Political parties hold debates to identify winners – and the DNC just hosted two three-hour debates in Detroit. The week began with four viable candidates: Biden (32%), Sanders (16.4%), Warren (14.8%) and Harris (11%). Along with Booker, Buttigieg and O’Rourke, they have already qualified for September’s debates. So – who helped or hurt their campaign?
I am betting three candidates will survive New Hampshire and Kamala Harris won’t be one of them. On Wednesday’s stage, she wilted under attacks from Joe Biden and Tulsi Gabbard, who threw softballs compared to the kind of heat President Trump will bring. In the process, they made Harris look a Bubble Babe that’s not ready to be commander in chief.
Even though Harris was new to the Senate, she entered the race with a “tough gal” reputation (just ask Justice Kavanaugh). True to form, she landed haymakers on Joe Biden in the first debate, getting a bounce in the polls. Intelligent and attractive, Harris should be a formidable candidate for president. So – what went wrong?
Her “we’re better than this” opening statement is the same elite we’re better than them message that cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. 2020 is not the year to have a “coastal elite” at the top of the Democratic ticket and Joe Biden personified the contrast. For example, he spoke to blue-collar Democrats by using “a bunch of malarkey” to describe Harris’s healthcare plan.
Biden’s team had obviously prepared him to dismantle Harris’s plan from stem to stern, reminding voters to “wonder why it takes ten years” to get something good and Democrats “can’t beat President Trump with double-talk on this plan.” Biden typically paints by numbers (1-2-3), but this was political surgery.
Harris’s plan would (1) cost $3 trillion annually, (2) take ten years to implement, (3) abolish employer-provided insurance, and (4) force “middle-class taxes to go up, not down.” With blood in the water, Senator Michael Bennet took a swipe: her plan’s price tag ($30 trillion) would consume 70% of all federal revenues received in the ten years after implementation.
Biden made the tax-and-spend argument Trump will make: “$30 trillion has to ultimately be paid. I don’t know what math you do in California, but I tell ya, that’s a lot of money and there will be a deductible [right] out of your paycheck.” Harris responded by promising to “talk about the math” – before yammering about annual drug and insurance company profits ($72 billion, which is only 2.4 percent of the annual cost of her plan). Busted!
Previously, Harris had embarrassed Biden with references to his “racist” past, but this time he attacked her civil rights record as California attorney general for not bringing any cases to desegregate Los Angeles and San Francisco public schools. He also called Harris out for not providing exculpatory evidence to 1,000 inmates that ultimately secured their prison release: “If you doubt me, Google 1,000 prisoners freed, Kamala Harris.”
Harris was reeling when Tulsi Gabbard attacked: “[Harris] put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed [about her marijuana use]…blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row…kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor [and] fought to keep a bail bond system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”
Harris was clearly un-prepared, based on her response to Gabbard. She was “proud of her record” and proclaimed “you can judge people by when they are under fire and it’s not about some fancy opinion on stage.” As a political matter, Harris appeared a cozy elitist by disparaging an Iraq War veteran as having no “under fire” experience.
Harris confirmed her coastal elite attitude by dissing Gabbard on CNN: “I’m obviously a top-tier candidate [taking] hits [from] people trying to make the stage for the next debate, especially when people are at zero, 1%, whatever she might be at.” That tact sounded like Donald Trump – not a good look for a Democrat. In the end, Kamala Harris looked more like a marshmallow than a mauler.
It is time for America to elect a woman president, but the Democrat Alpha Gal is Elizabeth Warren, who alone can derail Biden’s centrist path to the nomination. Harris made a strategic blunder in the first debate: portraying another Democrat as a racist. Biden is an “old” politician because he’s a “good” politician and he smelled BS in Harris’s premeditated “little girl was me” punchline.
Biden knows Harris is no Nikki Haley; a non-white woman of immigrant parents, raised in adverse conditions, and a winner of multiple elections. Quite the contrary, Harris was born to an Indian oncologist and Jamaican professor and raised in Berkeley (hardly the challenge of rural South Carolina). That “little girl” actually had a privileged beginning and powerful patronage.
Harris’s political patron was Willie Brown, whom she dated while he was speaker of the California Assembly, when he appointed her to two state commission boards. Biden’s team also knows prosecutors are better at giving it out than taking a punch, and that Harris ran for Democrat Barbara Boxer’s senate seat in 2016 un-opposed by a Republican.
Unlike Harris, Biden had paid his political dues, which told him she was no Barack Obama. His team suspected she had a glass jaw and instructed him to throw counter-punches. Sure enough, the “tough gal” prosecutor fell apart under cross-examination, meaning Harris can expect more of the same. Biden and Gabbard put Harris on the mat in Detroit, and it’s hard to make a cupcake rise twice.