Not being Trump won’t win Harris the election. She needs to do more – pronto

Barack Obama got blunt in Pittsburgh last week. He chided Black men who are not supporting Kamala Harris, saying that some of “the brothers” were just not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” That left me mulling again: Is Harris in a dead-even race against a ridiculous person because of her sex or is that just an excuse?

Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipping Wisconsin and barely visiting Michigan. She got discombobulated about gender and whinged about sexism.

“Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton.”Credit: AP

I asked political strategist James Carville if Harris’ problem is that too many Americans are still chary about voting for a woman, much less a woman of colour. He chided me. “We’re not going to change her gender or her ethnic background between now and election day, so let’s not worry about it,” he said. “Time is short, really short. They need to be more aggressive. They don’t strike me as having any kind of a killer instinct. They let one fat pitch after another go by. I’m scared to death. They have to hit hard – pronto.” Her campaign, he said dryly, “is still in Wilmington”.

Harris spent a week answering questions on 60 Minutes and The View and on the shows of Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern. And she didn’t move the needle.

“She needs to stop answering questions and start asking questions,” Carville said. He thinks that, for her closing message, she should put the issue of January 6 and who won the 2020 election on the back burner. Instead, he said, she should ask: “How dare J.D. Vance say with a straight face that Trump is the father of Obamacare when Trump tried to kill it 50 times?”

Kamala Harris needs to lift her campaign game. Credit: AP

She should display pictures of right-wing judges who Trump could appoint to the Supreme Court, and ask if Americans are ready for an even more fanatical court.

She should ask: “Do you know how destructive tariffs can be? They will kill your freaking jobs.”

She should say she’s going to end the Trump tax cuts for the rich and ask voters if they would rather use those trillion-plus dollars to help young people afford their first home.

In other words, he said: “She should scare the crap out of voters. You know, Trump is just taunting us, having a rally at Madison Square Garden just like the Nazis did in 1939.

“Black men and young Black men have to think about what they have at stake in the election. Donald Trump tells you that you have nothing to lose. Well, you have health insurance you could lose, you have a job you could lose.”

Other Democratic strategists I talked to agreed that Harris needs to let her guard down, cut loose and turn on the afterburners. Mainly, her pitch is that she’s not Trump. And that’s an excellent pitch. But she needs to make the case for herself more assertively.

It’s hard to understand why she didn’t sit down with a yellow pad or laptop long ago and decide why she wanted to be president, what her top priorities would be and how she would get that stuff done. The Vision Thing. Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer.

She didn’t learn to tack to the centre in bright blue California. When asked on The View whether she would have done anything different than President Joe Biden, she said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind” — a flub if you want to convey change.

Harris should distance herself from Biden when she needs to; she should just admit what we all know, that the border policy was bollixed up and that Biden was not tough enough with the execrable Bibi Netanyahu.

Harris’ guarded nature leaves people feeling that she’s not fully revealing herself. Her reluctance to do serious interviews made her look fearful. She should have been interacting more with the media as a way of getting off the teleprompter and giving a sense of who she is as a person.

She does her homework, but her delivery seems more scripted. Even though it can get weird and duplicitous, Trump is better at riffing.

As Harris grinds it out, trying to woo white women who are ambivalent about Trump, she does have one big advantage: abortion rights are on the ballot and, as a woman, she can conjure the medieval nightmare that Trump and Vance threaten.

When Harris linked her story about caring for her mother, dying of colon cancer, to her plan to get Medicare to cover some in-home care, she effectively offered a specific policy idea while revealing her vision for a kinder America than Trump has in mind.

His lies about the federal response to hurricanes Helene and Milton have consequences. When Trump says the government is not helping people in red locales, those affected might not apply for aid. Perhaps Trump’s most ludicrous whopper is that he would be the Protector of Women.

It’s disturbing that Harris can’t get over the hump and outpace Trump. As Carville says, we need less mulling and more action in a do-or-die moment. She needs to do so we don’t die.

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times, where this article first appeared.