Would the real Kamala Harris please take the debate stage?

The next key event in the 2024 presidential election campaign is approaching. The first debate between the candidates of the major parties will take place on Tuesday, September 10th.

But is this really the first debate? That depends on which candidate you ask.

Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump returns to the debate stage two and a half months after his last debate, which went pretty well. (At least for him.)

For the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, who was just endorsed as Vladimir Putin’s preferred candidate, this is the first face-off – and it is far from the only first for the Democratic nominee. Just 55 days before Election Day, it will be her first live and unannounced face-to-face with the American public since President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the race and his support as his successor.

On Tuesday it will be 51 days.

That’s right – unless something surprising happens today or tomorrow, we won’t hear from the Democratic nominee in a live, unscripted format until nearly two months after she took office. Voters in two states have already received absentee ballots in the mail, but Kamala Harris has yet to give a press conference, a live interview, or… well, an interview without a “wingman” by her side.

This is crazy.

This is also unprecedented in modern American elections. But this entire election cycle has been one unprecedented event after another. Just look at the last 100 days.

To recap: Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of capital crimes. We will never know the circumstances. He was later shot by a sniper. He escaped death by turning his head in a perfectly timed manner.

Trump’s original opponent, incumbent President Joe Biden, whose cognitive abilities are declining, suffered a spectacular debate failure in late June that left his decline undeniable. Biden and his camp insisted for 24 days that he was up to the task, while his outward appearance clearly told a different story. Support dwindled, donations dried up, and Biden eventually dropped out of the race, leaving the final six months of his presidency as a consolation prize.

Harris stepped in and was chosen as the nominee unopposed in a “joyful” scene at the Democratic National Convention. I would probably be very happy if I could run for president without actually having to earn the nomination.

Even the third-party candidate caused a stir. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was seen as a potential spoilsport, suspended his third-party candidacy and endorsed Trump.

What a whirlwind. It feels like most of these events happened so long ago. In a way, it did. There are two basic rules of time in campaigns and elections: tomorrow comes quicker than today, and yesterday was an eternity ago.

Election Day will be here sooner than we think, but by then the excitement over the candidate switch will have long since faded. Will the “joy” over Harris’ ascension to the Democratic nomination last for the rest of her candidacy? Perhaps we’ll start to see if it lasts beyond Tuesday night.

Tuesday’s debate probably couldn’t have taken place much sooner than many believe. September 10 was agreed upon by Biden and Trump’s camps in mid-May, shortly after the June 27 debate was scheduled.

Biden’s campaign had asked that all candidates’ microphones be muted when their opponents spoke at both debates. Trump’s campaign agreed to this arrangement, and at the June debate, the microphones were muted to avoid crosstalk. Harris, however, reversed course and asked that the microphones not be muted at the September debate.

It’s not hard to imagine why. Instead of candidates sniping at each other, moderators scrambling to intervene, and an angry audience wanting to punch the wall, the June 27 debate was a calm one and, all things considered, relatively peaceful — and Trump came out of it pretty well. The Harris camp put any doubts about her motives aside, telling ABC News in a letter that she “will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President.”

How dare these presenters take away her chance to raise Orange Man Bad’s hand and coolly and bravely say, “I’m speaking.”

Now that’s audacity. After helping for who knows how long to mislead the public about the president’s cognitive state, which she was surely aware of given her proximity to him as the “last person in the room,” Harris is now demanding that the debate moderators relinquish control of the tone and pace and give her opponent maximum opportunity to make himself look bad.

This requires either a complete lack of self-confidence or enormous nerves.

It was only on September 4, less than a week before Tuesday’s showdown, that Harris’ team relented and agreed to the rules agreed to in May. She should have accepted the rules from the start.

Kamala Harris cannot have it both ways. She cannot enjoy the advantages that President Biden and his existing campaign apparatus have afforded her as an incumbent while avoiding the same process that made it all possible for her. Without that process, Harris would not even have been considered as the Democratic presidential nominee. It was not Harris who won the 2024 Democratic primary.

Her nomination didn’t come by itself. Nor did she start fundraising from scratch. She didn’t even open her own campaign account – she took Biden’s name off their joint account, put her own in it, and started with tens of millions of dollars that were actually intended for his candidacy.

Kamala Harris cannot be the face of the Biden administration and simultaneously claim to be the candidate who represents change. She cannot back down from her previously expressed positions, such as banning fracking, and simultaneously claim her “values ​​have not changed.”

She does not want to condemn Trump’s border wall as a “prestige project” and then luminous features of the same wall in a campaign ad in which it touts its credentials as a border state.

And she can’t change the rules because she’s afraid of a debate.

Harris wants voters to believe they won’t see the real Donald Trump when the microphones are muted. But voters haven’t seen the real Kamala Harris. Unlike her opponent, she has no comprehensive platform, no policy positions are listed on her website, and she has expressed only vague economic ideas in elaborate speeches.

Despite his open disdain for the mainstream media, Trump has not shied away from press coverage – he and his running mate JD Vance have given over 35 interviews combined in the last month alone. Between August 6 and September 4, Trump has spoken to the likes of NBC’s Dasha Burns, Univision’s Pedro Rojas, TV psychiatrist Dr. Phil and popular Spotify podcaster Theo Von. Vance’s interview list includes CNN’s John Berman, No Spin News’ Bill O’Reilly and Sunday morning political talk shows on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News and CNN.

In contrast, Harris, who reportedly wanted to hit the ground running, committed to just a single interview, bringing her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, with her when she sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash on August 29. The pre-taped interview was long enough to fill the hour-long time slot and was supplemented by footage from the campaign trail, narrated previews of upcoming segments before and after each commercial break, and a 10-minute panel commentary at the end.

Kamala Harris’ strategy is obviously to hide as much as possible and hope that voters in swing states hate her opponent so much that they let her tiptoe across the finish line. With an opponent like the bombastic Donald Trump and a press that largely allows her to evade scrutiny, her strategy could pay off.

But she can’t hide from the debate stage. Tuesday night, the Democratic nominee will face the public for the first time with no script, no cronies, and no cheering fans in the hall. Maybe she’ll bring a real policy position or two to the table and American voters will hear something other than exaggerated giggles.

Or maybe the Democrats will realize that their joy over Kamala Harris is a thing of the past. And that yesterday was an eternity ago.

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