WaPo: Kamala Harris hits a home run [View all]

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/28/kamala-harris-hits-home-run/?utm_term=.dd7d75bb07bf

Thursday’s debate provided the first time to see several top presidential candidates — former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg — as well as an assortment of lesser known and, in some cases, improbable figures face off on the same stage. The result was, at times, explosive and surprising, a tough contest between several tough competitors. Harris, not unlike several middle-tier contenders last night, had the chance to mightily improve her standing (as former HUD secretary Julián Castro and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey did during Wednesday’s debate). And boy did she. She was the clear standout on the stage, mixing righteous anger, biographical stories and prosecutorial toughness. She demonstrated just how her toughness and prosecutorial experience could be wielded — not just against Democrats but eventually against President Trump.

From the first answer sketching out her economic plans to stepping in to chide her bickering colleagues (“America does not want to witness a food fight, they want to know how we’re going to put food on their table”), to a devastating attack on Biden’s record on busing (invoking her own experience as a child bused to integrated schools), to separating herself from the deportation policies of the Obama administration, and to chastising Buttigieg for not integrating South Bend’s police force, she was virtually pitch-perfect. Though she put up her hand for Medicare-for-all, she wasn’t grilled on details; instead, she told a story of mothers sitting in a parking lot afraid to go into the emergency room. By the end of the debate, I was left wishing for a Harris standoff with Elizabeth Warren.

Biden, after some miscues in the weeks leading up to the debate, had to show he was “with it” and ready for a rough-and-tumble fight. His strength is the amount he relishes taking on Trump — and getting under the president’s skin. He started capably by defending Obamacare over Medicare-for-all, and rattling off his plans on education. Ironically, it was Sanders not Biden who came under fire on policy grounds. With so many voices on the stage backing his public option, Biden never was directly challenged by Sanders on Sanders’s signature issue.

As the debate went on, however, the former vice president ran into trouble, most dramatically and painfully at the hands of Harris on the issue of race. Insisting that he favored letting localities decide on busing was a bad misstep because the discrimination at issue, in many cases, requires federal intervention. Biden soldiered on but real damage had been done. He defended his vote for the Iraq War and then pivoted to his positions on Afghanistan and pulling troops out from Iraq. He stumbled again, however, on guns — mangling a punchline when he said that our opponents were gun manufacturers and not the National Rifle Association. What Biden meant to say was that our opponents aren’t gun owners.

Mostly, he suffered in comparison to brighter, sharper voices. Was this fatal to Biden’s chances? No, but it suggested he is a very, very vulnerable front-runner. He also got lucky: Sanders had a poor night as well.

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