One of the strangest moments of last night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump came when Trump brought up Harris’s father, a well-respected left-wing economist. In reality, Donald Harris seems to have a strained-at-best relationship with his daughter, due at least in part to their profound political differences. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Professor Harris publicly criticized Kamala for making cheap appeals based on “identity politics.”

In Trump’s imagination, though, father and daughter see eye to eye: “Everybody knows she’s a Marxist. Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well.”

He also portrayed her as deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians killed, maimed, or displaced from their homes by the Israeli military. And at the end of the debate, he accused her of wanting to give every American free “government health care.” (The horror!)

As hard as this is to remember, it’s only been two and a half months since the debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That evening was so catastrophic for the rapidly declining president that he had to drop out of the race.

Trump’s performances at the two debates were indistinguishable. In both cases, his instinct over and over again was to pivot to hysterical xenophobia about the alleged “invasion” of immigrants and refugees, even when answering questions that had nothing to do with immigration. In both cases, he bizarrely accused the Biden/Harris administration of a pro-Palestinian bias despite the fact that Joe Biden has been arming Israel to the teeth for its genocidal assault on Gaza. At the debate in July, he said Biden had become “a Palestinian” — specifically, “a bad Palestinian.” Last night, he said Harris “hates Israel.”

And in both debates, the person he was most eager to talk about was Biden. But the difference between Biden’s and Harris’s performances was night and day. Conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro were reduced to grumbling about the refs — always a sign that your team is losing the game.

This debate won't matter. It was just eliminated as an inflection point. The American people still know nothing about Kamala Harris' positions. Donald Trump is still Donald Trump. And the legacy media are still a giant flaming dog turd.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 11, 2024

In July, Biden rambled and stumbled and often seemed to have trouble remembering what he had started saying. Last night, Harris was far sharper and more focused than Trump. She was well-prepared with lines of attack and canned responses to Trump’s attacks, and she had a carefully calibrated message about how “the American people are exhausted” with the former president’s toxic antics. Harris talks often about being a prosecutor before she was a politician; watching her last night, it was easy to believe she was good at it.

Trump, meanwhile, sounded more than a little deranged as he ranted about Ashli Babbitt, a rioter shot by police on January 6 and subsequently turned into a martyr by the extreme right, and he repeated a racist urban legend about Haitian refugees in Ohio eating Americans’ pet cats and dogs. So while it remains to be seen whether this is going to matter for her standing in the polls, it seems clear that Harris rhetorically “won” the debate.

But is that all that matters? A news media that obsessively focuses on “horse race” coverage encourages all of us to think of ourselves as mini-pundits, primarily reacting to political events like presidential debates by predicting what other people will make of it rather than what we think.

That instinct should be resisted. The job of politicians in a democracy is supposed to be to get citizens excited about what they’re going to do for us. And we should be bothered by how few bones Harris threw us last night. Is she better than Trump on most issues? Of course. But she seemed to be dedicated to demonstrating that this is a very low bar.

On foreign policy, she promised to continue the proxy wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and told the bald-faced lie that the American military hadn’t been engaged in combat under Biden. (Reality check: the US Navy was sent to the Red Sea to secure Israel during the assault on Gaza, various militias in the region have attacked them, and the US bombed Yemen throughout the summer.) On economic policy, her main emphasis was on promoting the unconvincing economics of creating abundant housing without having to do anything but a few tax breaks and some zoning deregulation.

And on guns and immigration, her message was Trump-lite. When Trump accused her of wanting to “confiscate guns,” she couldn’t even be bothered to make the case for the kind of gun laws that are common in other advanced democracies, or to make the point that a thousand liberal politicians have made before that there’s a reason mass shootings are so much more common in the United States than they are in so many other societies. She only said that she and her running mate were both gun owners and that they wouldn’t approve of “taking away” guns.

And anyone old enough to remember 2018 will remember that the main reason liberals thought Trump was a fascist at that point was his cruelty to immigrants. But last night, she seemingly endorsed the false right-wing narrative that blames illegal border crossings for the fentanyl crisis, and she faulted Trump for not being willing to support a bipartisan “border security” bill that would have shredded the rights of asylum seekers.

I know there are so many families watching tonight who have been personally affected by the surge of fentanyl in our country. That bill would have put more resources to allow us to prosecute transnational criminal organizations for trafficking in guns, drugs, and human beings. But you know what happened to that bill? Donald Trump got on the phone, called up some folks in Congress, and said kill the bill. And you know why? Because he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.

All in all, Vice President Harris’s priority seems to be to pitch herself as reasonable to Never Trump Republicans in the suburbs. Perhaps that strategy will pay off this time, although it’s certainly failed before. I guess we’ll see. But is that all that matters?

We live in a profoundly unequal and militaristic society. America is the only developed country where cash-strapped diabetics die because they try to ration out their insulin. Our billionaires take private space flights while our working class is one of the only in the world that isn’t guaranteed so much as a single day per year of paid vacation. And as Americans argue about what to read into the tea leaves of the latest polls from Pennsylvania, US-supplied bombs are dismembering children in Gaza.

Against this background, it’s bitterly ironic that Trump “accused” Harris of being opposed to US aid to the Israeli military, of being influenced by the views of socialist economists like her father, and of wanting to provide health care to every single American, and that all of these accusations were false. She’s not wrong that much of the country is exhausted by Trump and ready to move on. But we deserve to move on to something far better than anything on offer last night.