I'm Starting To Sense Real Incompetence

I want to keep looking at yesterdy's main topic, the dispute over the September 10 debate rules and whether the Harris campaign wanted to change them. My big question yesterday was, "why did the Harris campaign spend a whole day on this, which only focused attention on Harris's perceived weakness in debate?" I asked it before the dispute was resolved later in the day, at least in the eyes of the Trump campaign, when Trump himself posted,

The Rules will be the same as the last CNN Debate, which seemed to work out well for everyone except, perhaps, Crooked Joe Biden. The Debate will be “stand up,” and Candidates cannot bring notes, or “cheat sheets."

Throughout yesterday, the Harris campaign denied the initial Trump claim that they'd insisted on a seated debate with opening statements and notes, focusing on the question of whether the mics will be open or muted, which was a trivial issue on which Trump himself saId he had no preference. CNN confirmed Trump's version of the outcome, including the original rules for muted mics:

The rules for the debate will largely mirror the terms used by CNN for its June debate, including that microphones will be muted as the other candidate speaks and no studio audience will be present, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

But later Tuesday, the Harris campaign said that discussions are ongoing with ABC over whether microphones will remain on, according to a source familiar.

My puzzlement here is twofold, and it echoes my concerns yesterday. First, the CNN rules, including the muted mics, were thought to be disadvantageous to Trump. But Politico pointred out that Trump shockingly thrived under those rules:

Heading into the debate, many assumed that these new rules would hurt Trump; he’s the bigger interrupter, he feeds off live audiences and he lives to dominate and spread chaos. But the rules, and the effective moderation from Tapper and Bash, turned out to be a major boost for him.

. . . [T]he new format left Biden to speak in uninterrupted stretches of time, where his halting speech and inanimate affect were on obvious display. One could argue that Biden, who can easily be scattered, benefited a bit from the rules as well. This time, unlike 2020, he didn’t have to beg Trump, “Will you shut up, man?” But as the evening progressed, Biden supporters must have wished that Trump could misbehave so that Biden could shame him.

This seems to have been the Harris campaign's only takeaway from the June debate: they need to jigger the rules so Trump will have an outburst and Kamala can scold him for it! But Trump himself, as I pointed out yesterday, had no preference; he's clearly capable of effective repartee under either rule, and he knows it.

So this brings me to the other half of my puzzlement -- not only did the Harris campaign choose this hill to die on, but they spent not just one day, but two full days dying on it. And they allowed the Trump camp to play the whole battle out, including the Harris campaign's ultimate defeat, in public.

But on top of that, let's keep in mind that the Harris campaign seems to have been focused almost exclusively on this negotiation over Monday and Tuesday. The campaign seems otherwise to have been largely inactive since the convention, per Politico:

Harris has had a light schedule since accepting the nomination Thursday in Chicago, and several sources said she has been using the time not just to prepare for her Sept. 10 debate with Trump, but to map out a media strategy for the next few weeks.

Here are some of the questions rattling around about the decision …

— Who should you send your pitch to? One source of intrigue concerns who in Harris world will actually make this decision. BRIAN FALLON, the campaign’s senior adviser for communications, is generally considered the key person. But the interview has to be coordinated with Harris’s official office, where the communications director is KIRSTEN ALLEN. We hear there are some tensions.

Fallon, whose name appears three times in quotes I linked in yesterday's post on the open mic issue, was characterized there as "spokesman for the Democratic nominee" -- appears to have been completely preoccupied with that whole feckless struggle. The link says there are tensions within the campaign, and I wonder if the whole kerfuffle overthe debate rules was driven by power struggles within the campaign.

Meanwhile, Trump has been campaigning with RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, J D Vance did the Sunday talks, Dr Phil is airing interviews with Trump and RFK Jr, and beyond that,

Later in the week, he returns to Michigan, as well as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, to hold campaign events. Trump's running mate - Sen. JD Vance of Ohio - stumps in Michigan on Tuesday.

It's hard for me to avoid thinking that in the days after the Democrat convention, Trump has shown effective time management, while the Harris campaign seems to have had tunnel vision over the debate rules. The question of time management is important, because experienced observers are beginning to recognize that time is putting the Harris campaign at a disadvantage:

Democratic Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell said Monday on CNN that the media tends to “over-exaggerate” the “importance” of Vice President Kamala Harris sitting down for an interview, defending the vice president by noting her campaign hasn’t been around for a long time.

. . . “She’s only had a vice presidential nominee for two weeks. She had to go into convention. They had to orchestrate that. She turned a whole campaign over from one person to another. So Labor Day is coming, the fall is here. I think we‘re 72 or 71 days left in this election,” Dingell continued. “You‘re going to see some of those things that you want to see happen. We can‘t get it all squeezed into one day. We‘ve got to remember this hasn’t been a lot time of candidate Harris.”

Ah, the vice presidential nominee. This goes again to the question of resource management -- Trump since before the Democrat convention has effectively deployed J D Vance in the traditional attack dog role, and he's put new surrogates like JFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard to immediate use. But Politico has this to say about how the Harris campaign is using Tim Walz:

One of the issues that Harris world is currently working to address is how to deploy running mate TIM WALZ in the media. The danger in sending him out to do big solo interviews is that he might not have a full command of where Harris is on every issue. As someone pointed out to us last night, Harris talks about the “opportunity economy,” but if Walz were asked to define it, would he know how?

But Walz is too Minnesota nice to be an attack dog, while Harris has no consistent policies. How can he respond to obvious questions about Kamala's current views on electric vehicles or the border wall if she changes them from day to day? How can he reconcile the apparent differences between her policies now and her policies in 2019, when Kamala herself can't do this?

In other words, what I'm beginning to see is that important things aren't getting done when it's past time to do them; in the meantime, her staff is picking unneccessary public fights that they can't win, and she doesn't have surrogates that she can manage effectively.

If she's frequently impaired, of course, that's certainly a credible explanation. At this point, I think we can expect new misjudgments and blunders from her campaign on a regular basis.