The Presidential Debate: Kamala Harris Campaign Makes a Strategic Error

Emotions wear off; facts don’t

The usual legacy media suspects were giddy after Kamala Harris’s debate performance on Tuesday night. Reading from their Harris campaign-provided scripts, they tried to set the narrative that Harris “decisively won” the debate. The usual suspects have made much of the fact that commentator Brit Hume of Fox News and a panel of voters organized by Fox News claimed that Harris was the overwhelming winner by noting that Harris’s strategy appeared to keep President Trump “off-balance” during much of the debate.

This comports with the initial reactions of various people who seem to have gotten caught up in the contrasting emotions and mannerisms displayed by the two debaters. Cooler heads have suggested actually reading the transcript of the debate, which removes emotion from the equation, in order to obtain a better sense of what Harris really said.

Did she miss the boat in her debate preparations? Let us examine the topic.

KAMALA’S STRATEGY

Kamala’s debate gameplan of form over substance involved these elements:

1. To appear more moderate than her track record.

2. To dodge any controversial issues that would nominally put her in a bad light.

3. To be vague on policy prescriptions while talking platitudes and seeming to be “reasonable.”

4. To disparage Trump during his statements through use of carefully planned facial expressions and hand gestures, etc.

5. To deflect any explanation for her flip-flopping on long-held leftwing positions that she has taken over the years.

6. To ultimately blame Trump for all the problems she and Biden created that she is now claiming that she will fix.

7. To repeat debunked hoaxes and make other statements intended to incite emotional responses from Trump (preferably standard Trump outbursts) in lieu of discussing the top issues of concern to voters.

8. To rely on the ABC moderators to help keep Trump off-balance throughout the debate.

The last point is key. There was obvious bias displayed by the two moderators in favor of Harris in terms of falsely fact-checking Trump at least seven times while never fact-checking Harris even once despite several obviously false statements. Also, it appeared to many observers that there was clear coordination with the ABC moderators such that Harris’s responses to the questions posed to her were uncharacteristic of her past public responses to unrehearsed questions or simply speaking off the cuff. She is a well-known gaffe machine capable of the most amazing word salads imaginable. Some examples are provided here, here, and here.

Because her relatively smooth delivery during the debate was so out of character, there is a strong possibility that sample questions were given to Harris that helped her prepare her responses. While other Democrats have received debate questions in advance during past election cycles (Hillary Clinton received them from CNN’s Donna Brazille in 2016), there are no known examples of Republicans having received advance questions prior to presidential debates. Imagine that! Other shenanigans were possible in real time that need to be fully investigated, too, including the theory that she wore high-tech Nova H1 earphones disguised as pearl earrings during the debate. Occam’s razor, after all, is generally the best principle to provide the correct explanation.

STRATEGIC FAIL

How did that all work out for Harris? The networks are still gushing over the theatrics of her performance. These two quotes from taxpayer supported NPR (!) are typical of the legacy media narrative after the debate: “Harris was far more dominant than Trump, from beginning to end.” “Harris was calm, in command and in control and looked to the future.” In short, the network focus was on the superficial as opposed to the substantive, that is, on delivery and demeanor as opposed to actual content.

Other observers were not so enthralled by Harris’s performance. Breitbart highlighted a post-debate Reuters sampling in which “six out of ten undecided voters said they were leaning towards Trump due to Harris’s ‘vague’ answers and because they ‘trusted’ Trump more on the economy, the top issue of the 2024 cycle.” A better explanation is that the undecideds in particular were interested in hearing about Harris’s solutions to their top priorities (the economy/inflation, immigration, crime, national security), not Harris’s platitudes, grandiose statements about mythical togetherness in the future, and ranting on side issues like the Charlottesville and J6 hoaxes that are irrelevant. In short, the undecideds kept the door open for Harris to provide policy reasons that would persuade them to vote for her, but that door is closing fast.

The problem that was sidestepped by Harris during the debate is that her policy positions are completely unknown by most Americans, and that she did nothing to separate her own positions from Joe Biden’s positions. Of course, this is nearly impossible to do because she has slavishly backed Biden policies for the last three years BECAUSE SHE HERSELF HAS BEEN AN INTEGRAL PLAYER IN THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS and has only modified her positions recently on some of the more extreme issues for “pragmatic political reasons,” as Bernie Sander recently remarked. Pragmatic is political-speak for “lie now in order to get elected, then reverse after winning.”

Before the debate, what most people remembered about Harris were her frequent verbal gaffes, that she was destroyed by Tulsi Gabbard during CNN’s Democrat presidential primary debate in 2019, that she has been the failed “Border Czar” while the country has been invaded by well over 10 million illegals, and that she was the most liberal US senator before becoming vice president (even to the left of the socialist Bernie Sanders!), and that she is flipflopping on issues (and stealing policy positions from Trump, e.g., no taxes on tips).

As a result, according to Ryan Girdusky, the founder of Project 1776 PAC, "She is the worst polling Democrat against Donald Trump in history on national polls — NO ONE is performing worse than her...she is losing key factions of the Democratic base." Her debate performance will not correct those numbers!

Her strategic fail in the debate was to focus on platitudes, emotions and irrelevancies while avoiding any substantive discussions on real policies and solutions to current problems. Americans already know President Trump, including his policies and his reactions to the attacks by Democrats and their media allies, because they’ve watched it all for the past eight years. Nothing in his debate performance was the least bit surprising. Similarly, the comparison between the Trump economy and the Biden-Harris economy could not be clearer. She had an opportunity to explain her positions (unknown to most Americans) on all the key issues of the day and thereby give people reasons to vote for her but failed to do so. Admittedly, it would have been great theater to hear her tortured explanation of why there should be taxes on unrealized capital gains or implementation of price controls, but she could have given it the old college Marxist try! Regardless, she totally missed the boat and chose to attack Trump instead while absurdly trying to cast herself as the candidate of change and the future.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Kamala Harris’s debate performance did nothing to educate voters on her real policy positions or explain her flipflopping on issues like fracking and late-term abortions. Voters know Trump but don’t know her. It all gets down to a matter of trust because Americans know that Trump keeps his promise. Harris? She’s got no track record other than flipflops. She remains an unknown, and undecided voters will continue to break for Trump as Election Day approaches.

While trying to deflect blame to Trump for every current problem faced by the American people (especially those specifical exacerbated by the Biden-Harris regime), she failed to take any responsibility herself for having been part of the problem. And she couldn’t answer the real question put to her by President Trump during the debate (paraphrasing): “If you have all these great plans to solve these problems, why aren’t you implementing them NOW since you are the sitting vice president?” Furthermore, she failed to explain why she has been unable to accomplish any of those plans, even though she has been in power for four years. And that is why facts are already superseding emotions in how people are evaluating that debate in retrospective.

The Harris campaign focused her debate performance on the superficial – a grave strategic error – for the real problems faced by Americans this year require real solutions, not platitudes and vague promises.

The end.