Will the real Kamala Harris please approach the debate stage?

The next key event in the 2024 presidential race is upon us. Tuesday, Sept. 10 is the first debate between the major party candidates.

Is it really the first debate, though? That depends on which candidate you ask.

The Republican candidate, former president Donald Trump returns to the debate stage two and a half months after his last debate, which went fairly well. (For him, at least.)

For the Democrat candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, fresh off an endorsement as Vladimir Putin’s preferred candidate, this is the first showdown — and it’s hardly the only first for the Democratic nominee. With only 55 days to go until Election Day, it will be her first time appearing live and unscripted before the American public since President Joe Biden announced he was exiting the race and endorsing her as to replace him as the nominee.

As of Tuesday, that will have been 51 days ago.

That’s right — barring some surprise event today or tomorrow, we will not have heard from the Democratic nominee in a live and unscripted format until almost two months after she picked up the baton. Voters in two states already have absentee ballots arriving in the mail, but Kamala Harris has yet to give a news conference, a live interview, or … well, any interview without a wingman by her side.

That is insane.

It is also unprecedented in modern American elections. But this whole election cycle has been one unprecedented event after another. Just look at the past 100 days.

To recap: Donald Trump was convicted of 34 criminal charges that qualified as felonies based on circumstances we’ll never actually know. Later, he was shot by a sniper, evading death by a perfectly timed turn of his head.

Trump’s original opponent, the cognitively slipping incumbent President Joe Biden, had a spectacular failure of a debate performance in late June after which his decline could no longer be denied. Biden and his camp insisted for 24 days that he was up to the job while his outward appearance clearly told a different story. Support fell away, donations dried up, and Biden finally dropped out of the race, keeping the last six months of his presidency as a consolation prize.

Harris stepped in and was anointed without opposition as the nominee in a scene of “joy” at the Democratic National Convention. I suppose I’d be pretty joyful, too, if I got to run for president without having to actually earn the nomination.

Even a third-party candidate has stirred the pot. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, seen as a potential spoiler, suspended his third-party run and endorsed Trump.

What a whirlwind. It feels like most of these events happened so long ago. In a manner of speaking, they did. In campaigns and elections, there are two fundamental rules of time: Tomorrow arrives faster than today; and yesterday was a lifetime ago.

Election Day will be here before we know it, but by that time, the excitement of the candidate switcheroo will have long faded. Is the “joy” surrounding Harris’ ascension to the Democratic nomination sustainable for the rest of her candidacy? Perhaps we’ll start with seeing if it lasts past Tuesday night.

Tuesday’s debate may have come much closer to not happening than many realize. The Sept. 10 date had been agreed to by both the Biden and Trump camps in mid-May, shortly after the June 27 debate had been arranged.

At the time, Biden’s campaign had requested that each candidate’s microphone be muted at both debates whenever their opponent was speaking. Trump’s campaign agreed to the arrangement, and at the June debate, microphones were muted to avoid crosstalk. Harris, on the other hand, did an about-face from the agreement and requested that the microphones be left unmuted for the September debate.

It’s not hard to imagine why. Instead of candidates yapping over each other and moderators struggling to intervene and an exasperated audience wanting to punch a wall, the June 27 debate had proceeded at a smooth pace with, all things considered, a relatively peaceful tone — and Trump had come out of it looking OK. The Harris camp removed any doubt about her motives, telling ABC news in a letter that she “will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President.”

How dare those moderators rob her of the chance to hold up her hand to Orange Man Bad and coolly and valiantly say, “I’m speaking.”

Talk about audacity. After helping deceive the public for who knows how long over the President’s cognitive state, of which she was surely aware in her proximity to him as “last person in the room,” Harris now wants debate moderators to cede control of the tone and tempo and give her opponent maximum opportunity to make himself look bad.

That requires either a complete lack of self-awareness or a nuclear level of nerve.

It was only on Sept. 4, less than a week before Tuesday’s showdown, that the Harris campaign relented and agreed to the rules agreed to in May. She should have accepted the rules from the get-go.

Kamala Harris doesn’t get to have it both ways. She can’t to enjoy the perks of incumbency bestowed upon her by President Biden and his preexisting campaign apparatus while eschewing the same process that put it all in place for her. Without that process, Harris wouldn’t even be eligible to be the Democrats’ nominee for president. It wasn’t Harris who won the 2024 Democratic primaries.

Her nomination was not organic. Her fundraising did not start from scratch. She didn’t even open her own campaign account — she scratched Biden’s name off their joint account, wrote in her own, and started with tens of millions of dollars that had been intended for his candidacy.

Kamala Harris doesn’t get to be the face of the Biden administration while claiming to be the candidate representing change. She doesn’t get to flip-flop on her previously stated positions such as banning fracking while claiming her “values haven’t changed.”

She doesn’t to lambaste Trump’s border wall as a “vanity project” and then glowingly feature that same wall in a campaign ad touting her border state credentials.

And she doesn’t get to change the rules because she’s apprehensive about a debate.

Harris wants voters to think that with muted mics, they won’t be seeing the real Donald Trump. But voters haven’t seen the real Kamala Harris. Unlike her opponent, she has no comprehensive platform, no policy positions listed on her website, and has only released vague economic ideas during crafted speeches.

Trump hasn’t shied from press coverage despite his open contempt for mainstream media — he and running mate JD Vance have combined for over 35 interviews in the last month alone. Between Aug. 6 and Sept. 4, Trump has sat down with the likes of NBC’s Dasha Burns, Univision’s Pedro Rojas, TV psychiatrist Dr. Phil and popular Spotify podcaster Theo Von. Vance’s list of interviews includes CNN’s John Berman, No Spin News’ Bill O’Reilly and Sunday morning political talk shows on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News and CNN.

In contrast, supposedly hitting the ground running, Harris committed to a single interview and brought her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be by her side when sitting down with CNN’s Dana Bash on Aug. 29. Stretched to fill the hourlong time slot, the 28-minute pretaped interview was supplemented with campaign footage, narrated previews of upcoming segments before and after each commercial break, and 10 minutes of panel commentary at the end.

Clearly, the Kamala Harris strategy is to hide as much as possible and hope that swing state voters hate her opponent enough to let her tiptoe across the finish line. With an opponent like the bombastic Donald Trump and a press that has largely allowed her to evade scrutiny, her strategy could pay off.

But she can’t hide from the debate stage. Tuesday night will be the first time the Democratic nominee faces the public with no script, no sidekick, and no crowd of cheering fans in the room. Perhaps she’ll whip out an actual policy position or two, and the American electorate will hear something other than an exaggerated giggle.

Or, perhaps Democrats will find that the joy of Kamala Harris belongs to yesterday. And that yesterday was a lifetime ago.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com