Author, Lecturer, Ethicist

#1,006: 51 Days and Counting . . .

How many different synonyms can you come up with to describe what Vice President Kamala Harris did to FPOTUS IT at last Tuesday night’s nationally-televised presidential debate, watched by nearly 70 million Americans . . . not to mention people around the world? Was it “a drubbing,” “a shellacking,” or a whupping”? Did she “annihilate,” “trounce,” “route” or “destroy” him? Will it be known to future generations as “IT’s Waterloo?”

Indeed, V.P. Harris came across as being composed, intelligent, articulate, deeply knowledgeable, and - daresay we - PRESIDENTIAL, while IT was his normal self: petulant, puerile, waspish, racist and filled to overflowing with half-truths, mistruths and absurd - not to mention “dangerous” - fabrications. From the very moment the 5’4 1/4” Harris (wearing flat shoes) confidently strode across the debate stage, firmly grasped the hand of the 6’3” IT and introduced herself (“Good evening, I’m Kamala Harris”), one sensed that she already had him in her hip pocket.

Besides the obvious disparities in their physical height, Harris proved to be the bigger, taller candidate . . . and the most truthful.  This is not to say that the Vice President was spot-on honest throughout the full 90 minutes.  Several small fibs or disparities did manage to pass the V.P.’s  lips:

  • Harris: “Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result, for middle-class families, in about $4,000 more a year.”  This may be a high estimate.  IT suggested he wants to impose a 10 percent tax on every imported good entering the United States and a 60 percent tax on every imported good from China. The pro-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics has estimated that this would cost a typical U.S. household in the middle of the income distribution about $1,700 in after-tax income. That’s because tariffs are typically passed on to consumers by importers — a standard economic concept that IT rejects.

  • Harris: “What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025, that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected.”  to which IT responded “I have nothing to do as you know, and as she knows better than anyone, I have nothing to do with Project 2025 that’s out there.”  Project 2025 is not an official campaign document, and Democrats, including Vice President Harris, have been called out for sometimes falsely suggesting policies that are not in it, such as on Social Security and the definition of family. It’s a Heritage Foundation report called “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page manifesto filled with detailed conservative proposals that is popularly labeled Project 2025. But there are definitely Trump connections.

  • Harris: “Let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020, I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of United States. And in fact, I was the tiebreaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”  This is “spin.”  What Harris said in the vice-presidential debate in 2020, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking. He has been very clear about that.” Later in the debate, she reiterated that “the American people know that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact. That is a fact.”  In other words, V.P. Harris was stating Biden’s position — but not making clear her own. When she was still running for president months earlier, Harris took a firm stand against fracking.

By comparison, IT, immediately put on the defensive by his opponent, and  largely abandoning his pre-arranged debate strategy, made more than four times more false or suspect claims than the Vice President.  Some of them were outright whoppers:

  • IT“I have no sales tax. That’s an incorrect statement. She knows that we’re doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world, and the tariff will be substantial in some cases.” IT is flat wrong to claim that the entire tariff is paid by a foreign country.  There is no controversy among economists, who agree that tariffs — essentially a tax on domestic consumption — are paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, which in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers who may use imported materials in their products.

  • IT: "You believe in things like we're not going to frack, we're not going to take fossil fuel, we're not going to do things that are going to be strong, whether you like it or not . . . . Germany tried that, and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants."  This was such an undeniably false statement that Germany’s Federal Foreign Office took the unique  step of issuing a rebuttal:  “Like it or not: Germany's energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables, and we are shutting down – not building – coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest."

  • Harris: “I’m going to tell you that I have traveled the world as vice president of the United States, and world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.” ITs response drew blank stares around the globe: “Let me just tell you about world leaders. Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men — they call him a ‘strongman.’ He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him.”

  • IT speaking on crime during the Biden/Harris years: “They allowed terrorists. They allowed common street criminals. They allowed people to come in, drug dealers to come into our country. And they’re now in the United States and told by their countries like Venezuela, don’t ever come back, or we’re going to kill you. Do you know that crime in Venezuela and crime in countries all over the world is way down?”  This is false. There is no reliable data on crime in Venezuela — the government stopped publishing official data in 2015 — but at campaign rallies, IT says crime has dropped “a staggering 67 percent” in Venezuela, while at other times he has put the drop in crime at “72 percent in a year.” It’s unclear where he gets these numbers.

Then there is the one big fat lie that will outlive It, his running mate Vontz, as well as their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren:

  • Speaking of the perils of “unbridled immigration: “A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” IT is channeling right-wing social media sensations. On Springfield, Ohio, he is referencing a ridiculous social media hoax, supposedly centered on Haitian immigrants eating cats and other animals, that has spawned thousands of memes across right-wing social media. There is no evidence that Haitians are doing this.  And yet, despite  a welter of proof that this charge is utter hogwash,  bomb threats have closed down Springfield schools and forced to local hospitals - Kettering Health and Mercy Health - to go on lock down.  Threats have continued to come even after the woman who started the rumors acknowledged to  NBC News that they were unfounded and publicly apologized. 

    This past Friday, President Biden lashed out at IT during a White House event celebrating Black excellence, stating “I want to take a moment to say something [about the] Haitian American community that’s under attack in our country right now.  It’s simply wrong. There’s no place in America. This has to stop, what he’s doing. It has to stop!”

Here in 2024, IT has pledged that on “day one,” he will deport the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio “back to Venezuela”; in September 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate IT came to Miami’s Little Haiti and told an assembled crowd: “I’m running to represent Haitian-Americans.  I really want to be your greatest champion, and I will be your champion.” I guess IT presumes that those who eat cats and dogs, suffer from acute memory  loss.

Not surprisingly, a vast majority of the legitimate media proclaimed Kamala Harris the winner in a landslide.  It immediately proclaimed himself the overwhelming victor and declared that as a result, he would no longer consider engaging in a second debate.  In making his declaration, he used a boxing metaphor: “When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, “I WANT A REMATCH.  Polls clearly show that I won the debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate (sic).”

Despite the relative boost Kamala Harris received among independent and undecided voters as a result of her formidable debate victory; despite the greater polling numbers she is receiving among women and some minorities (such as Haitians and South Asians) she is still pretty much in a statistical dead heat with her Republican opponent. DO NOT PAY TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO DAILY OR EVEN WEEKLY POLL NUMBERS, I beg you.  Many pollsters are paid to report what a candidate wants them to report; there are but a few reliable and scientifically accurate polls out there these days.  Among those I find most trustworthy are:

  • The New York Times/Siena College

  • ABC News/The Washington Post

  • Marquette University Law School

  • YOUGOV

  • Monmouth University Polling Institute 

  • Maris College and

  • Suffolk University.

    Among the worst are:

  • Florida International University/Univision

  • The Florida Poll and

  • University of North Florida/Bob Graham Center for Public Service.

The way things go nowadays, people who support the Harris/Walz ticket cannot believe for one moment that anyone - knowing what we know about IT/Vontz - could ever support them come November. Then too, those who are ardent supporters of the latter - again, despite what they know about them - could ever in a million years vote for Harris/Walz. In politics, things are never that cut and dried. The path to victory is never paved with prayers or pronouncements; rather, they are the product of door-knocking, phone ringing, postcard writing and $$$. The path to loss is paved with people who give up, convincing themselves that their vote won’t amount to a hill of beans. I’ve lived and practiced politics long enough to know generally speaking, this is not true.

We have 51 days to go . . . 51 days to make our voices and our dreams a reality.

Do remember the words of Louis D. Brandeis, the greatest of all Supreme Court Justices: “The most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen.”

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone