A PREDICTABLY SHALLOW DEBATE UNLIKELY TO PROVE DECISIVE IN US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

If betting odds are an indication as to who won last night’s debate, then the winner by a nose, or even a short head, was Vice President Kamala Harris. 

According to Paddy Power and its stable mate Betfair whose odds are in lockstep, Harris is now the slight favourite to win in November at 5/6 to evens for Trump – a flip flop of pre-debate odds.

Most other books including the big American lines either slightly favour Trump or find it too close to call.  Post debate polls are likewise reflective of the odds and the overall polling and both sides immediately claimed victory.  Which did not happen after the Trump Biden debate when the Democrats quickly and cynically moved to dump on and dump out poor old Joe. 

Alternatively, if you do not accept the wisdom of online betting market traders from Ho Chi Minh City to Hoboken you can go with Taylor Swift who took to Instagram to endorse Kamala as a “gifted leader” having taken time off writing her poems and all.  

In the air wars contest where substance matters little and in which people watch debates hoping for something like a heavyweight boxing showdown of the classic era when Ali went toe to toe with Joe Frasier and George Foreman and one guy clearly bludgeoned the other into submission, there is rarely an obvious winner. 

Which means that she can promise to build an “opportunity economy” and do all the other things the administrations she has been associated with never got around to.  While the “fact checkers” will be busy parsing Trump, Harris was allowed to basically blame Trump for Covid.  In fairness, she did get the stage management better with her head shaking and wry smiles, a possibly effective distraction from what Trump was saying.

Trump on the other hand was too inclined to get into claims that were also distractions and were always going to lead to the moderators pulling him over what are undoubtedly genuine fears over the impact of illegal immigration but which he almost invariably references to anecdotes rather than hard facts and statistics of which there are an abundance.  The facts that will lead so many people to cast their vote for him in two months time. 

The same point might perhaps be made with reference to Trump’s continued claim about postnatal abortions. His point about Roe v Wade and returning the decision to the states is a strong one.  As are his points about late term abortion and the unrelenting determination as we have also seen here of extremists to keep pushing for more liberalisation.   However, he has done himself no favours where he has appeared to equivocate on core values seemingly in response to polling figures.  They are either core values, or they are not. 

If the Democrats do win it will largely be because of what may have been an orchestrated coup to remove Biden.  That was being whispered even before the President’s stumbling performance against Trump in June. I also watched that in June and with my slightly biased hat on I certainly did not call it as decisively for Trump as did the rookery of heavy hitting Democrats lined up by CNN and others to immediately deem it to have been a disaster and thereby to effectively destroy the Biden campaign.  

If they win it will because of that and that they have been able to reinvent Harris as some absurd icon of the marginalised and oppressed.  Her very first response to a question about the economy was her rambling on about being a “middle class kid” and lifting up working people.  She is a “woman of colour” who has managed to personally connect herself to every MOPE trope there is.  Despite being a representative of an elite which even their old friend Gore Vidal portrayed as reminiscent of the decadent Roman Empire. 

An elite which embraces the Trump averse Republican patricians  who Vidal described as being “stupider” in comparison to the “bit more corrupt” Democrats whose only virtue in his eyes was their welfarism towards their voting fodder among black Americans. 

Trump’s main virtue, perhaps his only remaining one, is that he has represented and in this contest continues to represent tens of millions of Americans who are instinctively suspicious of and increasingly hostile to that elite. No matter whether it comes in the form of the greying Obama or in Dick Cheney, the grey eminence of the Bush Haliburton neocon Republican never Trumpers who want to get back to the bipartisan old days on Capitol Hill.  

The old days when the Democrats in a good year and after maybe two terms of the Republicans could toot on the dog whistles of race and abortion and whatnot to tip the balance their way.  Or on the flip side when the Republicans might bolster their conservative pro-life base with enough swing voters teed off with the Democrats for some reason.  And then do nothing to rebalance the odds against the liberals. 

Which is why they all still hate him, and if like myself you sometimes make a decision based on the opposite choice of those you know to be your enemy, the fact that our own vacuous Democrat cloned and in some cases connected pseudo elite across the entire establishment are without exception on the same side as Kamala Harris is good enough were I to have a vote.  

As it will also be for tens of millions of those who do. It will certainly be little to do with the substance of two campaigns that are boring even in their predictable mutual abuse of one another. 

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