VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: A forgettable warped debate
The Sept. 10 presidential debate went down as expected. Summed up, it was Sappy and the Blob pile on Grouchy.
The swarmy and evasive Vice President Kamala Harris preened, posed, and proffered empty platitudes.
The ABC moderators proved they were predictably and shamelessly biased.
And an irate former President Donald Trump confirmed that he was too touchy and easily triggered.
Harris’ instructions were not to explain her agenda. She never defended disowning policies that she had embraced as a lifelong, self-confessed, “woke” “radical.”
Instead, Harris’s threefold strategy was simple enough — and it mostly worked.
One, goad Trump as a coward and racist. Then smile and call for unity, kindness, and an end to such name-calling.
Harris’s orders were to zero in on hair-trigger irrelevancies that would incite and sidetrack the thin-skinned Trump. So, Harris claimed his massive rallies were failures, crackpot — and worst of all, boring! — as she falsely added that weary attendants left early.
All that was missing from her adolescent putdowns was former President Barack Obama’s earlier convention speech obscenity that Trump supposedly suffered from undersized genitalia.
In Harris’ upside-down, projectionist world, ex-President Trump caused the Biden-Harris disastrous skedaddle from Afghanistan.
He was accused of being mostly responsible for the effects of the global COVID-19 plague that killed over 100 million.
And somehow Trump even appeased Russian President Vladimir Putin, who then oddly attacked his neighbors during the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations but not Trump’s.
Harris mocked Trump’s businesses, claiming he was a failure. Those tactics succeeded, as a rattled Trump missed easy refutations of Harris’s naked mendacity.
The result was not an easy exposure of her lies but an off-topic defense of the size of his rallies and his wealth.
Two, Harris predictably once more reinvented herself.
She erased entirely her upper-middle class, privileged upbringing, as a child of two PhDs.
There was no mention that her radical political career was opportunistically gifted by her insider and paramour fixer, the married Bay-Area left-wing politico Willie Brown, over 30 years her senior.
Instead, Harris became a middle-class child of a struggling small businesswoman.
To cement that deception, Harris would now insist that she was always a border hawk, supported fracking, and was tough on crime. She claimed she never rallied the public to bail out violent rioters during the 2020 looting, arson, and violent demonstrations.
Harris promised to answer questions in detail but never did.
Instead, she recited scripted talking points to avoid explaining her opportune metamorphoses.
As the current vice president, Harris went mum on her apparent inability over the last three years — or in the next five months — to enact her “way forward” policies.
Three, everything else in the debate was outsourced to the ABC “moderators,” David Muir and Linsey Davis.
Both apparently calculated that if it was a question between blatantly helping Harris or appearing intellectually and professionally honest, then it was a no-brainer, partisan choice.
So, the two fact-checked Trump constantly, but never Harris once, and tried to warp the tempo of the debate.
Harris, without interruption or correction, recycled the old, discredited lies about Charlottesville, Virginia, “bloodbath,” the 2025 project, and Trump’s supposed support for a federal ban on abortion.
When Trump frequently meandered off topic, the frowning moderators redirected him to answer the questions asked. Harris neither did nor was ever pressed to.
Debate rules supposedly outlawed hot-mic interruptions. But Harris was exempted.
Worse of all were the lopsided questions.
Muir and Davis fixated on the Jan. 6 incitement. They ignored Harris’ national televised screed that the 2020 demonstrations that had proved violent neither would stop nor should stop, and as a “movement” would go on after Election Day.
When Harris lied that police on Jan. 6 were killed by the protesters on a day apparently worse than Sept. 11 (when 3,000 Americans were murdered), the two fact-checkers still kept mum.
Will the debate change the race?
Probably not.
Harris confirmed that she was slicker. But her habitual happy-face nodding has been seen over the past 90 days as facilitating her shallowness, stonewalling, and evasions.
Trump reestablished that he is fiery, quick-tempered, and easily provoked. But the country already knew all that from the last nine years.
Half the nation always felt Trump’s loose-cannon furor was well-directed against plastic politicians and the fusion media — and likely saw such confirmation in the debate.
The sappy Harris won the visuals; the grouchy Trump likely the issues.
But the real losers were ABC and its two partisan moderators, Muir and Davis.
Both managed to easily outdo CNN’s Candy Crowley’s infamous partisan sabotage of the 2012 debate between Mitt Romney and Obama.
Just as we do not remember anything else about that spectacle other than Crowley’s career-ending interventions to aid Obama, so too did Muir and Davis confirm their shameless biases.
They sought to warp a debate, disgraced their network, and offered a good reminder why such media “moderators” should never be allowed anywhere near presidential debates.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.
