What She Needed to Do

And some thoughts on the state of the race

Portrait of the candidates as baffled uncle and skeptical niece. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty. 

When Vice President Harris opened up in her first debate response—to the fairly stupid but utterly predictable question whether Americans are "better off than they were four years ago", I was somewhat dismayed by the way she completely ignored it, choosing to answer a completely different question instead, with a peculiar mix of autobiographical detail and Clintonian numbers:

So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. Because here's the thing. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people. We know that young families need support to raise their children. And I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time. So that those young families can afford to buy a crib, buy a car seat, buy clothes for their children. My passion, one of them, is small businesses. I was actually -- my mother raised my sister and me but there was a woman who helped raise us. We call her our second mother. She was a small business owner. I love our small businesses. My plan is to give a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America's economy. My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.

But it's astonishing, looking back at it, how many necessary things she accomplished with that, in the first two minutes: 

• sketching out her character, as an ordinary American raised by a single mother with the help of a day care provider (loved, and also properly paid for her work), which has given her a feeling for what ordinary Americans need and a motivation to help them get it, for the benefit of those in the audience that had barely heard of her before July and still doesn't know much of anything about her; 

• establishing her readiness to talk about policy with details, numbers and all, for the benefit of the moderators whose preparation has led them to believe that she's going to keep it vague and airy, and precisely the kind of wonky detail they hate at the politics desk, because they find it so boring;

• establishing the contrast with her opponent, who is focused on helping his fellow billionaires and their giant companies, as he has shown in the past and as he plans in the future; and

• spooking the opponent personally with a description of his tariff proposals that he may not even be able to recognize—it's import duties, paid by the American importers of foreign goods—effectively a sales tax, since the importers normally pass the cost on to their customers, but not literally a sales tax, while Trump keeps implying idiotically that it's paid by the governments of the exporting countries, which he should understand better considering all the import businesses he theoretically ran in his TV star days (Israeli vodka, Slovene cocktail glasses, Turkish furniture, Chinese neckties and eyeglass frames, etc.—of course he was just a licensee pretending to run the businesses for the show, and they were all failures), a description that immediately goads him into opening with a ridiculously ignorant lie:

  ---

First of all, I have no sales tax. That's an incorrect statement. She knows that. We're doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we've done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money, they can't. It would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They've taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They've left the tariffs on.....

No, "other countries" don't pay a dime. And while the money paid by US import businesses is real, it's hardly important: it's up from about 1% of annual federal revenue from 1946 to 2017 to 2% (compared to 49% for income tax), and that's not the reason the Biden administration has held on to them. Tariffs haven't been a significant source of revenue since the income tax was introduced by a Progressive movement a bit over a century ago (it's imaginable that Trump learned from his rightwing father that income tax is an attack on the wealthy, and that's the reason he's convinced tariffs are the solution to every problem).

The only reason for imposing tariffs nowadays is as the (post-neoliberal) Biden administration uses it, for the encouragement of domestic industry, but combined, unlike the Trump tariffs, with an effective industrial policy of the kind Republicans regard as an abomination and which Trump and his minions wouldn't know how to begin in any case (Trump's own tariffs on imports from the EU as well as China are best known for China's retaliation against US agriculture—92% of the "billions and billions of dollars" they brought in went to compensating US farmers for the losses Trump policy had caused them).

Via.

FWIW.

Moreover, Harris did have an answer to the "are we better off" question, which she got to in response to Trump's freakout Gish gallop, which ran in a matter of seconds from tariffs to inflation to a rant on "millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums" before he remembered he was supposed to be talking about the economy. 

"I'd love to" talk about the economy, Harris replied:

Let's talk about what Donald Trump left us. Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. Donald Trump left us the worst public health epidemic in a century. Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess. 

So you can't complain that she didn't answer—she just chose to do it in her own time, after getting Trump to define his own character, as ignorant, delusional, and vicious, and did it with a list of charges that placed him as the defendant in what would amount to a trial, and took control of the occasion. 

Really, as Rebecca Traister suggested, she took control of it the minute she came on stage and marched over to Trump's podium introducing herself as if she were the host ("Kamala Harris. Let's have a good debate") and forcing him to shake hands.

It was a stunning performance. It was by far the most entertaining presidential debate I've ever seen, and by far the most useful (both at the same time: the faces she made for the camera when Trump was speaking were funny, but they were also instructive, assisting with the fact checking; leading the audience to distinguish Trump the liar from Trump the fool, libelous Trump from psycho Trump, the sneaky one from the one who was just tired and lost). (It's only fair to mention that the moderators did an unusually good job of keeping the candidates on the subject and checking the facts themselves.)

It didn't, as many of the pundits complain, provide a very clear sense of how Harris's presidency will differ policy-wise from Biden's, but I don't understand why it should; she's not running against Biden, she's running against Trump. Josh Marshall likes to say she's making Trump the "incumbent", the representative of the discredited establishment, in order to present herself as the change agent, and some think that's a little too paradoxical, but I think it meets the psychology of the moment, in terms of the Lacanian picture I sketched out a couple of weeks ago. Economically, Biden (or "Biden-Harris") rescued the nation from the calamity of 2020; psychologically, Biden's term is the afterwardsness in which we began to realize how traumatized we've been, and we may irrationally blame him, in the form of the psychoanalytic transference, but it's Trump we're suffering from—it's Trump who abused us, and he really is the incumbent in that sense.

As to whether the debate worked or not for the Harris campaign, whether she "did what she needed to do" as the horserace pundits always put it, I don't know, but I think there are reasons for being hopeful, and I don't mean the current picture in the polls, or for that matter the parade of Bush-era endorsements for Harris, most recently from that old reprobate Alberto Gonzales, or last week's statements from Liz Cheney and her father the abominable former vice; not that there's anything wrong with those in and of themselves, it's the responsible thing to do, given Trump's known incompetence and criminality, and Trump opposes some things in national security and foreign policy where the "bipartisan consensus" is so fundamental that at some level I agree with Dick Cheney (like "the US should have multilateral economic and security alliances"); but I can't quite bring myself to see it outside the context of Liz Cheney's broader project of rehabilitating the Republican Party by pretending Trump isn't really one of them, that he's some kind of horrific invasive species from somewhere entirely different. I may get back to that a little later.

The Liz Cheney endorsement that startled me was the one for Texas Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred, because it's a direct attack on the party as it is, in the rebarbative person of Senator Cruz: she wrote,

There are numbers of candidates around the country who have embraced election denialism [the C-SPAN transcript says "elections and nihilism" first, but never mind that]—denialism. It is important that we beat them too. I think one of the most important things we need to do as a country as we begin to rebuild our politics is we need to elect serious people. Often, when you go in to vote you don't have the choice. I want to say specifically here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous serious candidate running for the United States Senate. [Applause.] It's not Ted Cruz. [Laughter.] [Applause.]....You might not agree on every policy position, but we need people who are going to serve in good faith. In this race, that is Colin Allred.

And because she gives a nod to the idea that Allred might conceivably win, pinned in Cheney's explanation to Trump's and Vance's (and by implication Cruz's) misogyny, and its connection to the reproductive rights issue: "Women around this country, we've had enough," she said. It seems like a more conventional endorsement, in which she'd not only like him to win, but personally hopes to help.

The things that are giving me the most hope at the moment have to do with how bad the Trump Republican party is, in every sense of the work, incompetent, corrupt, and unresponsive to voters, especially on the abortion issue. 

There's the  arrogance of Donald Trump saying he doesn't have to prepare for a debate being matched by his vice presidential candidate:

A reporter asked Vance how he was getting ready for the [October 1 debate with Walz] at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday.

He answered: "The way I'm doing debate prep is by spending time with these fine people—this is how I do debate prep."

That didn't work out so well for Donald, JD, you might want to rethink it.

There's the awful quality of so many of the GOP downballot candidates, especially for the Senate, to the despair of the National Review, with only two seats likely to flip to the Republicans, West Virginia and Montana (but Montana is looking iffier for them, with the Republican, ex–Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy falling from multiple lying scandals to financial scandal to racism scandal).  

There's the turnover of the national committee from Ronna McDaniel (a horrible person, but a professional) to Trump's daughter-in-law focusing on her imaginary music career and outsourcing the party's entire GOTV program to pikers with no experience like Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA. I'm personally convinced Trump is continuing to milk the party to pay his own and his henchmen's legal fees. It's as if they're so confident in their voter suppression efforts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina that they don't need GOTV:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, including having about 90 staffers in the must-win state of Pennsylvania.

But the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the RNC in March, redirecting the focus on field operations to combating supposed voter fraud and pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on several political action committees and ardent Trump volunteers.

The result has been that the Trump campaign has put fewer resources into its ground game in battleground states, according to people familiar with the matter – and Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential.

They're so bad at everything else, maybe they're not really good at voter suppression either.

Meanwhile, since the coming of Kamala Harris, there's an explosion of new voter registrations, especially among the 18-to-34s and among those particularly among women:

Voter registration surged 700% after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, according to the CEO of a nonpartisan voter engagement organization....Hailey noted significant registration increases in key swing states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. By the end of the week following Biden’s announcement, Vote.org had recorded more than 142,000 new registrations nationwide....

(who don't show up in the likely voter polls because they'll be voting for the first time). 

This phenomenon is plainly connected to the issue of abortion, which is also the subject of ballot measures in 10 states, including some with important Senate races with repellent Republicans: Montana (Tester vs. Sheehy), Arizona (Gallego vs. Lake), Missouri (Kunze vs. Hawley), and Florida (Mucarsel-Powell vs. Scott). Plus Ohio (Sherrod Brown vs. the unspeakable Bernie Moreno), which had its referendum in 2023, which that state's vile legislature has decided to ignore, and the voters really ought to punish them for it. Some of those could have coattails, and they should.

I'm convinced there could be a Blue blowout in November that polls couldn't have predicted—not that there will be, because it's unpredictable, but that it's really possible, between the joy of the Democrats, the worthlessness of the Republicans, and Harris's emerging pro-freedom campaign.