"Kamala's Hasty Border Visit Could Become Her Nixon, Dukakis Moment" by Daniel Guss
Her campaign may need it. Trump's campaign may love it. But it is a bad look with little upside and enormous risk.
Vice President Kamala Harris is heading to the Arizona border tomorrow as she drops-in on some swing states which will help decide the election between her and former president Donald Trump in just 39 days.
It is an astoundingly bad idea for her.
But with early voting already underway in some states, and virtually zero chance of another debate with Trump, her campaign team feels it is absolutely necessary as it parses each remaining hour.
Whether or not Harris was the “Border Czar”…
Whether or not Trump helped defeat a deeply flawed border bill…
Each time she urges Americans to move on from “failed policies,” it is pounced-upon by Trump’s campaign featuring her mis-timed laughs and word salad utterances alongside footage of millions crossing into the U.S. with the blessing of the Biden-Harris administration.
So why tempt fate with a little-to-gain trip to the border now?
Has the Harris-Walz campaign forgotten her cringey exchange about the border with NBC News’s Lester Holt?
Harris going to the Arizona border tomorrow brings no rational expectation that it will clarify the issue in her favor any more than her claiming that “Bidenomics is working” has done.
Perhaps her campaign should revisit self-induced mistakes that destroyed other American presidential campaigns.
One of them took place 64 years ago today, when a fatigued and pale Vice President Richard M. Nixon eschewed make-up and a clean shave in America’s first televised presidential debate against a tanned Senator John F. Kennedy, who was just four years younger, and did not.
According to ConstitutionCenter.org, the importance of the event was immense:
“When Nixon arrived for the debate, he looked ill, having been recently hospitalized because of a knee injury. The vice president then re-injured his knee as he entered the TV station, and refused to call off the debate.
Nixon also refused to wear stage makeup, when (Don) Hewitt offered it. Kennedy had turned down the makeup offer first: He had spent weeks tanning on the campaign trail, but he had his own team do his makeup just before the cameras went live. The result was that Kennedy looked and sounded good on television, while Nixon looked pale and tired, with a five o’clock shadow beard.
The next day, polls showed Kennedy had become the slight favorite in the general election, and he defeated Nixon by one of the narrowest margins in history that November. Before the debate, Nixon led by six percentage points in the national polls.”
— ConstitutionCenter.org blog post, 9/26/17
It’s ironic how the role of a tan in presidential elections has changed between JFK then and Trump now.
But it isn’t that Harris, with her good looks and radiant smile, would look as poorly as Nixon did in that ‘60 debate debacle. It’s that going to the border in the 11th hour is a bad look for someone desperate to change the border narrative.
In 1988, it wasn’t a tan, but a self-induced mistake involving a military tank that helped sink Democratic nominee Mike Dukakis’s campaign, as expertly recounted in this don’t-miss 4-minute clip from The History Channel.
Then there was The Duke’s avoidably infamous response to CNN’s Bernard Shaw during that campaign’s October 13th debate in UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, after much had been made of the Massachusetts Governor’s prison furlough of a murderer and rapist named Willie Horton:
The potential upside for Harris going to the border is beyond anything that I can figure.
Perhaps her campaign thinks that the electorate is so dumb that showing her in front of a carefully chosen, tightly secured portion of it, orchestrated without its chaos during the past four years, will convince us that she did a great job remedying it.
But that would beg the question of her role enabling it in the first place, followed by years of Biden-Harris denying that it was a thing.
Opening a can of worms applies here.
The truth is, none of the talking heads or polling gurus know for sure how this election will end.
Even one of the best, pollster Frank Luntz, got it wrong in the early evening of Election Day 2016 when he infamously tweeted, “In case I wasn’t clear enough from my previous tweets: Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.”
But if either campaign insists on recklessly tempting fate, as Harris-Walz is about to do, don’t say that I didn’t warn them.
This trip makes absolutely no sense.
And that’s why the Trump campaign will quickly take advantage of it.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, won the LA Press Club’s “Online Journalist of the Year” and “Best Activism Journalism” awards in June ‘23. In June ‘24, he won its “Best Commentary, Non-Political” award. He has contributed to CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)