Buttigieg: Harris will need 'superhuman focus' while debating Trump

(CNN) — The world knows what kind of a debater former President Donald Trump is: loose with the facts, quick with an insult and confident to the extreme.

But what about Vice President Kamala Harris?

While her 2020 presidential campaign barely registered – she ended her campaign in December 2019, before the first primary votes were cast – Harris did leave a mark in one important way.

On the primary debate stage in June 2019, before she was his running mate or he was anywhere near the White House, Harris eviscerated Joe Biden.

‘That little girl was me’

The issues of policing and race were key to the 2020 Democratic primary.

“I do not believe that you are a racist,” Harris told Biden, staring him down across the debate stage as he looked straight ahead or down at his podium.

But it was hurtful, she said, that Biden would praise men like the late Sens. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Stennis of Mississippi, “who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.”

Pivoting, she noted that during his long Senate career, Biden worked with these men on legislation opposed to federally mandated busing in local school districts.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”

It was a powerful moment, evidence of what Harris can do on the debate stage – clearly rehearsed, deployed effectively, unsparing and said to the face of her opponent, who would later elevate her as his running mate.

A chance to prosecute Trump

Harris has, no doubt, spent her debate prep time working on material to use against her rival this year. She and Trump are set to meet for the first time and debate Tuesday night in the key state of Pennsylvania. ABC News is broadcasting the event.

Related: CNN’s political team has this in-depth look at Harris’ prep work at a sort of debate camp in a Pittsburgh hotel compared with Trump’s more informal approach.

Democrats have tried to frame this campaign as one between a former prosecutor in Harris and a convicted felon in Trump. Harris will have to live up to the billing as a tough prosecutor on Tuesday when she gets the rare chance to express Democrats’ years of festering anger with Trump to his face.

Unlike with Biden, Harris won’t have to go back to the 1970s to come up with lines of attack. She can look to his criminal conviction in New York, his liability in a sex abuse and defamation case, his nationalist policies, his unfounded claims about election fraud – for which there is no evidence – or his outrageous pledge to jail election officials.

One speaker at a time

While Harris will have plenty to say about Trump, she won’t have the benefit of his interruptions. The candidates’ mics will be muted when it is not their turn to speak, so Trump will not be able to interrupt Harris with insults like he did with Hillary Clinton, when he told her, “You’re the puppet!” or “You’d be in jail,” during debates in 2016.

It also means Harris’ memorable moment in the 2020 vice presidential debate – when she said in response to Mike Pence interrupting her, “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking” – won’t happen.

Prep can fall flat

Not all of Harris’ planned takedowns work quite as well as the busing attack on Biden. In another 2019 debate, Harris targeted Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the subject of Warren’s plan to break up tech companies.

Harris tried to isolate that larger issue into something more digestible by expressing disappointment Warren would not call for Twitter (it was a very different company in 2019!) to suspend Trump’s account. Twitter would later suspend Trump’s account after the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, but the company was subsequently bought by Elon Musk and renamed X – and Trump is now active on the platform again.

The point Harris was trying to make felt small and allowed Warren to make a much bigger one.

“Look, I don’t just want to push Donald Trump off Twitter, I want to push him out of the White House,” Warren said.

That exchange may be a warning for Harris to avoid getting bogged down in details since Trump won’t – and he will, if history is any guide, happily manufacture facts to make his points.

Lines of attack against Harris

Which brings us to a third telling Harris debate exchange from 2019. She was criticized by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard about her record as a prosecutor, which was to the right of the Democratic Party in 2019. Gabbard argued that Harris was too hard on marijuana offenders and had other criticisms of her time as a prosecutor.

“I am proud of that work,” Harris shot back, arguing she worked as attorney general to make California better, opposed the death penalty and didn’t just “give fancy speeches or be in a legislative body.”

The irony here is that Gabbard, now a former Democrat, has endorsed Trump, who likes to say he would use the death penalty on drug offenders.

Gabbard has reportedly helped Trump with his own debate prep, and Trump will want to paint Harris as to the left of the American mainstream – someone who changed her positions for political expediency in 2019 and has now changed them again to run for president.

The importance of this debate may ultimately be in how those few undecided or movable voters perceive Harris, since perceptions of Trump seem to be set in stone.

In a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Sunday, the race is effectively tied, within the margin of error. Few likely voters – less than 10% – said they feel like they need to learn more about Trump in the poll. More than a quarter, 28%, said they need to learn more about Harris, perhaps suggesting she has more room to grow, or fall, after being given the chance to face off against Trump.

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