Earlier this year, when progressive Americans first said that the greater good of defeating Donald Trump demanded that Joe Biden step aside, they did not want Kamala Harris to fulfil the traditional role of a vice president by stepping up to take his place.
They wanted a fight for the nomination in an “open convention”. They wanted the Democratic party to tear itself apart as rivals battled for the prize. They had their reasons. Harris had run a poor campaign for the nomination to be the Democratic party candidate in 2020. She had been an anonymous vice president in the years since. Above all else, she didn’t look tough enough to beat Trump.
Well look at her now.
Harris dominated last night’s presidential debate. She looked like a president.
Her appearance matters more than people, who suppose themselves to be rational men and women, like to admit
Strongmen appeal to their supporters’ urge to worship power. They pose as hardmen, tough enough to defend the tribe. You might think yourself a sophisticate who is unaffected by such atavistic concerns. But deep down you too may secretly despise leaders who look weak.
Trump plays on the yearning to be led. “I might be a vicious bastard,” he says in effect to his supporters, “but I am your vicious bastard, and in a vicious world I am the bastard you need”.
Progressives are so used to mocking Trump or despising Trump that they can forget that he is a successful politician, who knows what he is doing, and who has transformed his party.
Throughout his career, he has shown that he understands the brute appeal of posing as the dominant male. In his 2016 election debates, Trump loomed behind Hillary Clinton, as he commanded the stage, and owned the proceedings. He showed that he was a master of the theatrics of television. Liberal journalists at the time said that the picture of Trump apparently threatening a woman would not help him. Satirists laughed at him. But Trump knew what he was doing.
Eight years on, he’s lost it. He looks old and more than a touch deranged. Today it is Harris who looks in command.
In the hours before the debate began, Trump was thinking that the old macho playbook would work one more time. He relished the opportunity the debate offered to tower over Harris as he had towered over Clinton – Harris is 5' 4 1/4, and Trump is 6'3”
“No boxes or artificial lifts will be allowed to stand on [sic] during my upcoming debate with Comrade Kamala Harris,” he said. For that would be “cheating”.
The dominant male was preparing to assert his power.
Nothing of the sort happened. Harris was always in control. The US right wants to portray her as a “DEI hire” who is only a candidate because she is a black woman. I doubt they will be able to get away with that for much longer.
She repeatedly challenged Trump’s macho claims to power. She pointed out that foreign leaders laughed at Trump, and that generals said he was a disgrace. She undermined his manly claims and treated Trump as a loser – yesterday’s man – as he went off into dark and gormless fantasies about immigrants eating pets.
Harris showed that she possesses the necessary brutality to take power. There was almost a Shakespearian “I know thee not, old man” quality to her response to Trump’s attempts to tie her to her mentor Joe Biden.
“It’s important to remind the former president that you are not running against Joe Biden, you are running against me.”
No praise for her old friend, just a ruthless focus.
Harris baited Trump while sensibly ignoring the identity politics game the right wants her to play. Instead of making a big deal about the historic moment her victory would bring, she concentrated on what she would do for voters and the threat Donald Trump poses.
Her hope is that, in the end, most people really don’t care about a politician’s ethnicity. They care about themselves and their families.
Let us, in turn, hope that she is right. Because the polls show a dead heat. Indeed, the race is so tight that opinion polls with their large margins of error, are effectively useless and best ignored.
Trump retains popularity for reasons liberals do not like to think about. All governments in power in 2022 were blamed for the wave of inflation that swept the world. The Biden administration is no exception.
Meanwhile, for too long that same administration displayed a dangerous insouciance about the hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico.
As in Europe, mass migration has the power to electrify the right and far right, and Biden should have known it.
As we wait to see how this contest plays out, the rest of the world can only stare in wonder. I have written before how ridiculous it is that people in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, who understand the dangers Trump’s return would bring, are reduced to worrying about the fickle feelings of small businessmen in Pennsylvania and suburban women in Atlanta, when we couldn’t find Pennsylvania or Atlanta on a map if we wanted to.
But hey ho, such is our fate. While we wait, we have the tantalising possibility that Kamala Harris will defy all those who diminished her and overlooked her by pulling off an essential victory.
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He’s always been a weak man, just depressing it has taken 8 years to find a 5 foot 4 woman who can make that clear for the world to see
I still unironically think Jeb Bush should have walked across the stage and shaped up to Trump (wouldn’t have even needed to throw a punch, though I would have liked that too) and let the world see him flinch and squirm, when he made those comments about his wife. Trump is the classic weak bully, ready to play the tough man when he knows there’s no threat of consequences, I bet he’s never been in an actual punch on in his life
And then there is T Swift, if only a smal percentage of the 280 mio followers goes to register and actually votes there we have three things to deal with our anxiety