Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) experienced a breakout moment Wednesday night after directly confronting Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and questioning her record as a prosecutor. Harris had been dismissive, referring to herself as a “top-tier candidate” who cannot take Gabbard’s critiques seriously.
The California senator spoke to CNN’s Anderson Cooper following the debate and dismissed Gabbard’s jabs.
“This is going to sound immodest, but I’m obviously a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I would be on the stage and take hits tonight because there are a lot of people that are trying to make the stage for the next debate,” Harris said, reacting to a clip showing Gabbard attacking Harris’s record as a prosecutor.
“For a lot of them it’s do or die,” Cooper added.
“Especially when some people are at zero or one percent, whatever she might be at,” she said in a veiled jab at Gabbard, who has failed to break into the top tier of candidates up to this point.
Harris did not stop there and accused Gabbard of being an “apologist” for Assad.
“This coming from someone who has been an apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his, you know, of his country like cockroaches,” Harris said. “She who has embraced and been an apologist in a way to refuse to call him a war criminal.”
“I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously,” she added. “So, you know, I’m prepared to move on.”
The tension between the two started after Gabbard redirected a conversation in order to slam Harris’s record as California’s attorney general:
“Now Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president,” Gabbard said before pointing out that she remains “deeply concerned” about Harris’s record.
“There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Gabbard said.
“She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so,” she continued. “She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California.”
Harris said she was “proud” of her work as attorney general of California and bragged that she “did the work of significantly reforming the criminal justice system of a state of 40 million people.”
She continued:
I am proud of that work. And I am proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor, but actually doing the work of being in the position to use the power that I had to reform a system that is badly in need of reform.
“I am an advocate for what we need to do to not only decriminalize but legalize marijuana in the United States,” she added.
Gabbard did not accept the California senator’s response and said Harris failed to make a difference when she was in the position to do so:
The bottom line is, Senator Harris, when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives, you did not. And worse yet, in the case of those who were on death row, innocent people, you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to do so.
Despite Harris’s dismissive remarks, Gabbard has been dominating on social media, winning both the Drudge Report and Breitbart polls and coming away as the night’s most Google-searched candidate:
That came despite having seven minutes less speaking time than self-described “top tier candidate” Kamala Harris.
The trends continued into Thursday morning, with #KamalaHarrisDestroyed trending on Twitter in the U.S.– yet another sign that Gabbard made a significant splash:
Some, however, are trying to attribute Gabbard’s rise to the Russians. Ian Sams, Harris’s national press secretary, tweeted a story from NBC News which suggested that the “Russian propaganda machine that tried to influence the 2016 U.S. election” is going out of its way to promote Gabbard:
Polls released in the coming days should reveal if Gabbard made as much of a difference as the response on social media indicates.
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