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Kamala Harris, Protagonist

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Shortly before the debate started (I watched it after it was over, after getting some sleep), I tweeted that I wasn’t sure if journalists would even notice if Kamala Harris’ obvious efforts to get under Trump’s skin didn’t work.

There are so few journos who seem to understand (or be interested in) VP’s efforts to get under Trump’s skin, I’m not sure we’ll see a piece abt what happens if that effort fails.

The tweet is most interesting, in retrospect, as a record of my shock that so few experts understood Kamala Harris’ plan.

I first laid it out two weeks earlier. “I don’t think that even the outlets that recognize the troll are giving the Kamala Harris campaign enough credit for the jujitsu they’re engaged in with the debate,” I said in a post on how the Vice President’s campaign was deliberately pushing on Trump’s impulse control problems. My preview yesterday attempted to correct the misimpression that Harris was asking for open mics out of some sense of insecurity, before I noted that releasing a video of Trump’s top aides calling him unfit and another video mocking his obsession with crowd sizes made her plan clear.

There has been far less focus — or just as often, outright misunderstanding — on Harris’ efforts to make a Trump meltdown more likely. I’ve argued that was one purpose of Brian Fallon’s very public effort to get ABC to allow live mics. Even though the effort failed, it sets up a focus on the worries from Trump’s own handlers that he’ll lose his cool.

And yesterday and today, Harris has taken steps to make that more likely.

I’m not entirely sure what ABC did with the mics, because you could hear both at various times. Indeed, one of Trump’s biggest zingers, a preplanned one, came when he repeated her line back to her, “I’m speaking now.”

But the Vice President did with her animated, often mocking facial expressions what she might have done with an open mic in any case. She kept the camera on her, the entire time. And more often than not, even her facial expressions conveyed far more than Trump’s rants did.

Nate Silver and Frank Luntz both claimed that Harris failed the visuals, but here’s a good Bulwark post laying out how she beat Trump at his own TV game, and NYT framed the way she dismantled Trump’s ego in terms of her expressions. Something important Harris’ team did was force ABC to provide a podium sized to her height, limiting the visual impact of the ten inch difference in their height (though that’s one thing Nate said he didn’t like).

One of the more honest previews of the debate, from Hugo Lowell, described that Trump’s handlers were worried about whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde would show up.

Donald Trump’s campaign is most concerned going into the debate against Kamala Harris with the former president’s mood, afraid that the mercurial Trump could engage in the kind of self-sabotage that turned off voters in the 2020 presidential election, according to people familiar with the situation.

The campaign’s internal refrain is whether they get “happy Trump” or “angry Trump”, the people said, as they count down the days to perhaps the final presidential debate this cycle.

Kamala Harris had absolutely no intention of leaving that choice to Trump.

She took every opportunity she could, from an initial handshake that turned that common gesture of courtesy into a remapping of the stage space for her own benefit, to get in his skin. (Presidential historian Michael Beschloss reminded that Ronald Reagan similarly surprised Jimmy Carter with such a handshake.)

And yes, she even mocked him about crowd size. If he weren’t already at the party by that point, Mr. Hyde arrived to stay.

WaPo said she “baited him.” So did CNN. BBC called it “goading.” And while it took NYT a few tries before they could come up with a headline that described reality (as is their wont), they described that the Vice President “burrow[ed] under his skin.” A WSJ editorial described:

She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set the trap so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years.

Chris Christie critiqued, “she laid traps, and he chased every rabbit down every hole.”

There was little doubt what happened last night, after the fact. A dramatic success, CNN judged.

Harris came onstage with a clear plan: Throw Trump off his game.

It was, by any measure, a dramatic success.

Even at Fox News, there was little doubt what happened: both Bret Baier and Brit Hume saw what Kamala had done.

But beforehand, the press conceived the debate almost exclusively about what Harris had to do, not what she could or planned to do. Would she be up for it, journalists seemed to doubt, most buying into Trump’s hype that even Tulsi Gabbard could “eviscerate” Harris.

Journalists missed the Vice President’s clear intent because they treated Donald Trump as the protagonist of this story.

I don’t know how much the debate will affect the direction of the race. Though she struck blow after blow, it was still the 60/40-40/60 result I also predicted. The debate itself is most likely to have an effect for the way it gives Brian Fallon another opportunity to suggest Trump is too weak to take Harris on in a second debate. It might even lead some Trump cultists to wonder — to merely begin the process — of asking whether he really is the loser that Kamala Harris said he is.

But it may do something more important, indirectly.

In August, the press treated Kamala as the story largely because Trump was huddled in his mansions. But they still treated him as the protagonist. Every time he gave the order, they scurried to attend things billed as press conferences which were little different from his rambling rally speeches. He made them props in a fantasy that he had shared more about what he plans to do as President than Kamala Harris, and they were happy to play the role he demanded.

Yesterday, the press got their first chance — likely their only chance — to see the two candidates side-by-side.

And they left with the certainty that Vice President Kamala Harris was the protagonist of that story. Of this story.

Last night’s debate may not, directly, persuade many voters. But if it cures the press of their addiction to the Donald Trump con, it may have a dramatic effect on the race.

Update: Added the WSJ editorial. Noted that Fox News did too recognize what happened.

Whatever Happens with the Debate, Kamala Harris’ Campaign Is Not Yet Half Done

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As you watch the torrent of news obsessing about the debate tonight, remember this stat:

Trump’s campaign is 92% done (665 of 721 days).

Kamala Harris’ campaign is not quite half done (48%, or 51 of 107 days).

Lots can and likely will still happen in this race, but Trump is almost done and the Vice President is only halfway there.

The debate coverage is almost entirely focused on what Kamala Harris can do with it (though Peter Baker finally wrote a story — one published above the fold in the dead tree version — that Trump might look old). Polls show that almost a third of voters will look to the debate to learn more about what Harris stands for — which likely is code for “feels.” But pundits are focused on whether Harris can define her policy agenda, or whether Trump can succeed in branding her with policy failures on immigration, inflation, and the Afghan withdrawal.

There has been far less focus — or just as often, outright misunderstanding — on Harris’ efforts to make a Trump meltdown more likely. I’ve argued that was one purpose of Brian Fallon’s very public effort to get ABC to allow live mics. Even though the effort failed, it sets up a focus on the worries from Trump’s own handlers that he’ll lose his cool.

And yesterday and today, Harris has taken steps to make that more likely. Today, she released an ad based on President Obama’s mockery of Trump’s obsession with [cough] crowd sizes.

 

I’m not a fan of the ad. The glimpse of Trump’s very small hand is over the top.

I’m also not the audience for this ad.

Trump is.

Seeing a Black former President mocking his masculinity is the kind of thing that Trump is often unable to shake without a lot of babysitting.

I’m more fond of yesterday’s ad, which makes a far more substantial point: That none of the “best people” who used to work for Trump support him this time.

 

It, too, is designed to get under Trump’s skin. Anything involving Mark Milley gets under Trump’s skin! And Harris released it with enough lead time that ABC might even ask Trump about the ad, one of those stupid questions about the campaign that horserace journalists can’t resist. Perhaps the ad will lead ABC to ask a far more substantive question about why Trump is the first former president in history whose former VP refuses to back him.

So Harris is doing what she can to raise the chances that a man with no impulse control will act like a whiny baby in front of the whole country today. He’ll probably avoid saying the N-word (though I don’t rule it out). But there’s a decent chance he’ll say or do something that will display his insecurities about facing a very smart Black woman for all the world to see.

My point about the timing, though, is that the most likely outcome is that this won’t matter. The most likely outcome of tonight’s debate is that whatever happens, pundits will review the debate and decide, 60-40, that one of these candidates won the debate. Focus groups will tell pollsters, 40-60, that the other candidate won the debate.

If that’s the outcome, if Kamala can’t immediately win over a chunk of new supporters, if Trump can’t brand the Vice President as a communist, then it is unlikely to significantly affect the race.

Tomorrow morning, we’re most likely to be where we are today: with a tie race, only with 55 days left instead of 56. Trump will still be 92% done and Harris will be 49% done.

The reason I keep harping on that timing, though, is that most campaign journalists are not accounting for the fact that Harris did in the last 51 days what Trump did (or was supposed to do, but the Guardian reports he has not) in the last twenty months: lay a foundation for the rest of the campaign: Set up offices, recruit volunteers, identify likely voters, prepare a voter persuasion and mobilization plan.

While pundits were focused on crowd sizes, Harris used those huge rallies for a very specific purpose: to very quickly recruit a ton of volunteers who would find and turn out every possible vote. Tim and Gwen Walz and Doug Emhoff are swooping into campaign offices and randomly getting on phone calls that volunteers are already placing to identify and persuade voters, something that wows the voters, but also inspires volunteers that their efforts are not isolated from the larger whole.

But Harris has done something else in the last 51 days that has largely been measured only in terms of enthusiasm, if at all. She has:

  • Provided a permission structure (most recently with the Liz and Dick Cheney endorsements) for Republicans to support her
  • Elevated reproductive rights from one of many issues to the most important issue for many voters
  • Gotten a whole lot of younger voters of color, especially women, to register to vote

All three of those things are a foundation. Only the first one — a permission structure via which self-identified Republicans first consider and then, maybe, vote for Harris — will play a very important role tonight. If she succeeds in presenting herself as the better national security candidate (which should be child’s play) and if she succeeds in allaying concerns about her liberal record, it may advance that permission structure, little by little. Even that won’t immediately show up in the polls.

But the rest of that foundation — the new voters, the newly central reproductive rights as campaign issue — may not show up in polls at all. It’s not even clear which pollsters are using up-to-date registration lists to do their polling. It’s definitely unclear what the likely voter model will look like.

No one knows.

No one knows, in part, because Kamala Harris is only halfway through her campaign.

It’s certainly possible that one or the other campaign will do something that dramatically alters the shape of this race tonight. Though for all the bluster about Trump’s gish galloping debate prowess, if he looks old or melts down, the flood of lies may not be enough, this time.

But if that doesn’t happen — if neither candidate manages to disrupt the tied race with their debate performance — than that other detail becomes important again.

Donald Trump is more than nine-tenths of the way through this race.

Kamala Harris still has half the race to build on the foundation she has laid in the last 51 days.

Kamala’s Campaign Pushes Trump’s Impulse Control Problems

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I don’t think that even the outlets that recognize the troll are giving the Kamala Harris campaign enough credit for the jujitsu they’re engaged in with the debate. Before I explain why, though, here’s a video of Barack Obama’s skewering of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. It provides a useful reminder of the kinds of things that scar a racist narcissist like Trump.

The jujitsu on the debate started with Trump whining, two nights ago, about ABC as an excuse to get out of the debate again.

Early the next morning, Politico was the first to report an actual substantive dispute about the debate: whether the candidates’ mics would be on between questions or not. In the story, Jason Miller got an unsurprising dig suggesting that, Kamala “isn’t smart enough to repeat the messaging points her handlers want her to memorize.”

But before that in the story, this Brian Fallon quote appeared.

“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, tells POLITICO. “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own. We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button.”

It was followed by this unattributed quote, digging into Trump’s self-control issues even further.

“She’s more than happy to have exchanges with him if he tries to interrupt her,” one person familiar with the negotiations tells Playbook. “And given how shook he seems by her, he’s very prone to having intemperate outbursts and … I think the campaign would want viewers to hear [that].”

Remember that unattributed quotes often come from people who are otherwise quoted in a piece. Remember, too, that Brian Fallon was Hillary’s spokesperson in 2016.

Fallon has a long history of dealing with Donald Trump.

Fallon’s suggestion that Trump has no impulse control was bound to elicit the only kind of response that horserace campaign journalists can muster: a badgering question to the candidate about a dig the opponent made. And sure enough it did. At a campaign stop, someone asked him about it, and Trump said that, “We agreed to the same rules — I don’t know. It doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was that it would be the same.”

Having elicited a question that got Trump to admit he would prefer to have a live mic, Fallon immediately declared victory.

Then, someone in charge of Trump’s Truth Social account has released content that conflicts with what Trump said publicly, when none of his handlers could prevent it.

If Trump would prefer a hot mic, then why is Trump’s curated Truth Social account complaining that Harris would prefer that too? Fallon has now created the appearance that Trump’s handlers like Jason Miller believe Trump can’t avoid some kind of meltdown during the debate.

Has Trump been using the N-word behind closed doors to refer to Kamala, or only “bitch”?

Then Kamala’s campaign released a video showing clips showing Trump questioning whether he should debate, with chicken noises in the background.

Whatever happens with the scheduled debate now, Fallon has imposed a cost on Trump’s equivocations, making it more likely he’ll have the meltdown he and his handlers are trying to stave off.

It is absolutely true that Kamala is trying to change the terms of the agreement, even as Trump gets cold feet about participating at all. But this arises, I think, out of the dynamic that has made it so hard for Trump to face Kamala in the first place. He can’t suppress his bigotry, but if he doesn’t, he’ll risk losing to a Black woman. A smart, beautiful Black woman.

There’s a Beltway story that that moment in 2011, when the first Black president used Donald Trump’s racist birther campaign to humiliate the reality TV star in front of the entire press corps, was the moment Trump decided he needed to be President. Whether or not that’s true, it’s fairly clear that kind of public humiliation by a Black person triggers Trump in a way other things might not. Trump’s narcissism requires him to maintain the appearance of superiority over everyone else; his racism makes it even more important that that perceived superiority extends to Black people.

And even if the WHCP did convince Trump to run, after considering it, he didn’t run in 2012, when he would have faced Obama. Donald Trump chose not to risk losing to Obama.

Now, because of a decision Joe Biden made, Donald Trump has lost the ability to choose whether he wants to face someone like Kamala Harris. And he’s stuck: The thing his MAGAts like about him is his spontaneous riffs, many of which rely on the humiliation of others. But if he calls the Vice President the N-word or bitch publicly, it’ll further sink him in the polls.

At least from the moment that Kamala started to put on campaign events that Trump would love to pull off, the campaign has been damaging Trump’s ego. Undoubtedly Michelle and Barack Obama (among others) made that worse at the DNC. And all that makes some outburst that could doom his campaign more likely.

The Leak Hypocrisy of the Hillary Shadow Cabinet

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In what has become a serial event, the State Department and Intelligence Community people handling Jason Leopold’s FOIA of Hillary Clinton emails have declared yet more emails to be Top Secret.

The furor over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account grew more serious for the Democratic presidential front-runner Friday as the State Department designated 22 of the messages from her account “top secret.”

It was the first time State has formally deemed any of Clinton’s emails classified at that level, reserved for information that can cause “exceptionally grave” damage to national security if disclosed.

State did not provide details on the subject of the messages, which represent seven email chains and a total of 37 pages. However, State spokesman John Kirby said they are part of a set the intelligence community inspector general told Congress contained information classified for discussing “Special Access Programs.”

Now, as I have said before, one thing that is going on here is that CIA is acting just like CIA always does when it declares publicly known things, including torture and drones, to be highly secret. It appears likely that these Top Secret emails are yet another set of emails about the worst kept secret in the history of covert programs, CIA’s drone killing in Pakistan. And so I am sympathetic, in principle, to Hillary’s campaign claims that this is much ado about nothing.

But they might do well to find some other spokesperson to claim that this is just overclassification run amok.

“This is overclassification run amok. We adamantly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails,” campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said on Twitter. Appearing on MSNBC after the news broke, Fallon vowed to fight the decision.

“You have the intelligence community, including an Intelligence Community Inspector General, as well as the inspector general at the State Department, that have been insisting on certain ways of deciding what is classified and what’s not,” he said. “We know that there has been disagreement on these points, and it has spilled out into public view at various points over the last several months. It now appears that some of the loudest voices in this interagency review that had some of the strongest straightjacket-type opinions on what should count as classified, have prevailed. That’s unfortunate. We strongly disagree with the finding that has been reached today, and we are going to be contesting it and seeking to have these emails released.”

Alternately Hillary can declare that if she is elected, she’ll pardon both Jeffrey Sterling and Chelsea Manning.

Sterling’s prosecution for, in part, having 3 documents about dialing a rotary phone in his home that were retroactively classified Secret, happened while Brian Fallon presided over DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs; Fallon sat by as James Risen got questioned about his refusal to testify. Sterling’s retention of documents that weren’t marked Secret is surely the same kind of “overclassification run amok,” and by the same agency at fault here, that Fallon is now complaining about. So shouldn’t Fallon and Clinton be discussing a pardon for Sterling?

Then there’s Manning. As Glenn Greenwald noted, in that case Clinton had a different attitude about the sensitivity of documents classified Secret or less.

Manning was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. At the time, the only thing Hillary Clinton had to say about that was to issue a sermon about how classified information “deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so” because it “affect[s] the security of individuals and relationships.”

So if the nation’s secrets aren’t really as secret as DOJ and State and DOD have claimed, shouldn’t these two, along with people like Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, be pardoned?

Amid Fallon and Clinton’s prior support for this level of classification, there’s something else odd about the response to this scandal (which I have said is largely misplaced from the stupid decision to run her own server to the issue of classified information).

First, the response from many supporters — and it’s a point I’ve made too — is that this doesn’t reflect on Hillary because she mostly just received these emails, she didn’t send them. That’s true. And it largely limits any legal liability Hillary herself would have.

But this particular response comes against the backdrop of Hillary attacking Bernie for not giving a foreign policy speech before Iowa (a critique I’m somewhat sympathetic with, although debates have been focused on it), and against this approving story in the Neocon press on Hillary forming a shadow cabinet.

Team Hillary is in the process of setting up formal advisory teams and working groups divided into regional and thematic subjects, similar to the structure of the National Security Council, several participants in the project told me. Unlike in 2008, when Clinton and Barack Obama competed for advisers, this time around all the Democratic foreign-policy types are flocking to her team because Clinton is the only game in town.

The groups report up to the campaign’s senior foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, who was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning when she was secretary of state.

As it notes, this shadow cabinet reports to Jake Sullivan. Sullivan is, according to one report, the staffer who sent the most emails that have since been declared classified.

Nearly a third of the classified messages released so far from former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails came from one man: Jake Sullivan, who served as her deputy chief of staff in the department, and is now the top foreign policy adviser to her presidential campaign.

If Hillary’s supporters argue that she can’t be held responsible because she didn’t send these, does that mean they would hold Sullivan, Hillary’s presumptive National Security Advisor, responsible instead?

Then there’s this detail about outside advisors to this shadow cabinet: it includes Leon Panetta, who not only leaked highly classified information in his memoir, but also would have been busted for exposing the Navy SEALs who offed Osama bin Laden if the game weren’t so rigged to excuse senior leakers.

In addition to the working groups, Sullivan relies on a somewhat separate group of senior former officials who have more frequent interaction with the campaign leadership and Clinton herself. Many of these advisers aren’t publicly affiliated with the campaign because they have leadership roles with organizations that have not endorsed any candidate for president.

But sources close to the campaign told me that Clinton, Sullivan and campaign chairman John Podesta are in regular contact with former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Is the effort to keep the identities of the men who killed OBL secret also, “overclassification run amok”? Or does Panetta’s role in Hillary’s foreign policy team suggest her crowd really is that hypocritical about who can leak classified information?

I’d really love it if Hillary came out strongly against the paranoid secrecy that stifles our foreign policy (and just yesterday led to Ashkan Soltani losing a position as a technical advisor for the White House, presumably because of his role in reporting the Snowden documents).

But thus far that’s not what she’s doing: her campaign is making a limited critique of this paranoid secrecy, only applicable when it impacts those close to her.