The political maxim that if you’re explaining, you’re losing was lit up incandescently by former President Donald Trump’s debate implosion.
He should have spent all 90 minutes debunking Vice President Kamala Harris’s ludicrous claim to represent change from the dire governance for which she’s been jointly responsible since 2021. She pretends she dropped freshly out of a coconut tree and has nothing to do with 3 in 4 voters thinking the country is on the wrong track.
Even without input from the biased ABC News debate moderators, Trump should have been able to skewer her on her flip-flops, utter lack of detail, and radical left-wing agenda.
But he waited until the last three minutes to get to the point: She’s already been in power four years and done nothing, so why should anyone believe her vague promises now?
For the first 87 minutes, he allowed himself to be baited into making the election about himself, not her. As he got angrier and more indignant, it was like watching a trapped bear being goaded by smirking medieval tormentors.
Then he headed to the spin room to explain that he won, that it was his best performance ever, that Harris wanted a second debate because she lost badly. Yeah, right!
He had one job and he didn’t do it.
He has two months left to get it right. He still might do so because although Harris wanted to repeat her 2020 put-down of Mike Pence — “I’m speaking” — the truth is that although her lips move, she isn’t saying anything.
She strikes the pose of a strong woman hanging tough against an overbearing man, but she is too cowardly or dishonest to state her policies clearly and defend them. Trump and his campaign have a chance to define Harris because where the details of her agenda are supposed to be, there is a giant black hole from which no meaning escapes.
Jake Tapper, who is miles ahead of his colleagues in applying solid journalism to CNN’s election coverage, pointed out that Harris’s debate evasions were dodgier than a $3 bill. Though sharp and polished, she was ultimately vacuous and scripted, which figures for a pol nurtured in the make-believe of Tinseltown.
If she were to speak honestly and without calculation, she’d cop to policies voters hate. So, it’s safer to deliver soothing mood music rather than explain her reversed policies on everything from crime to climate change.
For saviors of democracy, Harris and the Democrats sure dislike transparency. They are less interested in that than in taking power.
Harris cannot win by being explicit about why people should vote for her. She needs to read her lines as they glow on the reflective glass of a teleprompter or else are learned by heart and delivered by rote, as in the debate.
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It’s a technique emblematic of the party she leads. Democratic politicians are increasingly distant from and disdainful of ordinary people. They don’t want to address the public’s reasonable and clamorous concerns.
That, more than anything else, is the foundation of Trump’s appeal. Whether he is capable of marshaling that advantage with a coherent strategy that focuses on his opponent rather than his grievances is a separate question.