Campaign Grind: Where is the fierce urgency of beating Trump?

Maureen Dowd

Barack Obama got blunt in Pittsburgh on Thursday. He chided Black men who are not supporting Kamala Harris, saying some of “the brothers” were just not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” That left me mulling again: Is Harris in a dead-even race against a ridiculous person because of her sex or is that just an excuse?

Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipping Wisconsin and barely visiting Michigan. She got discombobulated about gender and whined about sexism. Kamala spent a week answering questions on “60 Minutes” and “The View” and on the shows of Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern. And she didn’t move the needle.

“She needs to stop answering questions and start asking questions,” James Carville said. He thinks that, for her closing message, she should put the issue of Jan 6 and who won the election on the back burner. Instead, he said, she should ask: “How dare JD Vance say with a straight face that Trump is the father of Obamacare when Trump tried to kill it 50 times?”

She should display pictures of right-wing judges who Trump could appoint to the Supreme Court, and ask if Americans are ready for an even more fanatical court.

She should ask: “Do you know how destructive tariffs can be? They will kill your freaking jobs.”

She should say she’s going to end the Trump tax cuts for the rich and ask voters if they would rather use those trillion-plus dollars to help young people afford their first home.

In other words, he said: “She should scare the crap out of voters. You know, Trump is just taunting us, having a rally at Madison Square Garden just like the Nazis did in 1939. “Black men and young Black men have to think about what they have at stake in the election. Donald Trump tells you that you have nothing to lose. Well, you have health insurance you could lose, you have a job you could lose.”

Other Democratic strategists I talked to agreed that Harris needs to let her guard down, cut loose and turn on the afterburners. Mainly, her pitch is that she’s not Donald Trump. And that’s an excellent pitch.

But she needs to make the case for herself more assertively.

It’s hard to understand why she didn’t sit down with a yellow pad or laptop long ago and decide why she wanted to be president, what her top priorities would be and how she would get that stuff done. The Vision Thing. Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer. She didn’t learn to tack to the centre in bright blue California. When asked on “The View” whether she would have done anything different than Joe Biden, she said “there is not a thing that comes to mind” — a flub if you want to convey change. Harris should distance herself from Biden when she needs to; she should just admit what we all know, that the border policy was bollixed up and that Biden was not tough enough with the execrable Bibi. Kamala’s guarded nature leaves people feeling that she’s not fully revealing herself. Her reluctance to do serious interviews made her look fearful. She should have been interacting more with the media as a way of getting off the teleprompter and giving a sense of who she is as a person.

She does her homework but her delivery seems more scripted than from the kishkes. Even though it can get weird and duplicitous, Trump is better at riffing.