The Brooklyn Rail

Even before the Trumpian Age, American electoral politics has always been a cruel arena. I was ten years old, growing up in a working-class family in a small farming town in Kansas, when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963; twelve when Malcolm X was shot in 1965; and fifteen when Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot in Memphis, and Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, in 1968; so, my budding political consciousness was largely shaped by assassins. The work of these killers was to cut short the sense of hope for a multiracial, multicultural democracy that was then growing in America.

Most of the 51 million people who watched President Joe Biden fall apart in his debate with Donald Trump last June knew that they were watching the end of a long, storied career in politics and it was painful to see it end that way, standing next to the single biggest threat to American democracy we’ve had in this country, who was smirking and licking his chops at the sight of Biden’s disintegration. And it was particularly painful for Democrats, to know that Biden was the only candidate who had beaten Trump before and believed he was the best person to beat him again. It was an awfully big load to put on one tired old man.

And it is an awfully big load to put on one woman now, when half the country and all the powerful men and women of one political party have refused to stand up to this threat, and when the odds are stacked against her. But this is the way we do it, here. This is the way we make big decisions. “Say it to my face.”

Kamala Harris didn’t just win the debate tonight. She dominated her opponent. She schooled him. She got under his skin and forced him to make new errors. Before the debate even began, she put him on the defensive, when she strode across the stage at the National Constitutional Center, cornered Trump behind his own podium, and grabbed his hand. Trump never recovered from this gesture of gracious dominance. He scowled and squinted and looked older and smaller and more tired as the night wore on and he got angrier and angrier as she joyfully grilled him.

More than three-fourths of the things Trump said tonight were lies. When the simple fact-checking is done tomorrow, this will be abundantly clear. Harris wisely refrained from correcting all of his lies, instead looking over at him as he recited them with a look of incredulity, blending into bemusement, and settling finally into pity. It was the latter look that will have the most lasting effect.

She wasn’t shy about going right after him verbally. “World leaders are laughing at you,” she told him, to which he weakly replied something to effect of, “Viktor Orban likes me.” She said that if Trump had his way on Ukraine, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now, looking toward Poland. What will you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans living right here in Pennsylvania when that happens?”

If she gets a small portion of those 800,000 Poles in Pennsylvania to vote for her, and a smaller portion of Taylor Swift’s 283 million followers to vote for her after Swift endorsed her immediately following the debate, she will win this race.

And it’s hard for me to believe that the clips from this debate performance that will be going around in the next days and weeks will not cause a significant increase in Harris’s poll numbers. But she’s still an underdog. Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 2.1% in the popular vote, but lost in the electoral college. Joe Biden beat Trump by 4.5% in the popular vote, and barely beat Trump in the electoral college vote. There’s still a long way to go in the next 56 days.

But tonight, Kamala Harris stood up to the lying bully and thoroughly bested him. Now it’s up to the rest of us. If we don’t stand up now, we don’t deserve democracy.