Did sheer hubris leave Kamala Harris in the position of having to change her entire debate strategy? That’s the story following ABC News’ decision to not acquiesce to her campaign’s attempt to change the rules.
As RedState reported, a multi-week effort by the vice president and her handlers to get rid of the previously negotiated muted mic setup failed last Wednesday. No doubt the Harris campaign expected to succeed given how subservient the press typically is. In this case, though, the Trump campaign stood its ground and ABC News flinched.
SEE: Harris Finally Surrenders on the Debate Rules, and Her Crying Is Hilarious
That means that Harris’ original plan for Tuesday’s blockbuster debate is null and void.
“Kamala Harris had planned to object, fact-check, and directly question Donald Trump while he was speaking during their debate next week.
But now, with rules just finalized to mute the candidates when their opponents speaks, Harris advisers are scrambling to rewrite their…
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) September 8, 2024
Kamala Harris had planned to object, fact-check and directly question Donald Trump while he was speaking during their debate next week. But now, with rules just finalized to mute the candidates when their opponents speaks, campaign officials said Harris advisers are scrambling to rewrite their playbook.
Harris and her team — holed up in Pittsburgh for a multi-day debate camp — wanted unmuted microphones so that the vice president could lean on her prosecutorial background, confronting the former president in the same way she laced into some of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet members during Senate hearings.
The dirty little secret about Harris’ desire for unmuted mics wasn’t that she was looking for a rehash of her “I’m speaking” moment at the 2020 vice presidential debate. On the contrary, the real reason she wanted open mics is so she could interrupt Donald Trump. Part of Harris’ campaign is the idea that she’s a tough-talking, no-nonsense prosecutor who can take the former president to the woodshed intellectually. It wasn’t the “I’m speaking moment” she was after. She was after a repeat of her embarrassing back and forth with Brett Kavanaugh in which she made up an issue out of whole cloth and tried to bluff her way through a line of questioning.
With the mics muted, Harris won’t be able to do the rapid-fire interrogation of Trump she so desperately wanted to do, and her team is ticked off about it.
Instead, four Harris campaign officials argued that she will be “handcuffed” by the rules, which were negotiated by President Joe Biden’s team earlier this summer.
“Trump’s worst moments in the debates are when he gets upset and snaps,” said an aide to Harris in her 2020 presidential campaign, granted anonymity to speak freely. “And they have neutered that.”
All of these leaks feel like an attempt to build in excuses for when Harris doesn’t do very well or, at the very least, Trump does well enough for her performance to not matter. No one is “handcuffed” by not being able to interrupt their opponent in a debate while they are trying to answer a question. It’s also improbable that Trump’s team hasn’t thoroughly briefed him on the need to let her talk and self-destruct. The former president never snapped during the first debate against Joe Biden. There’s no reason to think he would have here no matter what condition the mics are in.
Lastly, I’m not convinced Harris acting like an obnoxious “prosecutor” would have played well anyway. The muted mics might end up helping her more than hurting her. Still, it’s funny to see the vice president and her team so flustered over something so simple. All this crying over microphones. It’s insanely stupid.
