Debate: Questions Kamala Harris Must Be Asked

After six weeks of completely hiding from the media, Kamala Harris finally appeared, with the safety valve of her running mate, in a pre-recorded, brief, and totally friendly interview with Dana Bash of CNN.

Bash did not press on the most urgent issues, nor did she follow up when Harris either obfuscated or simply refused to answer. As such, Harris still escapes the scrutiny of any real interview, even though she has applied for the most difficult and important job in the world.

Moreover, if anything, the burden of proof should be far higher for Harris given that she was elevated to nominee status by the backroom machinations of powerbrokers, rather than citizens voting.

In fact, Harris has never earned a single caucus or primary vote for president, neither in 2020, nor in 2024. Given that she came out of the Democratic Party apparatus that dominates California, in point of fact Harris has not faced serious scrutiny in her entire political career, ever.

She wants to claim all the advantages of incumbency without any of the attendant blame for her record as a sitting vice president and co-manager of the Biden agenda, especially on immigration and on inflation. Unfortunately, the corporate press seems more than willing to grant her this posture of “all the benefits/none of the costs,” in large part because leading media mavens clearly feel guilt for having deposed Biden so unceremoniously.

As part of that media fawning protection over Harris, she faces little blowback for ignoring journalists. Given this strange circumstance, next week’s debate may well provide the singular opportunity to press Harris on key questions that she simply must answer to prove herself worthy of the highest office in the land.

If ABC News wants to find a professional conscience on behalf of the profession of journalism, then these queries really should flow from the moderators, Linsey Davis and David Muir. But if ABC forgoes that ethical obligation, then President Trump should enter the debate hall ready to validly confront Harris on the following key dozen questions:

1. When did you know about Joe Biden’s cognitive issues and were you always truthful with the American people about his condition?
2. It has been reported that Biden was threatened with use of the 25^th Amendment as leverage to get him to drop out. Can you speak to that issue and defend why you belong on the ballot even though no primary voters chose you?
3. You have publicly boasted about Bidenomics, but Americans hate the economy. Can you describe Bidenomics and whether you still own it?
4. President Trump did a highly confrontational town hall on CNN as a candidate this cycle. Will you do a similar town hall with someone like Laura Ingraham?
5. Why do you affect accents in front of different audiences and what does it say about your authenticity?
6. On fracking, CNN states that you never did change your own personal opinion in 2020, so can you explain when and why you did change to become pro-fracking?
7. You’ve repeatedly backed race-based reparations. Can you explain why Hispanic, Asian, and white Americans today should pay their black neighbors for racial injustices committed before they were ever even born?
8. Can you state whether or not your home state of California is a model for America?
9. How can you assure the American people that millions of migrants who poured into America will not receive amnesty and citizenship?
10. What would you say to the parents of Laken Riley?
11. Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal – you said you were the last person in the room and that you’re comfortable with the decision. Is that still the case?
12. Housing affordability has never been worse in America by some metrics, and not since the 2006 Housing bubble, according to Goldman Sachs. Why shouldn’t Americans blame you for this crisis?

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

The Deep State Is Past Its Shelf Life

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

At the Economic Club of New York, President Trump announced: “I will create a Government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government — and making recommendations for drastic reforms.”  Elon Musk is eager to get involved with the project.  In one fell swoop, every other reason for re-electing Donald Trump took a back seat to the tantalizing possibility of turning his second term into an Office Space sequel.  

No government since the Byzantine Empire has been in more desperate need of immediate downsizing.  Can you picture the billionaire boys putting on their “efficiency expert” hats and shearing the bloated federal workforce one incompetent functionary at a time?  Commissioner Musk: “So what is it that you would say you do here?”  Crickets.  President Trump: “You’re fired.  Bring in the next one.”  If that’s all those two did for four straight years, round two of Trumpalooza would be a colossal success.  

Most of the federal blob is dead weight.  Its chief purpose is to hook so many families on a federal paycheck that tens of millions of Americans will never stop voting for its continuing expansion.  Even worse, it’s a Janus-faced monstrosity with internally conflicting mission objectives.  We’ve got departments dedicated to fomenting wars abroad and departments dedicated to stopping them.  We’ve got agencies tasked with confiscating taxpayers’ income and agencies tasked with providing economic relief.  Committees are organized to study “problems,” but those problems can’t be officially solved because doing so would mean that committee-members are out of jobs.  That possibility becomes the only “problem” that needless federal workers decide to solve, and they “solve” it by doing absolutely nothing.  The end result is that an unknowable number of ghost programs dedicated to issues that arose decades ago are still bouncing around the bureaucratic ether for no other reason than to keep the federal blob paid and happy.  There’s probably some group out there still ostensibly studying whether the popularity of compact cassette tapes will adversely affect the 8-track cartridge industry — and still probably another group filing seasonal reports on the likelihood that 8-track will end demand for cassette tapes!  It’s madness.

The whole mess reminds me of an underrated cinematic gem from the ‘80s called Pascali’s Island.  In that pre-WWI period piece, Sir Ben Kingsley plays a spy for the Ottoman Empire on a small Greek island filled with foreign emissaries from other crumbling empires.  For decades, Kingsley’s Pascali has written copious reports for the Sultan detailing all of the suspicious activities taking place in the area.  Although he is paid regularly for his services, he has never once received a reply.  He concludes that he was long ago lost in the bureaucratic system and that his life of espionage for a dying empire has been meaningless.  How many Pascalis currently work for the U.S. government?  How many mandarins file meaningless reports that never get read and receive regular payments from some holdover account established by a long-forgotten appropriation bill from another era?  Do all empires commit suicide by drowning in a sea of their own red tape?

Even worse than all the federal driftwood, of course, are all the federal apparatchiks who actually take their sinecures seriously!  Better to have a million Pascalis being paid for nothing than a single Jack Smith who thinks he’s entitled to incarcerate the Republican nominee for president while hiding the ongoing crimes of the imperial Deep State!  Anyone who needs a lesson in the corrupting influences of power need only interact with someone from the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, or any other bureaucratic busybody interested only in taxing you, regulating your behavior, or patting you down before you board a plane.  Unless you bend over when ordered and promptly cough up everything you’re told you owe, some other faceless-but-all-powerful bureaucrat throws your name on a list.  You definitely don’t want to be put on any mysterious list!  The regime enforcers at the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation just love to wake up people on lists in the dead of night.  And they don’t knock.  

That so-called civil servants could possess so many obscene regulatory tools to terrorize the American people is an affront to the principles that breathed life into our country.  The Founding Fathers rebelled against the British Empire because they were taxed roughly 1% of their incomes without proper representation in Parliament.  Can you imagine how they would respond to a punitive Leviathan that confiscated 50% of their wealth through a smorgasbord of taxes and regulations?  Or what they would say to a snooping trespasser who tried to tell them what they could and could not do with the watering holes on their family farms?  Or how they might react to a stranger who felt up their wives and daughters in the name of “security”?  Whoah, Nelly!  The men who declared independence from government tyranny and fought a costly war for personal liberty would burn the Deep State to the ground and drive its ashes right into the sea!

The rise of the vast administrative state over the last century has been an absolute body blow for the U.S. Constitution and the American conception of limited government.  Every couple years, political parties rile up voters, and everyone heads to the polls.  From that frenzy, we send a few hundred people to D.C. to putatively represent our interests.  At the same time, three million civilian employees actually do the day-to-day work of the federal government.  This number doesn’t include military personnel, contractors, part-time workers, or the roughly twenty million other Americans who work for state and local governments across the United States.  For every elected official who is sent to the nation’s capital to do the people’s bidding, there are six thousand federal employees who never face the voters.  

Where do their allegiances lie?  Well, if the 2020 election totals in D.C. reflect the ideological bent of the administrative state, over 90% of the bureaucratic blob votes Democrat.  If it seems as if Republican presidents and members of Congress are constantly swimming upstream to accomplish any of their policy goals, that’s because they are.  Control of Congress and the White House might shift back and forth between the major parties, but those actually doing the governing march in lockstep with the Democrat Party.  We don’t have democratic institutions or representative government in America.  We have one-party control!  The mandarins running the federal government are indistinguishable from the mandarins running the Chinese Communist Party.  No wonder Tiananmen Tim is the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee.

What are the practical consequences of a one-party State?  We get a taxpayer-funded PBS whose coverage of the Republican convention is 72% negative, while its coverage of the Democrat convention is 88% positive.  We get a presidential candidate in Commie-la Harris who openly endorses government regulation of public debate and promises to use the Department of (in)Justice as a weapon to censor online speech she does not like.  We get a Democrat Party that wants to use the force of law to segregate white and black Americans and provide them disparate levels of government support.  We get brainwashed Marxists in judges’ robes rewriting statutory law and interfering with private commerce while prattling about “environmental justice” and other “woke” nonsense.  We get trillions of dollars in Green New Deal spending that exacerbate inflation while failing to accomplish any environmental goals.  We get an immoral and criminal Deep State that persecutes J6 prisoners for their political beliefs while fighting for the rights of abusive pedophiles.  

To save the Republic, President Trump and Commissioner Musk, hand the Deep State some Kleenex...and fire them all.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- Sept 10

 

A Little Debate Preview

posted by Derek Hunter at Townhall 

Get your hip boot on, it’s debate day in America. You’ll probably want some nose plugs too, as it’s going to get really smelly around here.

What can we expect from the debate? I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot of challenging of Donald Trump from the moderators and Kamala Harris. Since the mics will be muted when the other person is talking, Kamala can’t use her pathetic “I’m speaking” garbage, but that will not stop her from scrambling for the victim card. 

How can she do that? She did it against Joe Biden in 2020, whining that she was bused to help integrate schools in Berkeley, California, when she was a kid. Forget the fact that she claims to have grown up in Oakland, when she really grew up privileged in Berkeley before moving to the “mean streets” of Montreal. Yeah, you didn’t have a hard-scramble life when both your parents have PhDs, sorry.

So, how will Kamala claim victimhood? Easily: with her name.

Donald Trump mispronounces “Kamala” the same way almost everyone does. The way Joe Biden has, but it’s only racist when a Republican does it. 

Kamala Harris will correct him the first chance she gets. 

I think it’s stupid, but it would be good if Trump never said her first name to take this away. She’s “Vice President Harris” throughout the whole thing.  

Why does it matter, you’re probably asking, or you’re mad at me for saying it does. I can tell.

Well, it matters because tomorrow and every day after for all eternity there will only be one thing that is remembered from this debate, and Donald Trump should do everything possible to make sure it isn’t Kamala scolding him for pronouncing her name in whatever way she determines is incorrect at the moment. 

How can I say that? What do you remember from any other presidential debate you’ve ever seen? From the one we just had where Trump knocked out Biden, it was Trump saying he had no idea what Biden just said and neither did he. Anything from the 2020 debates stick out? Just that they were snippy with each other, but nothing that was said. And with Hillary? Trump saying she should be in jail. In 2012 it was Candy Crowley jumping in to incorrectly “correct” Mitt Romney.

The further you go back, the fuzzier the memories get. But if you remember anything from any of them, I bet it’s just one thing. The George W. Buch “nod” when Al Gore crowded him, George H. W. Bush checking his watch (1992) or his “Read my lips, no new taxes” line from 1988.

Debates are about that moment. It’s stupid, it’s a sad commentary on where we are as a society that something insignificant and, ultimately, unimportant can be the difference maker on something as important as a presidential election. 

You can’t be afraid of them, otherwise it will impact how you conduct yourself on the stage, but you need to be aware of what the other side is likely to try to do so you can avoid backing into that buzzsaw. You can’t see every landmine, but you damn well better have a plan for not stepping in the bear trap in the middle of the sidewalk on a bright, sunny day.

Trump can count on the questioners from ABC News to be hostile towards him, with questions about how racist he or some random person tangentially connected to him is or some random out-of-context quote being weaponized as an attack. 

Harris can expect zero follow-ups. Anything she says will be ignored, as it has to be when you can find video of her saying the exact opposite just a couple of years ago. She’s finally added an issues page to her website, which is full of empty calorie words about things – honestly, an adult using so many words without saying anything makes the perfect running mate for Tim Walz, who famous claimed his hearing issues caused him to fail a field sobriety test for a DUI. No word on how tinnitus cost him the breathalyzer and blood test, but whatever – there won’t be any questions about that either.

If Trump sticks to the issues, he wins. Democrats are terrible on those and responsible for everything bad right now. The lines, “Why didn’t you do that already?” and “Why don’t you do that now?” should be heavily featured, as there is no comeback for them for Democrats. 

As long as Trump brings any question back to inflation, prices and the border, he wins. If he follows Kamala down a rabbit hole or spends time trying to explain where he stands on abortion, she lives for the sprint to election day. I’m rooting for discipline. 

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

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Harris Finally Unveils 'Issues' Section on Website

Leah Barkoukis reporting for Townhall 

Vice President Kamala Harris finally unveiled a new “issues” section on her campaign website, one day before she’s set to debate former President Donald Trump. 

Her policy agenda, titled “A New Way Forward," details her positions on issues ranging from her economic vision to abortion rights, healthcare, immigration, and more.

“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting for a New Way Forward that protects our fundamental freedoms, strengthens our democracy, and ensures every person has the opportunity to not just get by, but to get ahead,” the page says. “As a prosecutor, Attorney General, Senator, and now Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris always stood up for the people against predators, scammers, and powerful interests. She promises to be a president for all Americans, a president who unites us around our highest aspirations, and a president who always fights for the American people. From the courthouse to the White House, that has been her life’s work.”

In one section on the economy, Harris doubles down on her plan for price controls, which drew widespread criticism from those on both sides of the political aisle. 

"As President, she will direct her Administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers," the campaign says. "And she will go after bad actors who exploit an emergency to rip off consumers by calling for the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries, which will build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states."

In another section, Harris vows to make healthcare more affordable and protect Social Security and Medicare. There is no mention of her previous support for Medicare for All, a position she has since backed away from.

Harris and Walz also promise to "reform our broken immigration system," despite the fact that President Biden tapped her to be border czar. Additionally, she calls for bringing back the bipartisan border security bill and says she will sign it into law. 

Each section is contrasted with “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda,” though it’s a set of policy positions from The Heritage Found and is not associated with the Trump campaign. 

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt wondered what Harris is waiting for given she's currently in the White House. 

Beating Harris 101: Trump Allies Offer Insights on Beating Kamala in Debate

Ward Clark reporting for RedState 

With only hours until what may well be the only presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Democrat candidate Kamala Harris, Republican allies of the former president are coming forth with advice on how to handle that affair. Their advice is varied, but there seems to be a common theme: Make it all about policy.

[Republican consultant and Fox News contributor Ari] Fleischer's advice for Trump is, "Hit her on policy. Just like you did to Biden in the first debate. That was a disciplined, tough, policy-oriented Donald Trump. I would love to see the same Donald Trump against Kamala Harris."

[GOP strategist and Republican Jewish Coalition CEO Matt] Brooks highlighted that "on policy the distinctions are sharp and clear. It will be teed up to the American people if we stick to policy. That’s what they’re looking for and that’s what they want to hear about."

This is, of course, the right answer. Trump has the advantage of being a known quantity. Harris? Not even she seems to know what her positions on a range of issues are at any given moment. "Baffling inconsistency" wouldn't appear to be a good campaign strategy, but that appears to be what the Harris/Walz campaign is going for.

A few other Trump allies are also offering opinions:

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who was seriously considered a Trump 2024 running mate, told Fox News that the former president "doesn’t need my advice. He just needs to be himself."

Arkansas' Tom Cotton also weighed in:

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, another Trump ally and surrogate, emphasized that "the American people know where President Trump stands. They know what they got when President Trump was president."

Pointing to the vice president, Cotton charged that "Kamala Harris has tried to run as a blank slate."

Harris may be trying to run as a blank slate, but that's not likely to work. There's too much in her history, and she can't divorce herself from the many and manifest failures of the administration in which she has been the second banana for almost four years. The Biden/Harris administration has been a disaster; Donald Trump knows this and has been speaking on that topic at length. Expect that to be his focus on Tuesday.

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The Final Presidential Debate Memo 

Once Again, the Only Person in U.S. History to Ever Lose to Donald Trump Has Advice on How to Beat Him

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That is, of course, as it should be. In this, the closed-mic format may help Trump, forcing him to stay more focused and more on track, making him use the time while Harris is talking to analyze her statements and think about how best to reply. It will also eliminate the sniping comments that have been unfortunate distractions in past debates. That is, in fact, why the Harris campaign wanted to go back to an "open mic" debate, hoping perhaps she could trip Trump up and provoke him into making a comment that the left could focus on to shout "sexist!" or "racist!"

As the format is now, it favors Trump. And, yes, Trump needs to hammer Harris on the issues where he shows the most strength - the economy, the border, and crime.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects are still clutching pearls and claiming Trump won't even show. They're wrong. As usual.

Nancy Pelosi's Projection: She Claims Donald Trump May Skip Tuesday's Debate Because of 'Cowardice'

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Stay tuned! We've only hours to go before the spectacle begins.

Scott Jennings Offers Key Advice for Trump on Eve of Debate

Rebecca Downs reporting for Townhall 

On Monday afternoon, a little more than 24 hours before former and potentially future President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in the ABC News debate, CNN's Scott Jennings offered some key advice for Trump.

Jennings, a senior political commentator for the network, suggested that Trump focus his answers to questions on "one core issue," which is that he's the candidate for change, especially in comparison to the sitting vice president. 

"I would just advise him to answer all questions going back to one core issue: if you want change, I am the change. If you want change on the economy, I am the change. If you want change on the border, I am the change," Jennings pointed out. Speaking about Harris, Jennings also shared that "the only change she is is changing all of her positions in a craven effort to try to make you think she's not some radical liberal." He also cautioned Trump to not "take the bait" from a question or from Harris, and again emphasized the idea to "bring it back to one core issue."

This speaks further to how Trump has hope to win the election in November, as Jennings reminded that "people are not happy with the current administration, [Harris] is in the administration [and] she represents a continuation of the same." 

That, Jennings spoke further to, is why Trump engaging in anything "that gets off that track is really a lost minute or lost 10 minutes or however long it takes you to do it." He again emphasized his advice for Trump to "stick with change and you'll be all right."

Later in the segment, Jennings also spoke further to how Harris has to "unwind all of her past positions that she ran on before," as well as "unwind on all the things she helped Joe Biden do, which of course caused the American people to sour on this administration."

He again spoke to this "change election," as what Trump's "core mission" should be and how Americans see him as the change candidate on the economy and immigration. "Those are the top two [issues] that [Trump] should be focused on," Jennings believes. 

"'She's more of the same, I'm change,' and however he gets from A to B, that's the strategy he needs to go for," is how Jennings summarized what Trump's "core mission" should be when debating Harris.

When it comes to that poll from The New York Times/Siena College that Jennings referenced, Trump leads Harris with 48-47 percent among likely voters. The poll also found that 55 percent of likely voters consider Harris to represent "more of the same" while 53 percent consider Trump to represent a "major change." 

When it comes to those top issues of the economy and immigration, Trump enjoys double digit support on who likely voters trust more. A majority, at 55 percent, say they trust Trump more on the economy, while 42 percent trust Harris more. Fifty-three percent say they trust Trump more on immigration, while 43 percent say they trust Harris more. 

A plurality, at 47 percent, also believe that Harris is "too liberal or progressive."

The Trump-Vance campaign sent out a memo on Monday afternoon that also referenced that poll from The New York Times/Siena College, "Kamala Set Herself up for Tough Debate — It’s a High Bar to Clear."

"Now that her honeymoon is over, the debate will be the first time Kamala will answer tough questions. In doing so, Kamala Harris will be revealed to America as a Radical Left lunatic," the memo also noted in part.

The memo spoke further of change, and how Harris had claimed during her CNN interview in late August that her values have not changed:

Harris said in her one and only interview on CNN that her values haven’t changed. So that means in tomorrow night’s debate, Harris needs to:

• Square with the voters how if her values haven’t changed, why she is trying to run away from her dangerously liberal record and previous positions.
• Convince voters to trust her to make their lives more affordable, despite casting the deciding vote on the two key pieces of legislation that even liberal economists say caused the record high inflation they are experiencing.
• As the chief cheerleader for Bidenomics, she needs to convince voters how Bidenomics is working despite everything being significantly more expensive than under President Trump.
• And she needs to convince voters that she will actually follow through on her promises when she could have done any of the promises over the past 3.5 years and didn’t.

The memo noted it's "an awfully high bar" for the 90-minute debate. 

Kamala’s Debate Strategy Is Talking About J6, 2020, And Trump Being A ‘Convicted Felon.’ It’s All She’s Got

Eddie Scarry reporting for The Federalist 

Vibes and “joy” have exhausted their mileage. So we’re now seeing the inevitable leveling of the presidential race, in large part thanks to voters getting more exposure to Kamala Harris — who is revealing herself to be the dope she always has been.

That sets things up nicely for this week’s debate on Tuesday, perhaps the only debate that will take place between Kamala and Donald Trump during the entire presidential campaign. There’s no reason to expect it to go well for Kamala. Her demand for the host network, ABC, to keep both candidates’ mics on for the duration of the event was rejected, plus her recent (and still only) national TV interview with CNN served as another reminder that Kamala is in over her head, has no vision for the country, and has no interest in governance.

The logical conclusion is that for Kamala to have any shot at becoming the first American black/Jamaican/Indian woman president, she has to talk about Trump and say nothing about herself, her tenure as vice president currently in the White House, and her first run for president in 2020. All of those things are objectively, demonstrably dismal. There’s no case to be made for Kamala as president, thus she is going to spend the entire debate trying to make a case against her opponent. And that leaves her with just three topics to talk about.

One is Jan. 6, sometimes referred to as “the only riot Democrats and the media didn’t approve of during Trump’s presidency.” Kamala is going to talk about that with the usual lies her party has told since the day it happened — “armed insurrection,” “overturn the election,” “threat to our democracy.” Better that than anything that happened in the three-plus years of her administration, which have been marked by hyperinflation, surges in crime, and a highly fatal withdrawal of American troops in Afghanistan. (Plus two new wars directly implicating the United States, but we’re not keeping score.)

The second is the 2020 election, which Trump legally contested, as Democrats do with election results all the time — even though they now pretend doing so is unthinkable. Kamala will be eager to instigate an extended defense from Trump about the last presidential election because the media have so thoroughly lied about what happened. Her aim is to prod newspapers and cable news shows to microwave all those same lies for their post-debate coverage.

Third is Trump’s legal jeopardy, a thing he faces purely at the behest of Kamala’s current angry administration and her miserable Democrat Party colleagues in local governments up and down the East Coast. She finally posted an “issues” page on her campaign website, offering a thin outline of her policy proposals, one of which is ensuring “no former president has immunity for crimes committed while in the White House.” In other words, as president she’ll keep trying to put Trump in prison. Calling him a “convicted felon” will be 2024’s version of “I’m speaking.”

Kamala will surely get questions from ABC related to policy, but she will pivot each and every time to one of the three talking points above. She has nothing to say on behalf of her terrible, unattractive record. If the debate is about that, she knows she has no chance.

Kamala Harris' Debate Strategy Revealed, and Why She's Scrambling to Change It

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Did sheer hubris leave Kamala Harris in the position of having to change her entire debate strategy? That's the story following ABC News' decision to not acquiesce to her campaign's attempt to change the rules.

As RedState reported, a multi-week effort by the vice president and her handlers to get rid of the previously negotiated muted mic setup failed last Wednesday. No doubt the Harris campaign expected to succeed given how subservient the press typically is. In this case, though, the Trump campaign stood its ground and ABC News flinched. 

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Harris Surrenders on the Debate Rules, and Her Crying Is Hilarious

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That means that Harris' original plan for Tuesday's blockbuster debate is null and void.

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.

The dirty little secret about Harris' desire for unmuted mics wasn't that she was looking for a rehash of her "I'm speaking" moment at the 2020 vice presidential debate. On the contrary, the real reason she wanted open mics is so she could interrupt Donald Trump. Part of Harris' campaign is the idea that she's a tough-talking, no-nonsense prosecutor who can take the former president to the woodshed intellectually. It wasn't the "I'm speaking moment" she was after. She was after a repeat of her embarrassing back and forth with Brett Kavanaugh in which she made up an issue out of whole cloth and tried to bluff her way through a line of questioning. 

With the mics muted, Harris won't be able to do the rapid-fire interrogation of Trump she so desperately wanted to do, and her team is ticked off about it.

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.

“Trump’s worst moments in the debates are when he gets upset and snaps,” said an aide to Harris in her 2020 presidential campaign, granted anonymity to speak freely. “And they have neutered that."

All of these leaks feel like an attempt to build in excuses for when Harris doesn't do very well or, at the very least, Trump does well enough for her performance to not matter. No one is "handcuffed" by not being able to interrupt their opponent in a debate while they are trying to answer a question. It's also improbable that Trump's team hasn't thoroughly briefed him on the need to let her talk and self-destruct. The former president never snapped during the first debate against Joe Biden. There's no reason to think he would have here no matter what condition the mics are in. 

Lastly, I'm not convinced Harris acting like an obnoxious "prosecutor" would have played well anyway. The muted mics might end up helping her more than hurting her. Still, it's funny to see the vice president and her team so flustered over something so simple. All this crying over microphones. It's insanely stupid.

♦️𝐖³𝐏 𝐃𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝

 

W³P Daily News Open Thread. 

posted by DarkGoldenMan

Welcome to the W³P Daily News Open Thread. 

Post whatever you got in the comments section below.

This feature will post every day at 6:30am Mountain time.