Hints Of Kamala's Debate Strategy

As I've already noted here, I was puzzled that the Harris campaign had chosen to die on the hill of unmuted mics in trying to renegotiate the rules for the September debate, since Trump's record in debates is that he wins them whether or not mics are open (the second Hillary debate in 2016) or muted (the June 27 debate this year). Most commentators thought Kamala's handlers were pinning their hopes on the slim chance that Trump would embarrass himself trying to interrupt Kamala, giving her the opening to scold him with "I'm speaking!"

Big whoop, huh? It turns out, at least based on this story in Politico, that they actually had something else in mind:

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.

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.

What this suggests to me is that she wasn't so much intending to defeat Trump with ordinary argument -- after all, even US senators must speak when recognized by the chair and adhere to time limits -- but intended instead to use a prosecutorial strategy we occasionally saw in Trump's New York cases, whereby the prosecutor would continually interrupt the defense with rapid-fire objections -- "Objection, asked and answered!"

"Sustained!"

"Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence!"

"Sustained!"

"Objection! Argumentative!"

"Sustained!"

"Objection! Hearsay!"

"Sustained!"

And so forth. The intent is to keep the opponent from even finishing a sentence. If, as in New York, the prosecutor and the judge are in cahoots, this might work, especially if the jury is on the prosecution's side as well, and as long as the political machine doesn't give a flip about appearances, also as in New York. The problem for Kamala is that she simply isn't in court, she's working under a different set of rules where she can't just stop an argument with a legal objection.

Thus she needed a different set of rules that would allow her to keep breaking into Trump's presentation with shrieks. This would put her at an advantage, since on her own, she tends toward incoherent generalities. Another theory of the open mic strategy in the story is remarkably unobservant about Trump:

David Axelrod, who advised Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, was one of several Democratic operatives who noted that Harris’ complaints about the muted microphones also could serve to “get into Trump’s head.”

“What the [Harris] team is saying is that Trump’s campaign does not trust him to control himself,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think Trump likes to be depicted as someone being handled, so I do think there’s an element of trying to psych-out their side, too.”

But as we saw in the June 27 debate, Trump isn't just a politician, he's a successful entertainer who has a standup comic's sense of timing. He's fully capable of waiting for just the right moment to plant his responses, and attempts to bait him into destructicve outbursts never quite come off. A strategy aimed at trying to do this is a waste of time. Besides that, he's already been in so many debates and hostile interviews that it's difficult to imagine an attack that would throw him off balance and cause a spontaneous destructive outburst.

There's another subtle effect of the existing rules:

Trump says Kamala will not get a box to stand on 🤣 pic.twitter.com/UbK9rE94a9

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 7, 2024

As I posted a week ago,

Joe Biden is 6'0"; Trump is 6'3". As long as they aren't precisely side by side in a shot, this isn't noticeable. But if Kamala is 5'4" -- almost a full foot shorter than Trump -- and is standing behind a lectern identical to Trump's, this is going to be a problem. Even if she wears heels and stands on a box, it's going to be awkward. I'm sure this is why the Harris campaign is said to have tried to get ABC to change the rules to allow a seated debate -- but ABC didn't budge.

This may be a reason beyond the mutred mics that Trump insisted that the rules of the June 27 debate not be changed, although it looks like ABC will allow an audience -- but when the June 27 debate didn't have an audience, this was thought to favor Biden. But now, even if there's no long shot on both candidates that shows Kamala, even with heels, much shorter than Trump, she'll still be looking up at Trump when she addresses him, and he'll be looking down at her. The Kamala-in-the-kiddie-seat effect is still going to be a problem.

So why did ABC decide to continue with rules that clearly disadvantage Harris? Good question. I don't rule out that the lizard people know she's a loser.