I Must Have Watched A Different Debate

ABC News tries to fact-check Donald Trump on Springfield, Ohio.

Kamala Harris' reaction to this exchange might be her most cringe moment yet. pic.twitter.com/mhjaeqw8Bs

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 11, 2024

The consensus take on last night's debate was something like this:

Trump wasn't at his best, but it wasn't all his fault. Two things were all on him, however: his preparation — or lack thereof — and the fact that he walked into the lion's den of bias in the first place.

Kamala Harris didn't provide much real competition for Trump last night. The bar was low for her — all she had to do was show up and not be Joe Biden. Mission accomplished. She spent the evening doing little more than regurgitating DNC talking points from New York Times and WaPo editorials from the last few years. It was remarkably brain-dead, but it was all she needed.

I keep making the point here that subliminal messaging is far more important than whether you can make the middle school debate team. Most presidential debates aren't memorable, but a few, like the October 13, 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate, are thought to have helped tip that year's election. Another was the October 17, 2000 third debate between Dubya and Al Gore. The New York Times quoted the moderator, Jim Lehrer of PBS:

After the debate I walked out with my family, and one of my daughters said something I’ll never forget. She said, “Oh Dad, isn’t it something, what Gore did?” I stopped and said, “What do you mean?” Because as a rule, I only look at the candidate who is speaking. She said, “All that huffing and puffing and eyerolling and sighing.” I said, “My God, I didn’t know anything about it.” And she said, “Well, Dad, that’s going to be the lead of the debate stories.” And she was right. That night proved beyond any shadow of any doubt that body language is truly important in a presidential debate.

The piece quoted another insider:

It was the third debate when Gore finally invaded Bush’s space. He walked over right next to Bush and hovered as Bush spoke. Bush shot him a quick look — it was perfect.

Conventional ideas about debate prep had nothing to do with it, and the actual effect of Gore's attempts to steal the spotlight took days to sink in -- but sink in they did. Another example is the second 2016 debate on October 9 of that year. Trump is thought to have damaged his chances against Hillary Clinton badly, at least according to The Guardian:

That banging sound you heard were the last nails being hammered into the coffin of the Trump campaign. Or it might have been the thumping of Donald Trump as he stalked the debate stage.

. . . Wounded animals behave in strange ways, and Donald Trump was nothing if not strange at the second presidential debate. He went far beyond barking his usual interruptions and conspiracies[.]

But what seized my attention in that debate at the time was Hillary's strange outfit -- I remember commentary following the debate saying she looked like a penguin, but attempts to bring this up via a web search this morning have been unsuccessful. On the other hand, other commentary at the time suggested she was nevertheless intent on making a bold fashion statement:

Clinton opted for a hint of the unexpected in this navy Lauren suit with white lapels over a white crewneck top. She chose kitten-heeled pumps, sans bows, to complete the look.

Except that it made her look like a penguin, or maybe an old gay queen dressed for the ball. I think in hindsight the message it sent was that she wasn't taking Trump seriously -- he was just a bit player in her big drama, where her Ralph Lauren outfits were newsworthy events. I couldn't shake the impression that something was deeply off -- and I think more than a few others got the same subliminal nudge.

So let's move to what we saw in last night's debate. Clearly there was an expectation that Trump would somehow finish Kamala off in the same way that Joe finished himself off on June 27 -- but Kamala's handlers seem to have succeeded in keeping her away from alcohol while programming quasi-policy set-piece statements into her. Mark Halperin told Megyn Kelly that it was a C-plus performance, which was all she needed, and she won the debate.

If this were the middle school debate team, Halperin might be right. The problem is the subliminal effect. Let's leave aside for a moment the mugging for the camera while Trump was talking. The first thing I noticed was that her hair was suddenly four inches longer than it had been a day or so earlier. She'd added extensions for a full Louis XIV effect, going, like Hillary, for an incongruous glamour look. But by the time of her closing statement, either the botox had given out or the lighting was wrong, because little wattles began to dangle under her chin while she was talking.

She's 60, going for glamour, but with wattles. If you've got wattles, maybe you want to be more of a Margaret Thatcher thnan an ingenue, or maybe have a serious talk with your plastic surgeon.

The next thing wax the nasal weepiness. Every time subjects like women controlling their bodies came up, she'd sound like she was about to break into tears, but there was always this nasal harangue. This is going to get old if we're thinking about having to listen to it for the foreseeable futrure.

But then there's that matter of her making faces, mugging, smirking, silently laughing while Trump talked. Her expression in the tweet at the top of this post is a perfect echo of Lily Tomlin's Ernestine character on the old Laugh In show. But what comes off is that Kamala is trying to upstage Trump, and it looks petty and egotistical. What the people who are grading the debate as though it were the middle school debate team miss is that people are looking at this and deciding whether they feel comfortable with it on the nightly news for the next four years.

That's where Al Gore's huffing, puffing, eyerolling, and sighing did him in. That's where Hillary's penguin suit did her in. People don't want to vote for candidates who annoy them. I don't think we can discount the sublminal effect of the weepy nasal voice, the glamour look with the wattles, or the mugging and smirking on what the electorate thinks about Kamala.