Vice President Kamala Harris is reportedly struggling to prepare to debate former President Donald Trump on Tuesday due to an overwhelming amount of policy details.
Harris, who is now the Democrat nominee without receiving one primary vote, is conducting debate prep to avoid being shellacked again after the 2020 cycle when then-Democrat Rep. Tulsi Gabbard held Harris accountable for her radical left record.
Gabbard’s attack on Harris during the debate was deadly. Harris was the first candidate to drop out of the race. “We had not done a good job having her prepared to take that punch,” one person who worked with Harris in 2019 told NOTUS. “Tulsi’s effectiveness in 2019 was a lack of preparation on our side”:
To void a second catastrophe, the Harris campaign is trying to knock off the vice president’s “rust as a debater and her tendency to overprepare and fixate on the details,” nearly a dozen people involved with or aware of the preparations told NOTUS.
Articulating policy specifics appears to be difficult for Harris, who is known for awkward statements about simple ideas.
Harris debate sessions “have careened sideways when the vice president focused too narrowly on minute details, effectively derailing the sessions,” two people familiar with the process told NOTUS. As a result, Harris’s mock debate sessions do not include policy discussions to avoid too much focus on facts, another source familiar with prep detailed.
“A way that they’re trying to work through those sorts of challenges of the past is to change the process, right?” one source told NOTUS. “Not sitting down, talking through every single policy issue, [but] giving her the reading work to do ahead of time, making sure that her books are prepared and organized. And then every session is, let’s come in … and go through the mock debate.”
Reports indicate that Harris will try and assassinate Trump’s character during the debate to avoid attacking Trump’s policies, contradicting her allegedly “joyful” campaign.
The strategy might be an attempt to avoid Trump’s broad appeal on specific issues, such as migrant crime, immigration, soaring costs, and deadly Afghan withdrawal – all issues that arose under the Biden-Harris administration.
Harris faces a conundrum on those issues and, in particular, on soaring costs, the number one issue, which increased about 20 percent across the board since she took power in 2021.
Harris cannot campaign on the reduction of soaring costs without undermining the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, but she must tout the administration’s policies to validate her record and candidacy.
CNN’s Dana Bash exposed Harris’s conundrum during her first pre-taped interview.
Harris owned the Biden-Harris administration’s economic record while she simultaneously blamed Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump for it. The contradiction was stark, producing an outcome that forced Harris to tout her administration’s policies to validate her candidacy all while she undermined her record and her candidacy.
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Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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