The Cipher and Her Praetorian Guard

In the lead-up to this week's presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the polls showed a dead heat, both nationally and in seven swing states. The 2024 race is, by all measures, the closest presidential race we have seen in our lifetimes. But the usual presidential math applies: The person upon whom the race becomes a referendum loses.

For Trump, then, the task of the debate was threefold: to hammer the point that Kamala Harris is responsible for the failed policies of the Biden-Harris White House, and that he is the agent of change -- a proposition with which the majority of Americans tend to agree; to drive home that Harris is actually dangerously far-left, and that she is lying about her current policy positions in order to protect them from scrutiny; and that she is incompetent, having blown every single task she has ever been handed. In short, Harris is a cipher; it is Trump's job to clarify just who she is.

For Harris, the task was more complicated: she had to avoid all of these points, and she had to somehow go further by providing an effective counter. It wasn't enough to merely dodge punches; she had to establish that she is different than Joe Biden in some marked way; that she is a moderate who has experienced a change of heart; and that she isn't the cackler who regularly enjoys a heaping helping of word salad.

And for the moderators, the task was to help Kamala Harris achieve all of these things.

They certainly did their best. David Muir and Linsey Davis turned in the most discreditable job of moderation in presidential history. They repeatedly (and wrongly) fact-checked Trump four times, without ever calling Harris on a single one of her lies. They asked Trump follow-ups and demanded clarification while allowing Harris to skate on her bumper sticker platitudes. They structured their questions to elicit prepared responses from Harris, while demanding that Trump forgo obvious responses to Harris' lies.

It worked. It threw Trump off of his game. Distracted by the three-on-one pile-on, eager to defend himself from every charge and to engage in fisticuffs over his remarks and record, Trump forgot his reason for being there: to target Harris. Instead, he talked about Jan. 6 and the election of 2020 and his record on COVID and his proposals on tariffs and his negotiations with the Taliban.

Harris, meanwhile, appeared relatively cool and collected; she dodged nearly every question, with the help of her Praetorian Guard.

But there's a problem: Because both Harris and the media were so intent on dragging Trump down, they forgot that Harris needs to do more than label Trump; she needs to redefine herself. She didn't do that at all during the debate. Perhaps some Americans came away from the debate more quiescent about her incoherence. But none will come away satisfied that she represents a change in the direction of the country. None will be assuaged that she is a moderate unifier. That's because she isn't. Yes, she did better than Trump did, with the help of her loyal apparatchiks. But she didn't close the deal.

Perhaps that's because she can't close the deal. The lies are just too big for Americans to swallow. In the end, she is only the nominee because she is Joe Biden's vice president; she has never won a single primary vote as a candidate. In the end, she is only on the debate stage because of the Biden-Harris administration, in which she claims a critical role. In the end, it is Harris who ran as a Bernie Sanders socialist in 2019, and it is Harris who says that her values haven't changed.

Americans aren't stupid. And they still have more questions about Harris than about Trump. Trump still has two months to remind Americans to ask those questions.