'An Anatomy of the Post-Debate Detritus'

<https://victorhanson.com/an-anatomy-of-the-post-debate-detritus/>

'Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

After the September 10, 2024, presidential debate between Donald Trump
and Kamala Harris, the Harris campaign became giddy.

And why not?

Pre-debate conventional wisdom had assured the country that underdog
Harris would shock the nation with her endless wash/rinse/spin word
salads of repeated phrases and memorized sound bites.

She supposedly would prove as shaky as Trump—the veteran of several
presidential debates—would prove merciless in eviscerating her.

That did not happen. Post-debate polls of the first 24 hours showed
clearly that the public felt Harris had won.

Why?

She stuck religiously to her pre-debate prep. It was not difficult to
anticipate what her tripartite script would be. Joe Biden’s failed
debate with Trump offered a model, along with the need to avoid Harris’s
own known linguistic and cognitive liabilities:

One, Harris was told to bait the touchy Trump with smears and slights
about his failed rallies, his racism, and his shaky businesses. That way
she could trigger him to lose his cool, go off-topic, rant, and turn off
viewers.

And he did just that and often. Trump clearly did not prepare detailed
answers, was not ready to be insulted, and was not reminded to relax—and
smile, joke, and in Reaganesque fashion sluff off her certain slurs.

Two, she was not supposed to try thinking on her feet, no matter what
the question asked.

Instead, Harris was always ordered to plug in her prepped and canned
anecdotes, banalities, and bio-stories regardless of the topic or
question. And she followed that off-topic boilerplate to spec.

Three, the campaign apparently knew they could rely on the moderators
for four givens:

they were to fact-check Trump but never Harris. And they did that at
least five times;
they were to demand follow-up answers from Trump to make him
specifically answer the question addressed. And they did that numerous
times, but not on a single occasion to Harris;
they were to ask Trump provocative questions to force him to deny that
he was a racist, an insurrectionist, and an election denialist. But they
were never to do so with Harris, whose many past outlandish statements,
prevarications, flip-flops, and padded bio would have given the
moderators similar rich fodder for cross-examination;
they would interrupt Trump to get him off tempo, but never Harris.
The result was that a cool, if not smug, Harris mostly smiled while an
irate Trump scowled and raged.

Thus, to the millions who watched the slugfest, Harris seemed more
“presidential” and therefore “won” the debate.

When the size of the huge television audience—some 67 million watched
the debate—was announced, team Harris naturally assumed her win might
bounce her even higher than did her initial July surge after the forced
abdication of President Biden from the ticket.

But then strange post-debate developments followed.

Either a Tiny or No Bounce?

Harris did not receive the anticipated large bounce.

In fact, the polls still remain mostly even. She may have arrested
Trump’s pre-debate surge a bit, but otherwise, a debate that polled so
heavily in her favor oddly still seems to have made little difference in
the still up-for-grabs race.

Stranger still, Harris, the supposedly clear winner, almost immediately
asked for another debate. Her handlers suggested that this demand
displayed newfound confidence from her win—as if an assured, second
knockout debate would ensure her permanent pull away.

But Trump and others countered that it might have instead indicated the
very opposite: that her pre-debate internal polls had shown the race was
even or even had Trump leading and thus she still needed a second shot
at derailing him, given her own team was not sure her single and
transitory debate favorability would translate into any real lead.

The Debate Reset

Then in a day or two, other and far more significant realities emerged,
resetting the debate—like a first date’s favorable first impression
beginning to sour a day later upon further reflection.

As the debate clips were endlessly replayed on television, radio, and
the blogosphere over the ensuing week, few, if any, favorable Harris
soundbites popped up.

Harris, remember, was a veritable political unknown who was running a
stealth campaign of media avoidance and running out the clock.

She had never really answered any questions addressed to her in the
campaign. And in the debate, she presented her nothingness in confident
fashion. But she ignored and snubbed both the toadish moderators and
Trump at every turn.

Yet the public had tuned in only to receive just three answers from her
that she had never previously offered them since her July anointment:

Why are you flipping—temporarily or permanently?—on almost every issue
from your past positions?
If you are the candidate of change, why did you and President Biden as
incumbents not make these changes the last three years—or at least
promise now to make them in the next four months of your remaining
tenures?
And what exactly will be your policies as president and the details of
their proposed implementation?
Every time these questions in the debate were either stumbled upon by
the moderators or demanded by Trump, Harris evaded by plugging in her
memorized, smiley, and stonewalling non-answers.

Even leftist media outlets could not find video clips that would show a
dominant Harris mastering any of these questions.

Furthermore, in the recycled visuals of the campaign, when Trump
blustered and ranted, viewers now noticed that Harris had deliberately
turned to him in scripted posturing. She pantomimed as if she were
prepped by Hollywood actors—not just on memorizing canned trivialities
but also giving fake moves and poses.

At times, Harris was a Rodin-like “Thinker,” looking contemplative with
a strutting chin and propping it up with a closed hand. At times, with a
wink-and-nod, she privately communicated to the audience their
supposedly shared exasperation at her outrageous opponent. And at times
she rolled her eyes, batted her eyelids, raised her eyebrows, and
lip-synched her cynical disdain to 67 million viewers.

The net result?

The longer the debate was discussed, the more the far larger audience
who had not watched the debate heard about it from friends or saw
regurgitated media takes, so all the more the public came away thinking
Harris was certainly slick and smooth, but otherwise empty, shallow, and
smug.

And the more they saw clips of the scowling, snarling, and raving Trump,
all the more they heard him blast an unresponsive Harris for the border,
crime, the economy, and foreign policy—precisely the issues about which
she was now failing to offer any of studied expertise.

The result was Trump, albeit in sometimes obnoxious fashion, reassured
the country he could repeat what he did in 2017-21, while Harris
confidently and professionally offered them little but sugary bios and
platitudes.

Post Debate Meltdowns

After the debate, a now cocky Harris forgot her directions and thus only
confirmed her pre-debate no-no’s. So, at a post-debate rally, the
recidivist Harris reverted to what her handlers had told her was taboo:
cackling and word salads.

In her first solo media interview in over 50 days with a preselected,
left-wing local Philadelphia TV anchorman, Brian Taff, Harris actually
plugged in her exact memorized debate riffs from a few nights
earlier—even when they had nothing to do with the questions Taff asked.

When Harris realized that she could not answer a single one of his
questions in the brief 10-minute softball interview, then, in
deer-in-the-headlights fashion, she simply smiled, hand gestured,
giggled, and sought refuge in her accustomed platitudes and
circularities.

The net result was again reminding viewers of her debate inanity a few
days earlier.

Yes, Harris has a good memory to recite prepped banalities and to bait
and smear opponents while keeping cool with the help of moderators.

But otherwise, she shows no ability to think or speak on her feet—and
zero knowledge of the key challenges facing any president.

The Immoderators

It was bad enough that the moderators intervened in the debate—and only
on one side—to fact-check. But their fact-checks on at least three of
their five occasions themselves needed to be fact-checked for mistakes,
especially as the post-debate furor rose.

Moderator Linsey Davis went after Trump for his accurate claim that
partial-birth abortions and the killing of a baby as it leaves the birth
canal were legal.

Or as Ms. Fact-Checker arrogantly put it, “There is no state where it is
legal in this country to kill a baby after it’s born.” That was not
true.

At least six states make no restrictions of any kind on abortion, and
thus, admittedly, on rare occasions, infants can be terminated who leave
the birth canal.

Protection to ensure that such deaths never happen was vetoed by
Democrats in Congress. Worse still, Harris’s own running mate Tim Walz
as governor stopped Minnesota state legislation that would have outlawed
the killing of an infant delivered viable and alive during or after an
abortion procedure.

The moderators also fact-checked Trump’s assertion that crime was higher
under Biden Harris than during his tenure and his allegation that many
large cities do not fully or timely report crime statistics to federal
tabulators.

Yet Trump was right on both counts. And only days later, the nation was
reminded of just that when the Biden-Harris Department of Justice
released recent crime statistics showing crime is still elevated—and
still quite higher than when Biden-Harris took office.

The post-debate outrage further increased. It was further remembered
that the two fact-checkers sat mum while Harris spun her own whoppers:
that no military personnel were posted abroad in combat zones (just ask
those often attacked in bases in Syria and Iraq, in Africa, or on patrol
in the Red Sea).

And the two partisans kept silent when Harris repeated the long-ago
fact-checked lies about Charlotteville, “bloodbath,” Project 2025, and
Trump’s supposed support for a federal abortion ban.

Journalists after the debate tried to rescue Harris by jumping on Trump
for other supposed lies, such as alleging Harris had supported
government-provided transgendered conversion treatments for illegal
aliens and prisoners. But then, post-debate, Harris’s own prior written
endorsements for just that appeared.

While Harris’s campaign and liberal influencers were claiming that the
moderators were not fact-checkers, one of the two, Linsey Davis,
admitted she was not only a proud fact-checker, but along with her
co-moderator David Muir had become one.

The reason was because of ABC’s desire to not let Trump supposedly
promulgate falsehoods as he had in Joe Biden’s disastrous and
career-ending June debate.

ABC apparently felt the earlier CNN moderators on that occasion were
seen as too neutral and that being disinterested was a bad thing.
Instead, in the Muir/Davis warped view, Biden lost that debate not
because of his visible dementia but supposedly due to Trump’s
exaggerations (which Biden himself matched if not exceeded).

In other words, Davis inadvertently admitted that after Democratic
nominee Biden had crashed his career in a debate with Trump, ABC would
now correct CNN’s supposed laxity in being too disinterested.

So, ABC’s moderators would become actively involved in the debate—and
did so as the debate postmortem showed in clear partisan fashion.

Translated? One could take the Davis confession to mean the
Democratic-Media fusion lost one debate by playing by traditional debate
rules of moderator non-interference—and learned from that loss never to
be so fair again.

Debate Incest?

The post-debate detritus mounted.

Senior Disney executive Dana Walden—who helps oversee ABC—is known as
one of Harris’s “extraordinary friends” and, as reported, has been for
at least 30 years. Their respective husbands have been close pals for
even longer. Walden has been a steady contributor to Harris’s state and
federal campaigns for over twenty years.

And it was disclosed that Harris and moderator Davis were national
sorority sisters, a connection that sounded terrible, but after a fair
debate, no one would have known what to make of it.

So, in normal times, no one would have noticed these conflicts of
interest. After all, in the incestuous corporate/politics/media
ecosystem of the bicoastal left, everyone either went to school, knows,
does business with and profits from, dates, or is married to everyone
else.

But given the clear bias of ABC in the post-debate environment, these
relationships only further tainted the debate’s credibility.

Prairie-fire Madness

As the embarrassments of Harris’s debate and her post-debate evasions
became better known, the moderators’ bias more fully exposed, the incest
of ABC aired, and the lack of a debate “victory” bounce acknowledged,
the irate right-wing blogosphere struck back.

On the rationale that if the left-wing network had “rigged” the debate
and the moderators tipped the scales, then it too would reply in like
kind. The result was a barrage of post-debate rumors, conspiracies, and
false revelations—the discredited fact-checkers be damned.

Within days, fables floated by bloggers and often Trump himself that
Harris was wearing high-tech receiver-earrings to facilitate stealthy
prompts and directions from her off-stage handlers. Other rumors spread
that her calmness was only a symptom that she had been given the debate
questions in advance, or so an anonymous source claimed. Trump and his
supporters then insisted that he was widely recognized by the public as
the “winner” of the debate.

No evidence has yet emerged to prove any of these allegations.

Harris was likely wearing earrings that only remotely looked like a
brand that doubles as a receiver.

There is no proof, at least yet from ABC or the Harris campaign, that
Harris, in Donna Brazile/Hillary Clinton/CNN fashion of old, had
received either the topics or the general outlines of the debate
questions in advance.

And the polls uniformly really did show that Trump was felt by the
public to have lost the debate—even though Harris had not really
profited much from it.

But what was missed by the left’s outrage over the swirling rumors of
conspiracies was that its own behavior had seeded such hysterias.

When moderators are not just biased but proudly explain why they are
biased, and when such favoritism does demonstrably warp a presidential
debate, then those on their receiving end naturally fire back with
conspiracies of their own.

An interesting question arises over which is worse: the founded and
proven conspiracy of the moderators in undisclosed but preplanned
determination to hammer only Trump, or the frenzied reaction to believe
fables consistent with the demonstrable bias of ABC and its moderators’
intention to warp the debate?

The Way Not Forward?

What is the result of this debate mess?

No sane conservative will or should ever do another national debate on
any ABC venue.

If they were wise, Republicans should never agree to any televised
debate moderated by ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, PBS, NPR, or CNN again,
given the history of liberal moderator bias. The names of Donna Brazile,
Candy Crowley, David Muir, and Linsey Davis should serve as sufficient
warnings.

If the presidential candidates still insist on debating their opponents,
they then should agree only to the classical rules of debating—and with
only mute timekeepers present instead of loud-mouth,
egocentricmoderators in the following fashion:

An opening 5-minute statement;

A 3-minute rebuttal of opponent’s similar statement;

A 2-minute rebuttal of the rebuttal;

All to be repeated over eight or nine topics in a 90-minute debate, with
mouth-shut timekeepers keeping each candidate within his time limits.

So, no more of these televised travesties, even when, as in this case,
they boomerang on their fixers.