The (second) first presidential debate of 2024 won’t take place until next week, but Vice President Kamala Harris is already blaming the rules of the event in case she doesn’t perform to expectations.
The Democratic candidate, who is infamous for her incomprehensible word salads, had fought to change the rules of the debate to ensure that the microphones used by her and former President Donald Trump were live throughout the entire debate. The two campaigns had initially agreed to only activate the microphone of the candidate who was speaking.
Harris campaign adviser Brian Fallon said in a letter to host network ABC that the rules “fundamentally disadvantaged” the vice president, according to Politico, and that muted microphones would “shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President.”
Fallon then suggested that Trump would have skipped the debate otherwise.
“We understand that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format,” he reportedly said. “We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accept the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones.”
For all their whining about the debate rules, the Harris campaign is setting the stage to blame the format of the debate if their candidate wilts in front of a national audience.
Harris has a history of stringing together word salads in unscripted settings, which is likely a major reason that her campaign has kept her far away from media scrutiny, only doing one interview with the relatively friendly Dana Bash of CNN since she launched her campaign in late July. And even then, the vice president still served up one of her signature word salads.
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The odds are more than good that the ABC debate will feature a Harris word salad. And with muted microphones, her signature “I’m speaking” response to any interruption will be far less capable of delivering a memorable moment, leaving the audience at home to remember only her nonsensical musings.
The format for the debate is not to Harris’s disadvantage. The disadvantage is with the candidate herself.