The New Yorker:

In the Vice-President’s previous debate triumphs, she did not conquer her opponents so much as she permitted them to lose.

By Jessica Winter

President Biden’s political career died on a debate stage, a place where his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, has enjoyed unusual good fortune. When she was running as the underdog in the race for California attorney general, in 2010, her opponent, the Los Angeles district attorney, Steve Cooley, handed her campaign team a gift-wrapped sound bite: he admitted, during their only debate, that, if elected, he planned to “double-dip” into the state’s coffers by taking both a public salary and a public pension. Harris’s rebuttal was concise. “Go for it, Steve!” she replied, and let her now famous laughter do the rest of the work. She eked out a victory over Cooley by less than one percentage point. In California’s 2016 U.S. Senate race, Harris again met an opponent who toiled selflessly on her behalf—in this case, Representative Loretta Sanchez, who capped a shrill and aggrieved debate performance by dabbing after her closing statement. Harris paused for a beat, giving herself and the audience a chance to process their secondhand embarrassment, and then remarked, brightly, “So there’s a clear difference between the candidates in this race.” She laughed, but not the full-belly version this time—no need to spike the football. Harris won in a landslide. Four years later, when she faced off against Mike Pence in the Vice-Presidential debate, a fly alighted on Pence’s snowdrift coiffure and stayed put for a while: a perfect metaphor for a moribund incumbency. Harris didn’t have to lift a finger.

It’s true that, during the stuffed-phone-booth Presidential-primary debates of 2019, Harris hardly distinguished herself among the candidates. (Nobody did, save for Bernie Sanders, whose unwavering message discipline often seemed to be the only anchor in a chaotic sea.) Yet, even then, Harris managed to create a viral moment. In calling out Joe Biden’s historical opposition to federally enforced busing as part of school-desegregation efforts in the nineteen-seventies, she summoned an image of a little Black girl who, along with her schoolmates, found herself on the front lines of an ugly racial reckoning. “And that little girl,” Harris went on, “was me.” Two lecterns down, Biden looked up sharply, surprised. The moment was calculated and yet raw and rattled, too; like some of the best political theatre, it felt at once choreographed and improvised. It may have secured Harris’s place on Biden’s ticket in 2020, and, if it did, it made possible all that’s come since.

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