Onstage at the presidential debate last night, Kamala Harris gave the kind of substanceless performance that has characterized her campaign so far, seemingly designed to keep the country from knowing what she would actually get done in the White House.
Last night, it felt like the country went backward.
No, not because of Donald Trump’s erratic and meandering performance, though that will deservedly get most of the attention today. Trump gave a masterclass in how not to debate, carrying out missteps like he was systematically making his way through a list of them.
He wouldn’t give a straight “no” when asked if he would veto a national abortion ban. He brought up the bizarre and made-up right-wing rumor that Haitian migrants are eating people’s pets. He repeatedly attacked President Joe Biden, who is no longer in the race. He once more spent precious debate minutes defending his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. He did damage control over his comments questioning his opponent’s racial identity, only to immediately express doubts about her racial identity again.
It was clear Trump had soundly lost the debate by the sheer number of pro-Republican influencers who took to social media to whine about the debate moderating. What polling we have shows that the public agrees.
But we are used to this from Trump at this point. What made the night so dispiriting was that his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris — the one who is meant to be the fresh, exciting face brimming with energy and new ideas, who would take the country into a new, more hopeful chapter — turned in the kind of substanceless performance that has characterized her campaign so far, seemingly deliberately designed to keep the country from knowing what she would actually do if she ever gets in the White House.
But is this really all that a post-Biden Democratic campaign was meant to accomplish?
To be clear, this may very well work for her. At heart, Harris had one job last night: to seem competent and normal, which she capably did.
Trump, by contrast, failed his baseline requirement of not coming off as bizarre and chaotic. Harris turns out to have been able to do the most basic thing that those who pushed for a replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket two months ago demanded: she could ably deliver the Joe Biden campaign message that Trump was a threat to democracy, reproductive rights, and the country as a whole, while not being Joe Biden.
Many were unhappy with the way things were going way before Biden turned in an awful debate performance and wheezed about beating Medicare. Child poverty had spiked. Housing had become intolerably unaffordable. The health care system was still an anxiety-inducing mess. The country was embroiled in multiple wars that were sucking up taxpayer money and political attention, not to mention killing scores of civilians. It’s no wonder that 63 percent of voters in a recent — and for Harris, very bad — poll said they wanted to see a “major change” from Biden’s presidency.
Harris gave little indication she would deliver it at last night’s debate.
Besides a few single, off-handed mentions of policies she had announced to great fanfare just three weeks ago — an expanded child tax credit, building three million more homes, $25,000 down-payment assistance for first-time home buyers — this was a performance light on specifics that won’t reassure the 28 percent of voters who feel they don’t know enough about Harris.
It wasn’t that long ago that televised presidential debates featured some actual substantive discussion about different visions to tackle the United States’ many problems: the merits of a fully public health care system, for instance, or the value of reorienting the United States’ gargantuan military spending toward fighting climate change. There was none of that here.
Trump gets rightly pilloried for being a policy lightweight, but he wasn’t alone in that regard last night. Harris continually offered broad, sometimes self-contradictory pronouncements on how to deal with the country’s pressing issues. Asked what she would do about climate change, Harris simply didn’t answer the question, not long after bragging about unleashing record levels of domestic oil production and continuing fracking. There needs to be a cease-fire in Gaza, she said, but she made no indication she would stop sending Benjamin Netanyahu the weapons he needed to continue refusing one.
What were the candidates’ different plans to take on inflation? Most voters don’t know because the candidates never talked about it. The now vastly inadequate $15 minimum wage is part of Harris’s platform, as it was for Biden, but she never so much as mentioned it.
Maybe most stunning is how health care — still the number-one financial worry for most Americans, with 25 million Americans and counting thrown off their insurance under Biden — has seemingly completely vanished as an issue that candidates feel like they need to bother seriously addressing. Harris’s only proposal was a vague promise to “strengthen the Affordable Care Act,” the Democrats’ boilerplate answer on health care for more or less a decade now. Biden’s extremely popular policy ideas that died in Congress in 2021 like lowering the Medicare age to sixty and expanding the program to cover hearing, dental, and vision seem gone forever. Even Hillary Clinton ran on letting Americans older than fifty buy in to Medicare.
Worse, the debate confirms that both Biden’s and now Harris’s overall rightward pivot is now firmly set in stone. In keeping with the past year, the vice president didn’t put forward any alternate vision on immigration from Trump — one that was highly popular and politically beneficial to the party — but attacked him from the right on it.
It took debate moderator David Muir to articulate any disquiet about Trump’s Orwellian plan to send armed government agents into US neighborhoods to round up undocumented people. Likewise, Harris repeatedly attacked Trump for being too dovish on foreign policy, whether for exchanging “love letters with Kim Jong Un” or negotiating with the Taliban, and vowed, for the second time since the Democratic convention, to create “the most lethal fighting force in the world.”
Last night, in other words, was a depressing reversion to a style of shallow, unambitious, and right-leaning Democratic politics many thought the country had turned the page on after 2016. Harris’s team is hoping that this time, it will be a winner against Trump. Maybe so. But if this is how she plans to govern, too, it will only be matter of time before another reckoning.
This post was originally published on Jacobin.