By Maeve Reston
The Washington Post
Near the end of their 2016 U.S. Senate debate in California, Loretta Sanchez cast Kamala Harris as a tool of the establishment and sought recognition for the controversial stances she herself had taken as a congresswoman. She then confounded Harris and the audience by closing her remarks with a dab.
Replicating the once-popular dance move, Sanchez extended her left arm straight out and bowed her head into the crook of her right elbow. Watching wide-eyed from across the stage, Harris pressed her lips together and raised her eyebrows – letting silence hang in the air for a few seconds.
“So there’s a clear difference between the candidates in this race,” Harris said after several moments, turning to share a laugh with the audience. With timing and facial expressions, she relayed the message at the core of her campaign – that Sanchez was an unserious contender with a penchant for drama, while she was ready for the job. Harris won the election by a 23-point margin.
Harris will look to make a similar argument Tuesday in her one-on-one debate with former president Donald Trump, whom she has described as “an unserious man” who could create “extremely serious” consequences if he wins another term in the White House. But this time she will be facing a far more formidable debate opponent, who effectively ended the ambitionsof other White House aspirants that he bulldozed on the debate stage. The vice president’s longtime allies hope the skills she honed in the courtroom during her years as a prosecutor – including how to use restraint, timing and humor to connect with audiences – will shape the outcome as they did in her winning races for state attorney general and Senate.
Still, Harris will need to overcome criticisms that she is an overly-cautious politician, on the debate stage and elsewhere, who often struggles to give clear, concise answers. Her 2019 presidential debate performances were uneven as she struggled to find her ideological footing in a packed Democratic primary field. Then as vice president, she sometimes came across as unsteady and inscrutable in the rare interviews she did.
Conservatives have portrayed her as a lightweight. Trump has questioned her intelligence and asserted that world leaders would manipulate her like “a play toy.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently set a low bar for her debate performance by predicting it would amount to “90 minutes of word salads doused with platitudes.”
Harris has an opportunity to dispel those critiques Tuesday at a moment when some of the obstacles she faced in recent years have been removed. Much of the discomfort Harris displayed during the presidential primary debates stemmed from her difficulty navigating policy positions within a primary driven by a liberal electorate that was skeptical of her credentials as a prosecutor.
Now, as Democrats relish the chance to frame the race as a matchup between a prosecutor and a felon, she will be on firmer ground and is facing off against an opponent whose positions are diametrically opposed to her own. Unlike her years as vice president, Harris no longer is constrained by the need to speak on behalf of President Joe Biden and his policy agenda – with more latitude to focus on her own ideas.
Longtime observers note that she was more at ease in those earlier one-on-one matchups in California when she was appealing to a broader electorate that included independents and moderate Republicans, whom she is also looking to sway Tuesday night. Reflecting on Harris’s handling of the moment when Sanchez dabbed in the 2016 debate, her former chief of staff Nathan Barankin recalled that her advisers “were all dumbfounded.”
“But Kamala’s reaction to it was pitch perfect,” said Barankin, who served as her chief of staff both in the Senate and as attorney general. “There is no one I have ever met that is better than her at reading – not just a room – but individual personalities and motivations and their potential weaknesses.”
“She’s incredibly quick on her feet,” said Dan Morain, the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and one of the questioners in the 2010 debate while Harris was running for attorney general. He noted that the negative portrayals of Harris in recent years as a vacuous figure unprepared for tough encounters were “unrecognizable” to him compared with the profile she cut in California in that 2010 race and her 2016 Senate race.
“She understands how to connect with juries – and we (as voters) are the jury here,” said Morain, the author of “Kamala’s Way, An American Life.” “You have to be able to give an answer that’s logical ― that the judge and jury can follow. That’s what I saw in 2010; that’s what I saw in 2016. I would anticipate that is what we will see on [Tuesday].”
Harris used that ability to sense and capitalize on her opponent’s vulnerability in her 2010 race against then-Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley, a Republican. Harris was not favored to win in the contest that was ultimately decided by less than one percentage point.
But Cooley made a critical mistake when asked during their October debate whether he would “double-dip” if elected by taking both the state-funded $150,000 salary of the attorney general and the pension benefits he had earned during more than three decades of public service. “I earned it,” he responded to moderators, adding that he would use his pension benefits to supplement the “incredibly low salary of the state attorney general.”
Harris was silent. The moderator asked if she had anything to add.
“Go for it Steve,” she said with a laugh. “You’ve earned it.”
“She was really quick – and it went ‘Boom!’ It ended up being the perfect sound bite,” said longtime California Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, who went up against Harris as an adviser to Sanchez in the Senate contest. “She has a natural capacity to quickly respond with a short, powerful thing … And I think Trump better watch out.”
Harris is spending her final days preparing for next week’s debate in Pittsburgh in sessions led by lawyer Karen Dunn, who worked with her before the 2020 vice-presidential debate against Mike Pence. Her team has also enlisted former Hillary Clinton adviser Philippe Reines to play Trump in Harris’s mock debates. Though her campaign aides are revealing little about how she plans to take on the former president Tuesday night, several of her former aides note that she often prepared for her biggest moments – whether they were debates, major interviews or her interrogations of Trump appointees and nominees during Capitol Hill hearings – with a three-step process.
First, she would gather staff for a wide-ranging conversation about the policy topics might be broached in that debate or event. Then her aides would prepare a document outlining the ideas or policies that she wanted to convey. Harris would edit and refine that document. Then she would meet again with aides and advisers to workshop delivery of her message and solicit feedback, which helped her crystallize the perspective on the given issue that she wanted to get across.
That process produced one of her viral moments grilling Brett M. Kavanaugh after Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court. In the final phase of her process before the Kavanaugh hearings, her team invited several former Supreme Court clerks to join a session to help her anticipate how Kavanaugh might evade questions, as judicial nominees often do. Harris listened closely as aides mapped out potential lines of questioning on abortion. She then asked the two former clerks essentially the same question she would later ask Kavanaugh: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”
Barankin recalled that the room was “dead quiet … and that’s where that question came from.”
In those probing Capitol Hill exchanges with Kavanaugh and then-attorney general Jeff Sessions – who objected to the rapid pace of Harris’s questioning by stating he was not “able to be rushed this fast” because it made him “nervous” – Harris slipped back into the comfortable role of interrogator. But she faced greater difficulty landing her lines as one of many Democratic presidential candidates on the debate stage in the 2020 presidentialcampaign.
Her most memorable moment in that campaign came when she drew on her own biography to call out Biden’s opposition to forced busing as a tool to integrate public schools during the 1970s when he was a U.S. senator: “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
But in the days that followed, she offered muddled answers about what the modern day role of the federal government should be in integrating schools – leading Biden’s communications director to accuse her of “tying herself in knots” trying to explain her position on mandatory busing.
In an attempt to match the progressive credentials of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during a later debate in Miami, she and Sanders were the only two people onstage who raised their hands when asked whether they would abolish private health insurance in favor of a government single-payer plan. She backtracked the next day stating she had misunderstood the question.
And facing an imperative to appeal to liberal voters who perceived the criminal justice system as a driver of racial inequity – some of whom had branded Harris as “Kamala, the cop” – Harris seemed uncomfortable in 2019 delving into aspects of her record as district attorney and attorney general that she had once cast as accomplishments.
She appeared unprepared to respond in detail to attacks in a July 2019 debate, some of them misleading, from then-Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard on Harris’s past positions on cash bail and the number of people who were sent to prison for marijuana convictions while she was attorney general.
But Harris punched back hard in a November debate in Atlanta where she questioned Gabbard’s ability to serve as the standard-bearer for Democrats after spending “four years full time on Fox News criticizing President Obama,” seeking out face time with Trump and “buddying up” to his longtime adviser Stephen K. Bannon. Gabbard has since left the Democratic Party and endorsed Trump.
When Harris faced Pence the following year in their only debate, Pence adviser Marc Short said the vice president’s team had prepared him to respond to what they expected to be far more granular attacks on the Trump-Pence record. Pence’s team also felt that Harris’s effort to suggest that the vice president was mansplaining or talking over her when he would interject by stating “I’m speaking” came off as a canned line that fell flat.
“He’s not really a rude person, so it doesn’t really work,” Short said. “We came away after our debate feeling that she wasn’t as prepared as she could have been. We had prepared a deeper policy defense of the Trump-Pence record that we expected her to prosecute more and didn’t feel like she did. And when Pence parried back on her record in California, she wasn’t really able to defend that either.”
In the upcoming matchup with Trump, Short said Harris has more at stake. The former president, he said, “is such a known commodity at this point that it’s going to be really hard to change people’s opinions.”
“So there’s more upside potential, but also more downside potential for her.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said voters will be paying close attention to how Harris approaches Trump.
“Her focus, her knowledge of the issues, her articulation and her directness – I think that’s going to be very challenging for Trump,” said Bass, who predicted that Trump will try to throw Harris off balance by attacking her credentials and questioning her race, as he has on the campaign trail. “One thing that I think she should do – and I know she will do – she will not lower herself to his level.”
“When someone is in the gutter, why would you join them?” Bass said. “It will be important for voters to see how she can handle adversity. And frankly standing on the stage with him is standing on the stage with adversity. If she can handle him, she can certainly handle a hostile international actor.”