Why Harris’ strong debate performance is good for Australia

In what is likely to be the final US presidential debate before the November election, Kamala Harris was ushered into American lounge rooms and showed the world that the race for the nation’s top job has caught fire.

While a weary world knows what they are getting in Republican candidate Donald Trump, Democrat Harris had to reveal who she was and what she stood for. In contrast to the first debate last June, when a senile president and a liar ex-president displayed their dangerous handicaps, Joe Biden’s decision to stand down has paid off handsomely as Harris took the battle up to – and past – Trump.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the presidential debate.Credit: AP

The stakes for both candidates were high. Harris entered the race seven weeks ago with limited time to define her candidacy. Trump, meanwhile, saw support plummet following Biden’s exit, and needed a new message to counter Harris.

Instead, he stuck to his tried and true playbook, allowing her to show her mettle as leadership material. Harris focused her early remarks on the economy, while Trump often pivoted to immigration and promoted conspiracy theories.

The pair also had an intense exchange over abortion, with Harris saying women were “bleeding out” in parking lots and Trump sidestepping a question about a national ban on the procedure. Moderator Linsey Davis refuted one of Trump’s more ridiculous abortion claims, stating no state permitted post-birth killings.

Perhaps the most egregious moment came when Trump alleged Harris’ immigration policy was destroying America and claimed Haitian immigrants “in Springfield [Ohio], they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Harris’s microphone was off, but she laughed audibly. The other moderator, David Muir, called out Trump, saying there were no credible reports of pets being harmed, injured or abused by migrants.

In fact, during the debate both candidates made false and misleading comments.

But Trump chose to body-slam the Biden/Harris years and failed to articulate his vision for immigration or winding back affordable health insurance, Obamacare. Harris looked flatfooted when reminded of America’s undignified exit from Afghanistan, although she returned fire, alluding to Trump’s disrespectful campaign visit to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and remarks about veterans.

She raised Trump’s racist past, his early legal troubles for refusing to rent to black tenants and his push for the death penalty for later-exonerated young men over a 1989 killing in Central Park: “I think the American people want better than that, want better than this.”

Trump reached for the past too: “She is Biden ... They threw him out of the campaign like a dog. We don’t even know. Is he our president? We have a president that doesn’t know he’s alive.”

Harris shot back: “It is important to remind the former president: you’re not running against Joe Biden, you are running against me.”

Credit: Matt Golding

She is clearly no Biden. But in good news for the US and the world, we had a glimpse of the smart, credible, intellectual woman who has turned the presidential race into a real contest.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.