To say that Kamala Harris nailed it in Tuesday night’s debate is an understatement. She knocked it out of the park. She combined civility with firmness. She made Donald Trump look and sound like the blubbering idiot he is.
This was Harris’s first presidential debate. It was Trump’s eighth – including his debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But Trump was worse than he has ever been. All he did was attack. His only weapon was fear. His only means were lies.
Trump claimed that the American economy under him was better than the economy under Biden and Harris, and that under Harris the economy would be ruined. In fact, under Trump, America lost almost 3m jobs. And Trump’s unforgivable failure to contain Covid as well as other advanced countries required massive government expenditures that fueled inflation.
Biden and Harris, by contrast, have presided over an explosion of job growth while inflation has been tamed.
On the issue of abortion, Trump claimed Democrats want to kill babies after they are born. When questioned about January 6, he charged that Biden and Harris were responsible for the investigations and indictments that targeted him.
Harris, compared to Trump, answered the questions asked of her – clearly, cogently, powerfully.
It wasn’t so much Trump’s shambolic responses that gave Harris the big win. It was her manner, in sharp contrast to his.
She set the tone by walking over to Trump at the start of the debate to shake his hand and introduce herself. He seemed flummoxed.
Throughout the next 90 minutes, she stayed in control. She was the adult in the room. She smiled at his brazen lies, and then scolded him about them. She was in command of her facts and arguments and refused to stoop to Trump’s belligerence or become rattled by it.
Trump interrupted, even though his mic was supposed to be muted – which is how he managed to get nine more minutes of talk than Harris. Regardless of how much time he had, he filled it with shouts, harangues and repeatedly bogus claims.
Harris’s most important challenge was to introduce herself to the American public as tough and competent. She did that superbly.
She also understood that the only way to deal with Trump’s attacks was to hit him back harder. In doing so, she showed a combination of ferocity and discipline.
Despite a month of favorable coverage, 28% of voters in the recent New York Times/Siena College poll said they still needed to learn more about Harris, compared with only 9% who said they needed to know more about Trump.
On Tuesday night they saw a leader.
Her second challenge was to separate herself from Biden while also taking appropriate credit for the Biden-Harris administration’s achievements. An overwhelming majority of voters say they want the next president to bring “major change”.
Harris did that. She showed herself as the agent of change. She spoke of her plans for helping small business and families. She talked about how she would stand up for a woman’s reproductive freedom. She was tough on foreign policy and explained the importance of Nato. She was clear and forceful about strengthening American democracy and the rule of law.
Harris spoke of a “new beginning” for America. What does this new beginning consist of? She didn’t have to talk about her youth, gender or ethnicity, because these attributes were obvious. It was her positive energy – in contrast to Trump’s overwhelming negativism – that drove home the point.
The “new beginning” is a new generation of leadership.
Trump tried to paint Harris as the candidate of the status quo. He didn’t come close, not just because he’s an ageing, cantankerous white man. He failed because he came off as a mess of a human being.
When she said Americans were ready to turn the page on the politics of the past and strive together for a better future, she didn’t need to do more than make the slightest gesture toward the ageing, raging fount of grievance standing on the other side of the stage.
Her third challenge was to goad Trump into exposing his out-of-control self. In this she also succeeded.
She rattled Trump to the point where he couldn’t contain his nastiness. He called her a “Marxist”, and accused her father of being one, too. “She’s been so bad,” he sneered. He claimed Joe Biden “hates her”. He charged that Harris “hates Israel”, and she also “hates the Arab population”. He called her “the worst vice-president in the history of the country”.
On and on Trump went, into the dark depths of his personal malignancy – accusing her and Biden of everything Trump himself has done (such as take money from foreign governments) and everything he aims to do (such as bring down American democracy).
Harris’s closing statement didn’t even mention Trump. She didn’t have to. By then the choice was clear – either Trump’s bottomless negativism, pessimism, lies and anger, or Harris’s affirmative view of America and its endless possibilities.
Trump’s closing statement (he won the coin toss to close last) was even darker. We would become a failed nation if she were elected president, he predicted. We already are on the way to becoming one, he said.
Harris won hands down, but what matters most is whether the few voters who before the debate were uncertain about how to vote now decide to support Harris over Trump. Most pundits thought Clinton had won her three debates with Trump.
With election day just eight weeks away and early voting beginning within days, what Americans tell one another about tonight’s debate will be determinative.
At least one voter named Taylor Swift decided on the basis of tonight’s debate to go with Harris. In an Instagram post to her more than 283m followers, Swift said: “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”
Swift signed her post “Childless Cat Lady” and included a photo of herself holding her cat, Benjamin Button, who has appeared on the cover of Time magazine with her.
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Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com