One for the history books!
September 12, 2024
After delivering one of the best debate performances in American political history, Kamala Harris is receiving begrudging and stinting praise from many in the media and commentary class. But 67 million people saw Kamala Harris demonstrate she is made of presidential timber. They witnessed a masterful performance that revealed a penetrating intellect tempered by decency and humanity. On the substance and execution, she should have earned the support of all voters and unqualified praise from the media and political commentators.
Trump's performance was vile and disqualifying. It was worse than Joe Biden’s widely panned debate by far. While Joe Biden turned in a horrible debate performance as measured by the artificial rules of made-for-tv spectacles, Donald Trump made dozens of statements that were objectively depraved, racist, antidemocratic, delusional, and deceitful.
Trump transcended the debate format and devolved into fascist demagoguery that should have resulted in universal condemnation by all voters, the media, and political commentators. If Joe Biden was driven from the presidential race because of his poor debate performance, Trump should be banished from politics, expelled from his party, and relegated to a place of dishonor in the annals of American history.
Talking about the debate is difficult because of the urge to focus on Kamala Harris’s brilliantly executed strategy of baiting Trump into ranting about his insecurities and the horror of Trump's worst-in-the-history-of-the-nation performance on substance.
I get it. Harris’s ninja debating moves and Trump's racist deer-in-the-headlights stare made for riveting television. But we focus on those aspects of the debate to the detriment of the substance of Kamala Harris’s message. She spent a substantial portion of the debate discussing her policies and her plan to help heal the divisions that beset America.
It is disappointing to see so many stories and commentators describe the debate as “fierce” or “contentious.” I heard one commentator on MSNBC bemoan the fact that neither candidate seemed interested in bridging the divide in America. That is false. Kamala Harris promised to be a president for all Americans and to focus on the needs of the people, not the needs and wants of the president. She said, in part,
And I think the American people want better than that. Want better than this. Want someone who understands as I do, I travel our country, we see in each other a friend. We see in each other a neighbor. We don't want a leader who is constantly trying to have Americans point their fingers at each other. I meet with people all the time who tell me "Can we please just have discourse about how we're going to invest in the aspirations and the ambitions and the dreams of the American people?" [¶¶]
I've only had one client. The people. And I'll tell you, as a prosecutor I never asked a victim or a witness are you a Republican or a Democrat. The only thing I ever asked them, are you okay? And that's the kind of president we need right now. Someone who cares about you and is not putting themselves first. I intend to be a president for all Americans and focus on what we can do over the next 10 and 20 years to build back up our country by investing right now in you the American people.
Kamala Harris repeatedly offered her policy vision for America, including tax breaks for business startups; subsidizing downpayments for first-time home purchases; incentivizing the construction of starter homes; granting tax credits for families with newborns; investing in American chip technology, quantum computing, and AI; supporting worker’s rights; reducing reliance on fossil fuels; granting tax cuts for the middle class; requiring the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes; and protecting the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Medicaid. She also promised to protect reproductive liberty, LGBTQ equality, and voting rights of all Americans.
The media has hounded Kamala Harris for weeks about the alleged absence of policies in her campaign. On Tuesday, she talked about dozens of specific policies—and the media is not saying a word about those policies after the debate.
Not. A. Word.
It’s almost as if the media didn’t really care about Kamala Harris’s policies but were only interested in a talking point they could use to criticize her. Hypocrites!
So, before talking about how well Kamala Harris executed her strategy of baiting Trump and how abhorrent Trump's performance and positions were, let’s give Kamala Harris her due on the substance: She gave a presidential-level discourse on policies that will affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans. The fact that Trump and the moderators ignored those policies does not diminish the respect she showed for the American people by clearly setting forth her policies if elected as president.
Among the many insipid criticisms of Kamala Harris was that she used facial expressions to convey her disapproval, amusement, and disbelief over Trump's utterances. This was an effective use of her non-speaking time and allowed her to diminish Trump without saying a word.
Dahlia Lithwick demolishes the critics who faulted Kamala’s facial expressions—a criticism that would only be leveled against a woman. See Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, Harris–Trump debate: Kamala Harris’ face on Tuesday was the stuff of legend. (slate.com). Lithwick writes,
It must be beyond maddening for a political actor to be summoned into a “debate” that is not really a debate, pitted against some frothing amalgam of WWE reenactor and Tasmanian devil, warned that your microphone will be muted while he is speaking, cautioned that he will be allowed to talk over you and the moderators, then be criticized for … blinking? [¶¶]
Harris’ face roamed free and far on Tuesday, and it was thoroughly warranted and frequently enjoyable. I think of her mobile, legible face as a satisfying call-and-response to Trump’s lifelong preference for female adulation and Botox.
Women have faces. Their faces have expressions. If that was upsetting to you during Tuesday’s debate, you might be dismayed to learn that deep beneath our expressive faces lie thoughts, dreams, frustrations, and other markers of human agency. If a woman smiling freaks you out, imagine what happens when a woman votes.
While talking about Kamala Harris’s facial expressions may seem superficial, it is not. One of Harris’s most significant accomplishments was her ability to show herself to be a likable, relatable human being. She did so by using the medium of television to her advantage. Were the expressive facial reactions real or practiced? It doesn’t matter; they were successful. People liked Kamala Harris. For a candidate who has been on the national scene since 2018, the percentage of voters who still say they don’t “know” her is shocking. But she went some distance in the debate to introduce herself to those voters in a positive way.
Among Harris’s many pointed and powerful answers on Tuesday, none were better than her response to Trump's gloating over the demise of Roe v. Wade. Harris said,
In over 20 states there are Trump abortion bans which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care. In one state it provides prison for life. Trump abortion bans that make no exception even for rape and incest. Which—understand what that means. A survivor of a crime, a violation to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That is immoral. And one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree: The government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.
You want to talk about, this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12 or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.
Understand in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion—a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages.
There is more room to praise Kamala Harris’s performance in the debate, but we must turn to Trump's horrific statements during the debate. So, let’s get Trump’s “debate performance” out of the way: It was the worst debate performance (in terms of style) in the history of political debates. See The Guardian, Republicans dismayed by Trump’s ‘bad’ and ‘unprepared’ debate performance. Brit Hume of Fox News said, “Let’s make no mistake. Trump had a bad night. We just heard so many of the old grievances that we all know aren’t winners politically.” Coming from a Fox commentator, that is as bad as it gets for Trump.
There were many disgraceful, disqualifying statements during the debate by Trump: Refusing to say that he hoped Ukraine would defeat the Russian invasion; refusing to acknowledge that he lost in 2020; refusing to express any regret for his actions on January 6; claiming that “every Democrat” wanted to “get rid of” Roe v. Wade.; and repeatedly saying that execution of babies after a full-term delivery was permissible under existing law.
To state the obvious, if Kamala Harris had uttered a single statement that was one-tenth as egregious as any of the above, the major media would be calling for her withdrawal from the race.
But Trump's worst statement was the race-baiting claim that Haitian immigrants are capturing domestic pets in Springfield, Ohio and eating them. That trope was originally directed at immigrants from other countries but has been repurposed by Trump to slander Haitian immigrants who are legally in the US.
The claim is false and started as triple-hearsay thrice-removed:
On Sept. 6, a post surfaced on X that shared what looked like a screengrab of a social media post apparently out of Springfield. The retweeted post talked about the person’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” seeing a cat hanging from a tree to be butchered and eaten, claiming without evidence that Haitians lived at the house.
So, a “screenshot” of a retweet (three levels removed from personal knowledge) talked about a “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” (three more levels removed from personal knowledge). In short, the claim is the worst sort of internet rumor—intentionally unverifiable. Repeating such a rumor is beneath a candidate for the presidency.
But the crassness of repeating the rumor is the least of the offense. Trump did not repeat a rumor—he asserted the rumor as “fact” for the purpose of stirring racial hatred against Haitian immigrants. The false rumor has been circulating for weeks among right-wing websites that attack Haitian immigrants as the cause of an increase in crime in Springfield. See WaPo, Anatomy of a racist smear: How false claims of pet-eating immigrants caught on.
Trump then leveraged the cat-eating Haitian claim to smear all immigrants as law-breaking, violent, less-than-human invaders whom he would deport en masse from the US. The entire episode was an appeal to the most racist, xenophobic backwaters of American society. It was shameful and divisive. It may lead to violence against immigrants—just as past statements by Trump have led to violence against immigrants in Texas. See NBC (8/5/2019), Trump's anti-immigrant 'invasion' rhetoric was echoed by the El Paso shooter for a reason.
No modern presidential candidate has appealed to racial animus during a presidential debate. Trump's attack on the Haitian community should have been the end of his candidacy. As should his statements about Ukraine, the 2020 election, January 6, and abortion—and that list excludes his dozens of other falsehoods.
In short, the debate should move the needle in favor of Kamala Harris. Whether it will do so is a different question—one that will be determined, in part, by whether the media maintains the same intense focus on Trump's debate performance that it maintained on Biden’s debate performance in July. On the substance, Trump's debate performance was objectively worse, by far. Let’s hope the media doesn’t get distracted by the less consequential matters.
A short rant about the use of “undecided voters” after debates
It has become mandatory for news outlets to use panels of undecided voters to gauge the success or failure of candidates during debates and major speeches. The practice constitutes “viewer abuse” by the media outlets who employ it. It must stop immediately.
Let’s be clear: Undecided voters know that one candidate seeks to end democracy while the other candidate seeks to preserve it. The undecided voters’ reaction to that set of facts is to say, “I am not really sure who I will vote for. I need to know more.” Such voters have no useful information to impart to anyone, much less a television audience of tens of millions of viewers.
Worse, the use of a tiny panel of undecided voters is a sniveling form of cheap journalism based on pseudo-science. A sample of a dozen undecided voters has no statistical meaning. It is the literal equivalent of an empty set—only worse. The tiny sample misleads viewers by falsely suggesting that the uninformed view of fatally indecisive voters has value beyond filling airtime between commercials.
In short, the “undecided voter panel” is insulting to viewers and degrading to the journalists who are forced to pretend that the views of those clueless voters are newsworthy. Journalists should simply refuse to be part of the degrading experience.
Opportunities for Reader engagement
Join Sister District, Daily Kos, and Heather Cox Richardson
Please join Sister District on Monday, September 23, 2024, at 5:00 p.m. Pacific / 8:00 p.m. Eastern for a virtual event highlighting why voting downballot in 2024 is so critically important in partnership with Daily Kos and The Downballot. We will hear from Tennessee State Rep. Justin Jones, Virginia Sen. Danica Roem, and author and historian Heather Cox Richardson. The event will be moderated by Sister District Co-Founder Gaby Goldstein and The Downballot’s David Nir.
Sister District is a grassroots organization that aims to build enduring progressive power in state legislatures across the country, to improve people’s lives and support Democrats by filling critical gaps at every point in the political life cycle. Sign up to phonebank and volunteer with Sister District.
Join Airlift and Ruben Gallego on September 17
Kamala certainly showed the country how ready she is to be President. The race is too close for comfort and we all are acutely aware of how close the Presidential and Senate races are in Arizona. You can do something about it by joining Airlift on Tuesday, September 17, 5:00 PT / 8:00 ET to help ensure victory. Airlift is thrilled that Congressman (and Senate candidate) Ruben Gallego will be our special guest before our fundraiser benefiting Worker Power to help get out the vote in this crucial battleground state. As the son of an immigrant single mom, Ruben knows what it’s like to fight for and empower workers. We’ll also hear from key leaders of Airlift Partner Worker Power.
Worker Power has built one of Arizona’s biggest field operations, scoring victories for worker protections while helping flip the White House, Senate seats, the governorship, and other statewide offices Blue. With so much at stake in 2024, come learn how we can help Worker Power help Ruben Gallego and Kamala Harris win this election.
Sign up here.
Although this is a fundraiser, you need not make a donation to attend.
Concluding Thoughts
After his disastrous and insulting debate performance, Donald Trump attended a 9/11 memorial ceremony at the site of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. Trump was accompanied by 9/11 conspiracy theorist Lara Loomer, who contends that the attack on the Twin Towers was an “inside job” by the US government. Loomer also posted virulently racist comments about Kamala Harris two days before the debate. Donald Trump Brought a 9/11 Conspiracy Theorist to a 9/11 Memorial Event – Mother Jones.
Trump’s desecration of the 9/11 memorial ceremony should be as notable as his desecration of Arlington National Cemetery. It is up to us and the press ensure that the American people are aware of Trump’s continued insults to veterans and victims of terrorism.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Daily Dose of Perspective
The image below captures a portion of the nebula classified as NGC (“New General Catalog”) 7822. It is 3,000 light-years from Earth and has a radius of 75 light-years.
Astrophotographers present NGC 7822 in a dizzying array of colors. When I process an image, I try to find a reliable reference image to guide my color processing. Here, I opted for muted colors that are directionally consistent with the image from Wikipedia’s entry on NGC 7822: Ngc7822 - NGC 7822 - Wikipedia
Yes, why should I care what some undecided voter thinks about any political issue at this moment in America? Those people are unknown to me. Their lives, how they think, who they care about is all unknown to me. What is known is that Donald Trump is well known to them, yet they still aren't sure if he should be elected President again? That alone disqualifies their opinion as holding any interest for me. I have disdain for their opinions as ones held by people I have no interest in knowing.
And the criticism of Harris’s making faces, the Corporate media , the GOP and every sane person in the US should have been making faces at Trump for the last 9 years. Finally somebody has the courage to stand up!