Kamala Crushed It, But Missed a Few Chances

 

Remember that whole big controversy before the debate? The one about whether the microphone should be on or off when the other person is speaking? History records that the Harris team lost that one. I’m not so sure.

Trump’s handlers wanted the mics off, presumably to keep their guy from haranguing Harris and alienating the audience. Harris’s people fought to keep the mics on, for essentially the same reason, or so it’s said. The theory was that Trump’s inability to keep from interrupting would expose his boorish assholery, which would most likely work to her advantage.

That theory always seemed counterintuitive to me — I couldn’t see any downside to keeping Trump quiet, or upside to letting him talk under his breath. So I suspected the Harris team might be playing rope-a-dope. Indeed, I think they faked the Trump side into keeping the mics off, which is what they wanted the whole time.

Because what they knew — and we didn’t — was that Harris had a whole repertoire of facial expressions that could speak loudly, and quite eloquently, without saying a word. They were subtle but unmistakable, perfected over decades in California courtrooms. She could use them to communicate, microphone-free, anything from surprise to skepticism to disgust, in reaction to any sort of garbage Trump might spew.

I’m guessing her team knew that the split screens of the two of them would tell a devastating story, and they coached her to make the most of what came naturally to her anyway.

And it worked. When Trump ranted, Harris rolled her eyes. When he sputtered, she snickered. When he regurgitated the same lies that were old a decade ago, she mouthed “Not true.” And when he said immigrants were eating pets, she just laughed in his face. Trump hates being laughed at.

So half the battle was nonverbal. Whatever Trump said, there was a face she could make, which the audience could read. By contrast, when she was talking — and stripping the paint off him — all he could do was grimace and pout. His mic was off, and his rage was there for all to see.

Over 67 million people watched this smackdown, with many millions more seeing the clips over the last week. For many of them, this was their first, and possibly only, glimpse of Trump off the leash. His decline into demented ranting has been so carefully managed by his handlers, and so thoroughly “sane-washed” by the media, that only those paying attention understand what a dangerous fool he really is.

And a lot of those 67 million have not paid attention until now. They’re low-interest voters. They don’t care about politics. They have only the vaguest idea what government does, how it’s run, or why the person they elect might be hazardous to their health.

Now that Labor Day has passed, these people are actively — or less passively — looking at the election for the first time. This one debate was perhaps Harris’s only real opportunity to reach them.

Which she did, but only up to a point. I think she could have done even better. I do understand the pressure she was under, and I certainly didn’t expect perfection. But there were opportunities missed, and they’re worth discussing.

Most were a matter of emphasis, and no big deal. I wish, for example, she could have hit the convicted criminal thing a little harder. I’m over it.

But the biggest chance came right at the start. David Muir’s first question to her was the softest of possible softballs: Is the country better off now than it was four years ago?

She should’ve hit it out of the park. She should’ve said, right then and there, that four years ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying because of the incompetence and greed of this despicable criminal. Or something.

Instead, she sidestepped the question. She was tentative, a little nervous — as was I — and she had a list of talking points she wanted to get through. So she missed the chance to remind 67 million people that Covid was horribly botched by Trump, leaving a huge mess for the Biden administration to clean up. To be fair, she did ultimately make that point, but imagine if those had been the first words out of her mouth.

I would also argue that her closing statement could’ve been better. She could’ve told those 67 million people, many of whom do not know, that the American economy is the envy of the entire world, and that it’s all because of Democrats.

Instead, she went for her canned lines, which she mostly delivers by rote. It wasn’t effective, and it gave Trump an opening he was too flustered to do much with.

Again, these are quibbles, missed opportunities that don’t really matter. But she did actually make one real mistake — subtle but significant — and it might have been a coaching error.

When she brought up what she called “the Trump sales tax,” she got the point wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be about sales taxes, which are not a Trump thing, but about tariffs, which very much are.

It bothered me immediately, because the distinction was important. This was a huge chance to puncture one of Trump’s most dangerous lies, that tariffs are the solution to everything, and should even replace the income tax.

He’s been telling the same whoppers for years — that tariffs are a tax on foreign countries, which they’re not, and that they’ll bring in more revenue than ever in our history, which they won’t. Tariffs are the only economic argument Trump ever makes, and even quack economists know that it’s purely bonkers — an economic suicide pact.

But he keeps repeating it, and lying about it, and he manages to confuse enough people — and, appallingly, enough of the media — that we miss how bonkers it really is.

And that, I believe, is why the talking point was in Harris’s debate notes. Unfortunately, it was a point that didn’t get made.

I think I know what happened. Somebody on the team watched LawrenceO’Donnell on MSNBC the night before, when he demolished the New York Times for sane-washing Trump’s tariff lies, which were getting demonstrably crazier.

O’Donnell patiently explained to us — and to the Times — that a tariff is a tax on imports that is paid by American consumers. It is not paid by China or any other country of origin, only by us, and that it “amounts to a sales tax” on what we buy. He emphasized those very words and repeated them several times.

The Harris team surely heard this story and astutely thought the point O’Donnell was making might belong in her prep sheet. But somewhere in the process, the most important word, ‘tariff,’ went missing. As soon as she said “sales tax,” I flashed back to O’Donnell, and imagined him smacking his own head.

But don’t let me kill the buzz here. I couldn’t have asked for a better time, and it still feels good a week later. Harris brought humor, ridicule, and nonverbal communication into a game that had always been played on Trump’s terms.

She baited the emperor into showing the world that he had no clothes, that he was morally and intellectually bankrupt, that he was nothing but a more bloated version of your old drunk uncle sounding off at Thanksgiving dinner.

Yes, she did a good job of selling herself. But she did an even better job of getting him to sell her. She got him to make his own case — to 67 million people — of just what a loser he is. 

If they didn’t know already.