this week is destined to be as irrelevant as it was eight years ago. Who knows? I mention it because Trump has never been a good debater — that requires logic and evidence, not stream-of-consciousness insanity. And Clinton’s serial devastation of Trump could not overcome her deeper vulnerabilities: her weakness among the white working class, her polarizing decades in public life, and her inability to grasp the salience of mass immigration and free trade.

To my mind, Harris has three bigger policy vulnerabilities as an actual incumbent: she presided over a collapse of the southern border, admitting millions of illegal immigrants, almost all of whom will never leave; she was in power when we had a spike in inflation worse than anything since the 1970s; and, unlike Clinton or Biden, she has a political record on the far left. On Tuesday, for all her debating chops, she did nothing to dispel public worries about all three.

Yes, she focused on Trump, making him the star of the show in many ways. But was he revealed as something different than we’ve seen in the past? Not so much. This was classic Trump. Exposing him this way has never worked before. Most people responded to some of his cray-cray by bursting out laughing.

And the focus on Trump took attention away from Harris. And she needs that attention. She needed those 90 minutes to rebut the critiques of her past opportunism, to introduce herself clearly, to spell out how she will grow the economy, keep inflation under control and stop illegal immigration. And, by and large, she failed.

She dodged question after question with scant follow-up. On the single area she was pressed, fracking, she had a chance to explain why she had said, in 2019, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, and starting with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands” — about as definitive a statement as it is possible to make — only to reverse herself when she became the veep nominee. The honest answer for the change is that Biden forced it. A good answer would be that she learned we didn’t need to ban fracking to control climate change. But she didn’t say that either. She just repeated her view that her “values haven’t changed.” I believe her. Pennsylvanians might too.

Immigration? She touted the Lankford bill that Biden supported after three-and-a-half years of Harris gaslighting us that “the border is secure.” Here’s a question the press should and won’t ask: Why won’t she simply extend the administration’s recent executive order that is now reducing illegal immigration to lower levels than Lankford ever would? (To his credit, Ezra exposed Mayorkas on this today.) That’s because Lankford is designed to expedite the processing of illegal immigration, not stop it.

On the economy — another serious weakness for Harris — we had price controls for alleged price-gouging, subsidies for home ownership and child care, and an “opportunity economy,” whatever that means. This is, well, underwhelming. Trump’s biggest advantage is that Americans feel poorer today than they felt in the Trump boom years. Harris had to persuade them that her policies are not Biden’s, will make the economy soar, and that they’ll feel better off in four years’ time. She didn’t. She can’t.

My favorite moment was when you saw the gulf between reality and the press bubble. At one point, Trump accused Harris of wanting “to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” The woke media guffawed in unison. Here’s Susan Glasser of The New Yorker (unwittingly echoing Pauline Kael on Nixon):

[Trump’s] line about how the Vice-President “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” was pretty memorable, too. What the hell was he talking about? No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point.

Lots of people do know, actually. This fact has been everywhere — apart from the “rather special world” of the New Yorker. Harris told the ACLU as recently as 2019:

I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained.

More to the point, Glasser surely supports this too! But she called it as insane as the dog-eating rumors in Springfield! And no correction, of course.

Harris also told the ACLU in the same 2019 questionnaire that she backs amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants, and the end of any detention for illegal immigrants. Are those still her positions? She didn’t tell us. She supported donating bail for rioters in 2020. Does she regret that? We don’t know. She backs medical experiments on gay, autistic and transgender children. Has she absorbed the Cass Report, which debunked these experiments? We don’t know. She believes in systemic public and private discrimination against whites, Asians, Jews, and men. Is that still the case? Again: no answer. Has any candidate refused to answer so many basic questions as late as this before? None that I recall. Harris didn’t even have a single policy on her website until the day of the debate.

The MSM, of course, can’t help themselves. They cheered Clinton at every opportunity in 2016; they didn’t criticize her execrable campaign exactly the way they are protecting Harris now. But the fact remains that Harris is still a blank space for many Americans; they want to know more about her and she doesn’t want to tell them — because the more they know about her past positions, the worse she’ll do. Hence a deeply cynical and vague campaign, still based more on vibes and Trump than on Harris’ policies or vision.

In an interesting column today, David Brooks hopes that Kamala’s “joy” is more compatible with a culture shift than Trump’s anger. But to many, including me, Kamala is more easily defined as representing the current dominant culture, the elite status quo, an icon of the ruling class’s wokeness, a docile product of every Gen-Z-run interest group the Dems bow down to. She is the left-establishment that is already in power, the foreign policy blob. Trump is still the culture shift against it.

Many voters will be picking between the devil they know (Trump) and the devil they don’t (Harris) this fall. She had a chance to fill in the blanks on Tuesday night; and, by and large, she didn’t. We’ll now see if others more competent than Trump and more willing than the MSM can begin to reveal who she really is and what she’d really do in office. And if that’s what the swing voters in Pennsylvania are truly looking for.

Back On The Dishcast: Rod Dreher

Rod is an old-school blogger and author living in Budapest. He’s a contributing editor at The American Conservative and has written several bestsellers, including The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies. His forthcoming book is Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, which you can pre-order on Amazon. And check out his raw and honest writing on Substack, “Rod Dreher’s Diary.”

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on what red-pilled JD Vance, and embracing the mystery of Christianity. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s episode with Eric Kaufmann on liberal overreach, as well as continued reader debate over the rollercoaster election.

“They’re Eating The Dogs!”

It was hilarious, of course, and an instant meme. But the way in which the troubles of Springfield, Ohio have been discussed this past week is a near perfect example of our political dysfunction. There is no evidence whatsoever that cats and dogs are being eaten by Haitian immigrants, as Trump recklessly claimed. But there is plenty of evidence that what Springfield has been experiencing the last few years is madness.

A declining industrial town of 58,000 mostly white people admitted almost 20,000 new Haitian migrants into their town over three years. The migrants entered the country illegally. The NYT’s story omits this fact, by writing that “the Haitians had Social Security numbers and work permits, thanks to a federal program that offered them temporary protection in the United States.” There would be no “temporary protection” if the migrants had visas. But practically speaking, they get the working equivalent of a green card almost as soon as they arrive — because adjudicating their cases takes many, many years, and almost no one is ever deported. (That would have saved me and millions of legal immigrants a lot of trouble!)

Does anyone truly believe you can admit 20,000 people from a completely different culture, a completely different language, and a completely different race in a few years — without something blowing up? That is, of course, what the Democrats believe — and any opposition is described as mere racism. The migrants themselves have a better grasp of what is going on:

[Haitian migrant] Mr. Campere said that he was aware of the criticism leveled at his community. “We can’t say anything. The Americans are chez eux,” he said, using the French words for “in their home.”

For many in the elite, however, this country is not Americans’ home. It is anybody’s home. The illegal newcomers are actually cherished by the elites (business and cultural) more than those of us who came here legally, and way more than people who were born here.

The problem is not migrant crime, as Trump despicably claims. Haitian migrants have a great rep on that score, and employers love them. The problem is the scale and the pace of the mass migration that Harris and Biden allowed. Transform a community overnight with an influx of cultural aliens around a third of the previous population, and you can guarantee that community will face huge challenges. (This is what Europe is grappling with as well.) But the Democrats have thinly veiled contempt for the natives, and Trump demonizes the migrants. That’s where we are in this debate. We have to do better.

Obama understood this. Every Democrat since hasn’t. If you want to empower white nationalism, to foment racist extremism, to turn ordinary people into foam-specked xenophobes, then throw open the borders as Biden and Harris have. Bring in millions and millions of unvetted, fraudulent, culturally alien migrants in just a few years, signaling to the world that anyone anywhere can just show up and get in by saying a few magic words to a border agent. Don’t do it gradually so integration can occur and disruption minimized. Do it all at once. And tell anyone who dissents they’re a bigot.

Of course it doesn’t excuse the racism. It’s disgusting. But if you have the slightest grasp of human nature, it helps explain a lot of it. And one reason for racism’s resurgence is the Biden-Harris’ catastrophic negligence on immigration. They bear some of the blame for the racist poison that has spawned.

Money Quotes For The Week

“Harris rn killing a baby in his 78th year,” – Mark Dow during the debate.

“I’m trying to decide if I want to go on record, and the answer is yes. I think that Trump loses because of this debate performance,” – Frank Luntz.

“On the one hand, Trump is an insane, lying imbecile. On the other, that’s been clear for nine years and the race is tied,” – Damon Linker.

“In recent years, Democrats have usually been the party that’s too online and stuck in a left-wing bubble. At this debate, it was Trump who relayed a (false) online social media meme about migrants eating cats that showed his team in its own bubble,” – Josh Kraushaar.

“You won’t find messages about voter fraud or the 2020 election on Vance’s [Twitter] feed; instead, on Monday, he unleashed an eight-part thread (55 paragraphs in all) picking apart the new policy section on Harris’ website, piece by piece. It was quite possibly a longer discussion of policy than Trump has ever attempted in any of his three presidential campaigns,” – Gabe Fleisher.

“Trump commits to not reading Project 2025, and I believe him,” – Ramesh Ponnuru.

“If you think the tradeoff between having 13 million [illegal immigrants] and an open southern border is worth half a point of GDP, that’s a tradeoff that most Americans probably wouldn’t be willing to make,” – Joe Kernen on Harris’ economic plan.

“It was quiet. There was nothing to justify the shot. The shot was taken to kill,” – Jonathan Pollack, an Israeli activist, on the IDF killing American activist Aysenur Eygi. Biden says he believes the IDF. I don’t.

The View From Your Window

Montgomery, Alabama, 9.47 am

Dissents Of The Week

A reader writes:

You remain obsessed with what candidates say — not what they do. The latter is my primary concern. Your column on Trump’s sane-washing is a great example. It was filled with all sorts of inanities that Trump has said, but little focus on what he did as president in relation to those inanities — other than the reference to January 6. It is far more important what politicians do than what they say.

I get it, words matter. But only to a point. Biden was elected on the explicit promise of being “regular Joe.” He then governed — or his staff governed, really — in a reckless, left-wing fashion that has really hurt the country. Kamala? Every indication is that she would be the same. Trump? A total nut-job who drove people crazy with the shit he said, but he governed the country in a very vanilla fashion.

Another dissent:

I find your comment on Biden’s immigration order deeply unfair. While I’m okay with him making the order on pragmatic grounds, people like yourself who know better should be full-throated in demands that Congress do the job that the Constitution prescribes. The executive should execute laws, not circumvent Congress with ever-expanding catalogues of executive orders.

I had the same qualms with Obama’s Dreamer order. Even though I agreed with the outcome and gave Obama credit for begging Congress to do its job for multiple years, I was deeply saddened by the precedent he set. If we accept congressional dysfunction, then the only real question is whether we end up in a left-wing dictatorship or a right-wing one.

Agreed. We need a much stronger border; we need far more immigration judges, border agents, detention facilities, and on and on. All of that requires legislation, and I strongly favor it. But on immigration, the president really does have a lot of independent authority in executing policy. My point was that the press should ask Harris if she’d keep the executive order, if her favored, and more liberal, legislation did not pass.

From another dissenter:

If Walz is so far left and woke, why is Minnesota ranked #6 by companies for doing business there? And if your concern about Harris is that she’s from California, and therefore so far left and woke she shouldn’t even be considered, why do we have the fifth largest economy in the world, surpassing both India and Tory-run England? Oh, and no mention of the fact that Biden’s “far left” economy has done better post-pandemic than almost any other country without going into a recession?

Also, I don’t know why you have to rely on a website to determine what Harris’ policies are. We know her policy on reproductive rights, on guns, on a piece of her economic plans, the border. She addressed them all in speeches over the past few weeks.

And you still haven’t mentioned Project 2025. Or do you just think it’s never going to happen, even if Trump is elected? I’d be happy to hear your take.

The Heritage Foundation frightens me. But I’m not entirely hostile to making the administrative state more accountable to democratically elected presidents, if it’s done right. Another reader quotes me:

“[Harris] has no policy proposals on her website!” So what? The last consideration for voters in this election is policy or platform, for heaven’s sake! You know as well as anyone that Trump’s so-called “policy proposals” are nothing but whatever his disordered brain produces in the moment, depending on nothing but whatever bolsters his malignant ego and what he believes the audience wants to hear. What attracts his supporters, of course, is precisely that crazy; and he is exceptionally skilled at pandering to their cravings.

“But [Harris] is the candidate of the woke elite, marinated in its subculture, and a creature of the Democratic lobby groups.” And your point would be … ? The alternative has made himself the favorite of the Q fantasists, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and, worst of all, Putin’s sock-puppet, Tucker.

To be sure, I was glad to see Harris forced out of the 2020 race even before the first primary. Her attempt to out-flank Warren and Sanders on the left led her to some contemptible conclusions. But the only question in this election — not the “most important,” but the only question — is whether a voter can be sure the 2028 election will be orderly and according to law and the Constitution; or more generally, whether your candidate can be relied upon to comply with the law and court decisions.

That’s why I’m not voting for Trump. It doesn’t mean I’m going to give Harris a free pass in this campaign. And as always, please keep your dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

Here’s Pogo, the great mashup artist, embracing The Simpsons:

In The ‘Stacks

• Tim Noah answers one of the many questions that Harris dodged: Better off now than four years ago?
• Polling shows that voters aren’t buying Harris’ pivot to the center.
• The “middle-class” nominee is way behind the tycoon when it comes to working-class voters — of all races.
• Jeff Maurer reads the vibes of Harris’ policy plan. The foreign policy is thin.
• Trudeau, like Biden, is moving right on immigration.
• Michael Stumo defends Trump on tariffs, and Dan Drezner isn’t having it.
• Christian Schneider writes, “Republicans are desperate to join the celebrity culture they abhor.”
• Loury and McWhorter on the vibe-shift against the likes of Kendi and DiAngelo.
• How responsible was Walz for the 2020 inferno in Minneapolis?
• Renewables are rising fast, but are they actually displacing fossil fuels?
• Scott Alexander and Freddie debate the likelihood of an apocalypse.
• NS Lyons reviews Auron MacIntyre’s new book on “how liberal democracies become tyrannies.”
• The market value of the major dating apps is dropping fast.
• Three cheers for curmudgeons — and Slow Horses.
• Anne Applebaum launches a pod, “Autocracy in America.”

The View From Your Window Contest

Recommend The Weekly Dish to your readers

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” – Orwell