SAUNDERS: Closing arguments from Harris, Trump did voters no favors

WASHINGTON

Tuesday night, when Kamala Harris gave what was billed as the closing argument of her presidential campaign on the Capitol mall, her own supporters must have felt let down, even if the crowd size was estimated to have exceeded 75,000.

I get it. I’ve felt that way after Donald Trump speeches.

The vice president should have delivered a message with one goal: woo undecided voters with policy specifics. Instead, Harris recited the same stale talking points that have failed to catch fire since President Joe Biden handed her the top of the ticket.

This is the third presidential election in a row with two nominees who disappoint even a good chunk of their own party’s voters.

This go-round, it’s Harris, who couldn’t get close to the Democratic nomination in 2020. Trump, meanwhile, can’t stop media-savvy Republicans from declaring that this year, they’ll vote for Harris, thank you very much.

In 2020, it was Trump vs. Biden, a Faustian Democratic bargain that produced a nominee who campaigned from his basement yet somehow was hailed as the only Democrat who could beat Trump.

In 2016, Trump beat the hyper-polarizing Hillary Clinton, who brought her own baggage to the election.

If I thought hard enough, I probably could come up with smart people who actually liked their party’s nominee in one of the past three elections, but just thinking about it gives me a massive headache.

You’d have to go back to 2012, when President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney, to find the old-school party policies driving the campaigns.

This year, I know people on both sides who will vote with the conviction that they are picking the better candidate.

But not the best.

No wonder many voters believe that the system doesn’t work for them.

The only winner in this election, it seems, is cynicism.

For his part, Trump has plugged into the disenchantment many Americans feel toward a governing class that doesn’t listen to them.

The former president showed that side at a Tuesday morning Mar-a-Lago press event when he brought out Tammy Nobles, the mother of Kayla Hamilton, a young Maryland woman who was raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant and MS-13 gang member in 2022. The Biden-Harris administration and its Department of Homeland Security, she said, failed her daughter.

Also presenting was Christy Shamblin, whose daughter-in-law, Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole Gee, was killed by a suicide bomber during the deadly U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan under Biden in 2021.

Those moments presented the best of Trump’s pitch. But then he rambled. Not the best way to close an argument.

On the mall, Harris delivered the same canned lines voters have heard since Biden dropped out of the race.

As I watched, I thought, this woman’s team has raised $1 billion and all she can deliver to people hungry to see more in her are hand-me-down sound bites from earlier speeches.

Team Kamala picked the Ellipse on the Capitol mall for her signature speech to remind voters of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, jeremiad that ended with a rump of supporters marching all the way up Capitol Hill. Harris rightly lamented the 140 police officers who were injured doing their jobs.

But after the many 2020 riots, and the protests that turned violent as left-wing activists stormed downtowns in San Francisco, Oakland, and other blue cities — she wasn’t swimming in an overabundance of credibility. Remember, Harris helped raise bail money for rioters in Minneapolis.

I remember those years. Protests and occupation of government buildings were a staple in progressive circles; but when left-wing mobs stormed government buildings, the media hardly noticed. Some even hailed the black-masked activists as social-justice warriors.

It’s a double standard so profound that the left can’t even imagine being held to the standards it demands from the right.

Over the weekend, at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe quipped, “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The joke was in poor taste. Social media erupted, because how dare a comedian equate people with garbage?

Yet Tuesday a sitting president did just that. When asked about the Hinchcliffe remark, Joe Biden replied, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his (Trump’s) supporters.”

Then Biden called such demonization “unconscionable.”

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.