Coaxing Kamala out of the Basement
All eyes are on Tuesday’s debate—whether either candidate will emerge the winner in this one-time engagement with muted microphones, no live audience, and no notes or props.
In Kamala’s case, it’s all about abortion and “defending democracy,” while in Donald Trump’s case, his goal is spotlighting Kamala’s litany of policy positions as a San Francisco radical and forcing her to defend the Biden-Harris record over the last four years.
The truth is that Kamala’s team is looking less for a knockout than for her to simply survive this debate, one of the only -- and possibly the last -- unscripted moment in her short campaign, and head back into the basement to play out the clock over the next two months.
Her campaign recognizes that the basement strategy is the only way to get her across the finish line as the winner in November. Even if Kamala had a strong record to run on, she is famously prone to gaffes, including laughing inappropriately in her public speeches and speaking in word salads that leave even her strongest supporters scratching their heads.
No matter how hard Republicans try to call out Kamala’s refusal to face voters unscripted, reporters will never call her on it, despite her putting it directly in their face by wearing earbuds on the tarmac to avoid their shouted questions as she boards Air Force Two to her next scripted event.
Absent any articulation of her vision for the country, as she would have been forced to present in a traditional primary election process, no one knows what she stands for as the Democrats’ stand-in nominee less than two months from Election Day and less than two weeks from early voting in some states, including Pennsylvania.
Kamala is the Party’s first nominee to win not a single vote in a primary election since 1968, and a politician whom Democrat party leaders viewed as a major political liability right up to the moment they pushed President Biden out less than two months ago and anointed his number two as their new vessel to carry them across the finish line.
Kamala’s campaign defends the basement strategy, maintaining risibly that she is focused on taking her message directly to the American people rather than through media interviews or unscripted venues such as town halls.
Make no mistake -- this is Biden's 2020 basement campaign on steroids, without any COVID-lockdown rationalization. Simply put, Kamala’s staff knows she is vulnerable on her record as Biden’s four-year copilot on policies that have resulted in skyrocketing inflation, a wide-open border, soaring crime and homelessness in major cities, and two major wars overseas.
She also has taken radical positions -- on camera and for years -- on banning fracking, forcing a buyback of semi-automatic weapons, taxing unrealized capital gains, bailing out violent rioters, declaring herself a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, and delivering the single most liberal voting record in her tenure as a U.S. Senator. Rather than confront or defend this record, she leaves it to anonymous campaign aides to distance her from it off-camera.
Yet there's no way for Republicans or independents to force her to sit for media interviews, conduct town halls and talk directly to the American people, as has been the tradition in every presidential race in the modern era, a rite especially necessary for a candidate who was only recently declared the nominee of her party, with no articulation of her policy positions before getting the nod.
American voters deserve better, yet the question remains: how can Kamala climb out of the basement and talk unscripted to the American people, as Donald Trump does daily, when she refuses to do so? The media declines to throw the flag on the play.
One way to do just that is for President Trump to use the debate not only to win policy points but more importantly, to challenge her directly to join him in pledging to speak to the American people unscripted -- with neither a teleprompter nor notes -- in each of their individual public appearances going forward for the remainder of the campaign.
The debate rules agreed upon by both campaigns stipulate that neither candidate can ask a direct question of the other. Yet laying down the gauntlet to her in this most public of forums to engage with voters from the heart, in her own words henceforth in the most important race in decades, would make her continued refusal to do so a high-wire act politically for the first time in the campaign.
Inviting her to do so would also help realize her party’s oft-stated goal of “defending democracy.”
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