With the clock ticking, should Harris define herself or her opponent?

PHILADELPHIA - It was the most standard of job-interview questions, in this case posed by Mr Joe Donahue, a registered Republican and undecided voter, to an applicant for the post of leader of the free world: Vice-President Kamala Harris, what weaknesses do you bring to the table?

And at a CNN town-hall meeting on Oct 23 night, Ms Harris answered with her version of another classic of the genre: Maybe I’m too much of a perfectionist.

“Perhaps a weakness, some would say, but I actually think is a strength, is, I really do value having a team of very smart people around me who bring to my decision-making process different perspectives,” she responded.

As political performances go, Ms Harris’ lengthy question-and-answer session with undecided voters was certainly not disastrous.

There were no obvious gaffes, no viral, awful moments.

She made news, using the word “fascist” to describe former President Donald Trump and saying that Trump’s former chief of staff, Mr John Kelly, was “putting out a 911 call” to the American people with his warnings about the former president’s authoritarian bent.

And it must be noted that she was there because Trump did not bother to show up, having declined an invitation to debate her there.

But two weeks from Election Day, the vice-president missed opportunity after opportunity to leave a strong impression that, if elected, she would bring with her thoroughly fleshed out policies for a Harris administration and a plan to get them enacted.

She repeatedly mentioned her opponent, his fitness for office and the dangers he presents to American democracy.

At the conclusion of an unusually short presidential campaign, Ms Harris still finds herself struggling between the need to define herself to voters who did not have the benefit of a protracted election season and her desire to focus on her opponent.

If the undecided questioners, both to her political left and to her political right, were stand-ins for the few voters still up for grabs, Trump’s increasingly authoritarian closing argument did not seem to be top of mind. Instead, the worries of those actually present were focused on less-lofty matters.

Dr Carol Nackenoff, a political scientist at Swarthmore College, simply wanted to know what one policy goal topped her agenda for Congress.

Mr Jaxon Weiss, a registered Republican studying at Drexel University in Philadelphia, asked how much the taxpayers were on the hook for integrating the surge of migrants into US society

Lastly, Ms Pam Thistle, a real estate agent, wanted “to hear more nuts and bolts” about her plans to tax the rich.

That tax question could have prompted an answer generated by her own campaign.

Her campaign has floated the idea of requiring taxpayers with net wealth above US$100 million (S$132 million) to pay a minimum tax of 25 per cent on the rising value of assets such as stocks, bonds or privately held companies – even if they do not sell them.

Such a “wealth tax” remains controversial, but it certainly counts as nuts and bolts.

Ms Harris, instead, offered her proposals to expand the child tax credit for middle-class Americans, reiterated her pledge that she would not raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year and suggested she did want to make sure the ultrawealthy paid their “fair share”.

She just did not answer the very specific question: How?

Dr Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert on presidential communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said both Ms Harris and Trump would have big moments in the coming days to present closing arguments – he at Madison Square Garden in New York, she at the Ellipse behind the White House, the small park where Trump rallied his forces on Jan 6, 2021, before they stormed the Capitol.

But with voters already casting ballots, Ms Harris might have seen the CNN town hall as another opportunity to grab them with her final pitch, regardless of the question.

Dr Jamieson summed up Ms Harris’ approach as: Trump is a clear and present danger to the Republic, and “I have plans that relate to you – I’m going to tell you what they are even if the question is something else.”

Faced with two tasks – pounding away at her closing argument and getting to the specifics – she opted for the first. For casual viewers, that might have been enough.

For the undecided voters who came to the broadcast with thought-out concerns that needed to be addressed, it might not have been.

“She was asked very specific questions, she acknowledged them and answered pieces, but those voters were likely to be unsatisfied,” Dr Jamieson said.

It is hard to say whether a traditional primary season would have changed those answers or better prepared Ms Harris to think on her feet and develop more detailed plans that could be parceled out in rapid-fire responses.

The short campaign season was supposed to obviate the need for such details, but, as it turns out, short might not have been short enough. The questions came. The answers did not always follow.

Ms Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist who advised Mr John Fetterman’s successful Senate campaign in Pennsylvania in 2022, said the vice-president was trying to do the impossible: mount a presidential campaign in 100 days against an opponent who is universally known.

Under the circumstances, she said: “I think she’s done a phenomenal job.”

And to be sure, it was not an easy setting. The vice-president was pushed from the left to stop Israel from killing Palestinians with US-supplied weaponry and to expand the Supreme Court.

She was pushed from the right on immigration, the border wall and grocery prices.

And when she danced, the CNN host, Mr Anderson Cooper, kept pressing her: Did she now support a border wall after calling it stupid? How would a plan to stop price gouging in times of emergencies help consumers with their everyday grocery bills? And seriously, can’t you point out some mistakes in your past?

To that she answered: “I probably worked very hard on making sure I am well versed on issues. It’s a mistake not to be well versed on issues.”

As Mr Cooper noted, Trump is far more known for an utter inability to find fault in himself or his actions, past or present. He did nothing wrong during the coronavirus pandemic, he has said. His followers’ attack on the Capitol, he has said, was a beautiful day, full of love.

And if Ms Harris saw her main task as keeping the closing days of Campaign 2024 focused on the former president, she is likely to have succeeded, returning repeatedly to Mr Kelly and his warning, now on the record, that the former president meets the definition of a “fascist” waiting for his moment to assert authoritarian control over the government.

“Anderson, come on,” she said on that subject, even if the question was which candidate would be better for Israel, “this is a serious, serious issue.”

At times, her finesse was warranted.

Ms Beth Samberg, a real estate agent who said she was undecided because of her concerns about rising antisemitism, asked what the vice-president would do about a surge of hatred toward Jews.

Ms Harris, whose husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish, did not exactly hit it out of the park, but she acknowledged that antisemitism was rising, saying, “We need to ensure that college students are safe in their schools,” and then pivoting to Trump’s praise of Adolf Hitler, as described by Mr Kelly.

In doing so, she nodded to antisemitism on the left and the right, not falling into the “either/or” narrative that many politicians have embraced.

But it was the simple questions – not the hard ones – that may have left viewers scratching their heads.

To close the session out, Mr Elkan Pleat, a student at Temple University in Philadelphia, went back to the standard job interview template and asked Ms Harris to name the proudest moment of her political career.

Some obvious ones might have jumped to mind - winning the vice-presidency in 2020 in what she had termed a vital moment for American democracy, voting to convict Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors as a senator, casting the tiebreaking vote to secure any number of achievements for President Joe Biden, or standing up to Trump’s Supreme Court nominees.

Heck, in 2019, she was among the sponsors of a bill to ban abusive robocalls, something a lot of undecided voters might have cheered.

Her answer was not bad. It just was not memorable – not what might have been expected from a candidate for president locked in a race that seems truly tied.

As California’s attorney general, she said, she created a new bureau of children’s justice. What exactly the bureau has done she did not detail.

But, she offered, “I know we can make a difference, I really do.” NYTIMES