The Debate Goes to the Dogs

(Note:  I wasn’t going to write about the debate, since everyone else was, but…who could resist?)

In the wake of Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in Atlanta ten weeks ago, CNN commentator Chris Wallace, late of Fox News, after listening to his fellow pundits insist that the race still had a long way to go, said definitively, “There is no coming back from this.”

His pronouncement after the Harris-Trump encounter was the same in magnitude, but not in direction.  He even noted that after Biden’s Shakespearean descent, he did not think there could be another confrontation of such import, but he was forced to admit he had been wrong.

In truth, Trump has been ripe for the taking for months, teetering on unsteady legs. Harris simply pushed him over.

At the end of his storied career, an aging and diminished Muhammad Ali fought a series of opponents he would have toyed with and then knocked out a few years earlier.  Instead, they made him look old, slow, and flabby.  Still, the judges gave him extremely questionable decisions against the likes of Alfredo Evangelista and Earnie Shavers.  When, after Shavers, he fought Leon Spinks, who had won an Olympic gold medal but was at best a mediocre professional, the fight was so one-sided that Spinks, a huge underdog, got the decision, even though one judge, who did not see the same fight everyone else did, voted for Ali. (In this case, the odd judge was Fox News.)

And so, that Harris was so easily able to exploit Trump’s glaring weaknesses, while a huge relief, should not have been a surprise.

This does not mean that Harris’s performance was preordained.  She faced enormous pressure to demonstrate she deserved to be there, and there were serious questions as to whether she could muster the strength and the will to take on an aggressive, misogynistic bully who was willing to break every rule of civilized behavior and had succeeded in reducing many previous opponents to caricatures.

Harris was more than up to the task.  After her first answer, during which she was visibly nervous, Harris turned everything to her advantage, including the muted microphones.

In the June debate, the split screen used to record the reactions of the non-speaker was devastating for Biden.  He did everything but drool. 

But Biden needed Trump to be inaudible.  If not, he was sure to be overwhelmed by constant interruptions delivered a good deal louder and more forcefully than he could match.  As an indication of how confident the Harris team was about her performance, they made a big deal about keeping the sound on, but Trump’s team demurred, because Harris might easily be the one interrupting for the best effect. 

 As it turned out, Harris didn’t need an open mic.  Her expressions were far more potent than words would have been.  With almost perfect timing, she showed disgust, perplexity, disbelief, amusement, and incredulity.  She constantly turned his way and sometimes placed her hand under her chin for added impact. Trump talked for ten minutes more than Harris, but Harris’s deft use of the camera made many of those minutes lethal for Trump.

In the end, she evoked Gloria Swanson’s famous pronouncement in Sunset Boulevard.  “We didn’t need dialogue.  We had faces.”

Trump, for his part, barely changed expression at all.  For almost the entire hundred-five minutes, he appeared sullen, angry, and miserable.  He rarely looked her way.  His eyes seemed half-shut, except for that one incredible moment when, after Harris said that Trump’s rally attendees often left because they were exhausted and…BORED…his eyes bugged out.  A Walt Disney cartoon character could not have done it better.

That led right into Trump going totally brain-dead.  After some idiotic but all too predictable remarks about how he had “the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” in which not one devoted follower would ever consider leaving before the final insult was hurled and the final outlandish lie told, Trump ventured into remarks about the eating habits of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio.

“In Springfield,” he railed, “they’re eating the dogs…the people that came there…they’re eating the cats.  They’re eating the pets of the people who live there.”

Harris, once again exploiting the camera for great effect…laughed…and could be seen mouthing, “Oh, come on.” 

Trump was then done in by his inability to back down.   When the moderator noted that ABC had contacted town officials and were told the assertion was unfounded, Trump insisted it had actually happened and that the officials were lying.  Why?

“I saw it on television,” he said authoritatively.

It is hard to know which allegation was more laughable—Haitian dog and cat dinners or his insistence that in some states abortions were legal after the child was born.  He seemed impervious to the fact that abortion means terminating a pregnancy, something that ends when the child emerges.  Ending a life after that is called murder and is, unsurprisingly, not legal in even the most radical blue state.

After the debate ended, a common refrain on the left was, “How can any thinking person vote for this guy?”  Still, many will.  No one expects a rout.  But Harris went a long way in solidifying the support she needs to win.

A pollster employed by Fox who purports to be a Democrat did agree that Harris won the debate and that she might get a small bump.  The result of this debacle, which should manifest itself in the coming days, will be a lead for Harris, not a bump.  Bumps in politics go away on their own.  Leads do not.  Leads must be overcome and whether Trump can muster the energy and skill to do so is as much in question as it was for Joe Biden before he was forced from the race.