Vice President Kamala Harris is prepping up for the September 10 debate Tuesday to cover the lost ground of Prez Joe Biden in the Atlanta debate that led to his dropping out of the 2024 presidential race – Harris kicks off with running mate Gov. Tim Walz to tour battleground states – Seven of them – from Wednesday.
BY TN Ashok from Washington
With less than 60 days to go for November 05, Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is prepping up for her debate with rival Republican nominee Donald Trump live on TV on the CNN network, and this time it’s going to be a fierce Kamala v/s Trump Debate between “prosecutor and a convicted felon.”
Harris is a seasoned prosecutor who has tried hardened criminals and Narco Kings in the courts of California during her reign as a DA and Attorney General before rising to the post of vice president after losing out on the primaries to her boss Joe Biden. Trump on the other hand is a convicted felon in the Tax Fraud case in Manhatton courts where he has to pay $340 million in penalties to the state treasury for alleged inflating his assets disproportionate to the market value and securing loans at discounted rates and also on insurance premia. He has 34 cases of felony facing him in the election interference case in district courts of Washington DC, before Judge Tanya Chutkan. Add to this his alleged hush money case and libel suit of Jean E Carrol, an author abused on his social media platform Truth Social.
All the cases punch a hole in his wallet, a billionaire, who cannot reportedly afford both his legal fees or the campaign costs. RNC (Republican National Committee) is now picking up his campaign fees, but donors are shying away from him and Harris with her immense newfound popularity has a war chest four time greater than Trump to spend. She has reportedly collected $940 million in campaign funds and expanded her ground troops and is going on AD Blitzkrieg shortly with a clean record. Her main backers’ oil rich Paul Getty family, and Laureen Powell Jobs, wife of Apple Founder Steve Jobs among others.
Laurene’s net worth is around $20 billion and the Paul Getty family is worth around $6 billion. They have supported the rise of Kamala Harris from her days of a District Attorney to Attorney General of California to the Vice Presidents post.
At Atlanta in Georgia Trump faces a state case, not a federal one, under the RICO act, rarely applied to politicians, but only to gangsters and NARCO kings, with 19 co-defendants including his reportedly “devil’s advocate” Rudy Guliani. Harris is no Biden; she will go after his jugular in the debate if Trump allows his attack dog on her trying to grill her and hold her responsible for the alleged failures on the economy of Joe Biden.
Trump has been hauled up before judge Juan Merchan in Atlanta for allegedly leaving death threats on emails and telephone calls with court officials not to deal with the case to which Merchan has very strong objections. Even if Trump wins the elections and becomes President and pardons himself of all the alleged crimes during 2016 to 2020 as President, he cannot recuse himself from the Atlanta case which is not federal but a state one. It will stick and continue and bother him. Media coverage will be catastrophic to his presidency.
Harris on the other hand has advantages and disadvantages before the debate that will be watched by over 30 to 35 million people through various TV networks. Her record is clean, she does not carry luggage like Biden with his son on the gun license issue and alleged involvement with a Ukrainian company by being on their board and facilitating their deals. Joe Biden despite distancing himself from son Hunter Biden was under fire from the Republicans who sought to bring an impeachment motion which lacked credibility and integrity for want of sufficient evidence of Bidens involvement.
Harris carries no such baggage with her. Her weak ground. Being Vice President and being a partner of the President Biden in implementing his policies. Trump always lives in the past and as he did with the immigration bill, he will continue attacking Harris on the TV debate on the flawed economic policies that led to record inflation, loss of jobs, and a weak economy riddled with high prices of gasoline and grocery prices and house buying for first timers next to impossible with high mortgage rates.
But Harris has the government on her side and the statistics she will reel from the Labor Ministry will almost demolish Trumps argument.
1) Bidens government engaged in a relentless 52-week federal rate hike that ultimately lassoed inflation to 3.2% against the targeted 2%, down from 9% CPI, 11% WPI, 14%, overall, the highest recorded in American economic history in 40 years.
2) By December 2023, the federal reserve chair Jerome Powell had managed to bring down inflation to 3.2%, manageable levels. Gasoline prices which were a record high during the pandemic at $5 a gallon slid to $3.5 a gallon by December last year. Trump left a legacy of a mismanaged economy due to his wrong handling of the pandemic situation and Biden was called upon to inherit that legacy and do firefighting all the time during his presidency.
3) Housing market is looking up and first-time buyers are coming back and Harris has vowed to make housing her major plank of her economic policies to make easy affordable homes to the home buyers getting into the mortgage market for the first time. Rentals too are coming down from a high of $2,000 for one BHK to around $1700 for one BHK in the suburbs.
4) They will debate foreign policy: The Russian Ukraine war & the Middle East conflict where more players are getting in.– Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis. Trump will argue on the flawed policy of supporting Ukraine with a bill asking for $61 bn for military hardware and rehab relief at a time when the country was facing unprecedented flow of undocumented immigrants across the border in the south from Arizona and Texas.
Harris will argue that Trump deliberately washed his hands off the immigration bill which had severe measures arming border security guards with sweeping powers to check undocumented migrants. And yet Trump chose not to support the bill and instead flag it as an election issue.
Trump would say he is the strongman and represents a strong Hercules (the MAGA Macho Man) to the world and there were no conflicts during his period. He will pin the blame on Biden and Harris for the hasty withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan that led to chaos for the civilians, the Afghan president to flee the country, and the Taliban to take over Kabul. But Harris will argue it was Trump who initiated the Doha talks where he agreed to withdrawal of troops (under pressure from American families who wanted their sons and daughters back home from the battlefield in a war in which they had no stake) and it was an 2016 election pledge.
Trump lost power in 2020 in what he describes still as a stolen election while there is no evidence to back it up. Yet he is whipping up a campaign with his voters who believe he is a victim of witch hunt. America appears to be totally polarized and vertically divided on many critical issues. Republicans hold extreme views on ‘Abortion, Gun Licensing and the economy and border issue. Trump has said he will deport all undocumented migrants.
The republicans backed by the strong lobby of National Rifle Association (NRA) in the Congress wants gun licensing to stay as it invokes the 2nd amendment to the constitution – the right to carry a firearm in public concealed for the sake of self-defence. The democrat ruled states implement strict gun licensing through stronger background checks of the applicant’s status of mental health.
Harris takes a moderate approach as she follows the “open border “policy of the government of the democrats. This accommodates asylum seekers, victims of political vendetta from oppressive regimes in central and south America and Gang lords of crime such as the Narcos in Mexico.
Trump will speak in his usual stentorian style, loud and talk over others to drown them out of the debate. But Harris is not Biden, who was soft spoken and talked in hushed tones, she is the aggressor equally, being prosecutor, she will rebut all Trumps arguments loudly equally and try to floor him. If she does, she gets a heads up on her tour of the battleground states. She is already leading six of the seven battle grounds except Nevada where white voters dominate and are essentially Republicans backing Trump.
Israel – Hamas war: Contentious foreign policy issue. Both Trump and Harris are strong supporters of Israel. But the difference is that Trumps vote base is not Arab or Palestinian which is traditionally Democratic, who sought to sway away either to Trump or a 3rd party candidate for not calling a ceasefire and supporting an adamant Netanyahu that led to the collateral damage in deaths of 40,000 innocent civilians.
Trump and Harris would have to choose their words carefully. Arabs and Palestinians are infuriated as evidenced by the nationwide student protests across university campuses which was pro Palestine and antisemitic and pro Jews on the other.
Trump would let his attack dog argument on Harris speaking vociferously against the Biden Harris administrations inability to rein in the Israeli prime minister and conclude a ceasefire and release of hostages. Out of 240 hostages taken out from Israel by the Hamas militant group on October 07, 2024, only 100 remain to be freed, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Egypt helped in the release of a major chunk of hostages.
Harris has already distanced herself from Biden to woo the Arab and Palestinian voters back into the democratic fold by going for an immediate ceasefire after she is elected and release of the remaining hostages besides collaborating hard with her advisors to put in a two-state solution. This could knock the bottom out of Trumps arguments against Biden-Harris failure on Middle East war.
Finally comes the southern borders issue: Trump will attack the Biden Harris administration of diverting $61 bn of aid to Ukraine at a time when the southern borders needed to be secured as a chunk of the undocumented immigrants would indulge in crime on the streets of New York and major cities, be mules, be drug peddlers, bringing untold hardship and sufferings. Not all Mexican immigrants are mules or Narco peddlers. Majority of them flee Mexico for fear of persecution from both the drug lords and political vendetta of politicians in power for speaking out against them for not putting down the Narcos and ensuring safety of the citizens.
Harris may argue that Trump deliberately sabotaged the Immigration Bill that contained measures to stem the flow of immigrants across the southern borders with more monies and equipment and manpower and the latest firearms to check the flow. Instead, he chose to red flag the issue for the elections asking republicans not to vote for, and the moderates in the GOP are furious with him as it reflects them in bad light and could cause their candidates to lose in the senate and congress.
In any TV debate, more than the content, the audience is often swayed by the manner in which the content is delivered, even if its lie upon lie as Trump often does, (fact check by US media has proved this) speaking over his opponents. Biden failed here because his delivery in Atlanta was totally flawed, he stumbled, mumbled, fumbled and was at a loss for words and often dozed off during the debate. Harris is no Biden much younger, 18 years younger than Trump, she will speak loud and clear that “Trump is a threat to democracy”, a man who said he will be a dictator for a day. His economic policy is flawed with tax cuts which will raise prices of essentials rather than bring them down and 16 Nobel laureates in economics have opposed his policies. They calculate that his policy would raise the family budget of an American citizen by $2600 a year. Hard on them.
On the contrary, Harris proposal to bring down inflation, prices, through modest raise in taxes, not so much in the slabs of the middle class, but mostly in the upper income brackets of billionaires, will do more good than harm to grow the economy. This is what the Nobel laureates concur. Labour ministry stats show that the economy has grown more under democrat presidents than republican presidents.
America is bracing itself for a lively debate, wherever the winner takes all before 30 to 35 million viewers expected to stream in. Harris wins, she goes into her campaign of battlegrounds with a head start. Trump wins, he recovers lost ground in battlegrounds. At the moment it seems Harris has the upper edge.
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