3 things we got wrong about Kamala Harris’s debate approach

While former President Donald Trump was talking about eating cats and dogs, I was eating crow — somewhat. When Vice President Kamala Harris came out on stage last night and immediately confronted Trump by shaking his hand and telling him her name, I knew my suggestion, pre-debate, to not confront him was wrong.

Sometimes when you know you’re wrong, it can be defeating, but in this instance, I was elated. Charging over to him, while he demurred, was a precursor to how Harris — rightfully — charged after Trump during the entire debate.

Many of us said that for Harris to succeed last night, she had to, for all intents and purposes, ignore Trump on many levels, and thank God she wasn’t listening to us.

I didn’t sleep last night mainly because of the post-debate euphoria I was feeling for Harris, but I started to think about why her strategy of confronting him succeeded, and I was so reluctant for that to happen.

She treated Trump as a human being — now before you say he is not, he is one, albeit a fatally flawed one. And she treated him as a fatally flawed candidate like she would with any other.

I think many of us have fallen into a Trump trap: that he is different, that he should be treated differently, and that he doesn’t deserve to be treated like anyone else. He has to be handled uniquely, and we’ve comported ourselves in knots trying to figure out the best way to minimize and neutralize him. Or, if we’re talking about dogs, neutering him so he’s impotent.

We’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to respond to Trump, that we missed the elephant in the room, so to speak. Trump is a severely immature man, and as such the way to goad him is to remind him of just how small he is.

That’s what Harris did last night. She talked about it previously on the campaign trail — making Trump look small. He’s almost fetal, not fully formed, so Harris took to that vacuous canvas and filled out a picture of Trump that showed him to be childlike and feeble all at the same time.

Now, we did get a few things right. Harris sounded intelligent without being condescending. In fact, she spoke directly into the camera and passionately. And, I also said to let Trump create the meme moments, and that happened, but she gave him a little help. “Marked safe from having my pet eaten” was all over my Facebook page.

Yes, clearly she had zingers of her own, and they also ran through social media, but his foolish extreme quotes won the day — in a bad way.

And most importantly, I advised that Harris should just be herself. By dissing the advice many of us gave her, she succeeded in not only letting America see her strength, but maybe more urgently, Trump’s galling weaknesses.

Here’s what she did right that I got wrong:

Ignore his lies

Thinking back, it was ridiculous to think that Harris could stand up there for 90 minutes, and not call out Trump for lying. Yet, she did it in a way that was the antithesis of going down to his level by saying, for example, “Liar, liar pants on fire.”

When he did falsely talk about immigrants eating cats and dogs, she called it out in a way that showed ridiculousness, “Talk about extreme.” That’s all she needed to say.

And then on abortion. The biggest lie he tells on this subject, and there are many whoppers, is that the people, both Democrats and Republicans, wanted abortion returned to the states, saying that’s what the people wanted.

Instead of saying that's not true, and quoting some statistics for example, she let him have it with this, “You want to talk about this is what people wanted?” And then went into describing horror scenes of women and their families who don’t have abortion access in their states because of barbaric new laws.

President Joe Biden could never have talked about abortion so personally. Calling Trump out on this as a woman was perhaps her best moment of the night — and that’s among many.

Ignore him while he speaks

Yesterday, I cited former Vice President Al Gore’s famously sigh-riddled debate against former President George W. Bush, and advised Harris to just keep to herself while Trump spoke at the risk of looking too dramatic, I suppose.

Yet, it was a masterstroke on her part to look at him intently each time he opened his mouth and got carried away. And her reactions were anything but dramatic. They were authentic and mirrored what viewers were thinking themselves watching Trump obfuscate.

I think ABC News directors knew that her reactions were gold, and that’s why, for most of the night, the debate included a split-screen of both of them. She was honestly animated, and smiled, not glaring at him. That’s what Trump did. He glared at the camera, never at her, and the dichotomy was breathtaking.

Getting under his skin

Wrongly, I thought that the way she could do that was completely ignoring him, because Trump hates to be ignored. I said she shouldn’t get caught up in his attacking his lies and misstatements, and to show little emotion while he spoke, and after he was through, she should just pivot to policy.

I thought that would elevate her from going down to his level; and yet, I missed what she saw. The only way to get under his skin was to get under his skin by hitting him on areas that called him weak, a danger, and unloved.

Immediately, when she invited viewers to go and attend a Trump rally — can you imagine anyone taking her up on that offer — and that’s the point. She spared them the drudgery, mentioning his crowd sizes, and by informing viewers that people get bored and walk out. And of course, his head nearly popped off.

How did I, and those of us who follow politics obsessively, miss this? Since his inauguration day, when he sent his then-press secretary Sean Spicer out to talk about crowd size, Trump hasn’t stopped talking about them. If you’re going to rile him, riff on his crowds.

That was the first in a series of Harris shredding Trump’s insecurities, and he fell for all her traps, and in the process, America saw Harris’s intellect and maturity juxtaposed with Trump’s stupidity and infantility.

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