I Dream of Kamala
A commanding debate performance snaps a sleepwalking Harris campaign back to life.
On the night before her much anticipated presidential debate debut against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris made a campaign stop in my dreams. It began with me sitting next to her in a wood-paneled gallery, a stuffy space resembling a Puritan meeting house. Kamala and I had been seated in the front row but I could hear whispers and feel the heat of the crowds trying to push their way into the back of the room. Standing at a podium in front of us was a young, Amanda Gormanesque poet reading aloud her latest masterwork.
“Though these times are insane they need not go to our brain,” the poetess intoned earnestly. “As a renewed nation, we will no longer be sick, only ill. A shining city on a Cypress Hill.”
I felt the softest vibration rise from the floor through the legs of my stiff wooden chair. Then I heard it - muffled laughter. I looked over to see Kamala stifling her chuckle, trying to compose herself. But when our eyes met we simultaneously erupted into roaring laughter. We were both cackling and wheezing, unable to pull ourselves together. Suddenly there was a tug at my collar, violently ripping me upward and out of my seat. Hulking secret service men carried me out of the gallery and into some back room. An amorphous blur of campaign advisors rushed in, slamming the door behind them. “You ruined it. You ruined everything for Kamala…for this country,” they hissed. “Democracy is dead and it's your fault.”
At that point, I woke up in the darkness. It was almost 5:54 AM. Close enough to my normal 6:25 alarm that any attempt to fall back asleep felt futile. I made myself a coffee, got my dog out of the kennel and we watched the sunrise together on the back porch. I thought about the Kamala dream and briefly considered consulting a respected authority on dreams…the Book of Genesis, Sigmund Freud, Fleetwood Mac? But once the caffeine kicked in I realized the silliness of looking for some mysterious profundity within the dream I was still replaying in my head. Before bed, I had marinated my brain in story after story previewing the upcoming debate. My local news was saturated all weekend with features about Kamala using Pittsburgh as her home base for debate prep. Hand on the Pump by Cypress Hill was still on my Recently Played Spotify playlist. Sometimes dreams just aren’t that deep.
Or are they? If dreams are good for anything they are good for a vibe check. Going into the debate, the vibes of the Harris campaign were in a slump. Kamala’s run for the presidency began with a supernova of memes, emojis, and joy in late July only to withdraw into a stern defensiveness as stiff as the austere wood-paneled gallery from my pre-debate dream. The Democratic National Convention’s attempt to paint Kamala as a dead serious centrist focused on strict border control and making the U.S. military the “most lethal fighting force” on earth may have helped her court the crucial Dick Cheney vote, but in the end, the event yielded more of a post-convention thud than a post-convention bounce in the polls. The campaign would only become more cautious in the weeks to follow. Ettingermentum’s The Harris Campaign Needs to Get Real, one of the articles I read before bed summed up the vibe slump nicely, “In an unfortunate sequel to how these same staffers ran Biden’s doomed re-election campaign, Harris 2024 has adopted a hyper-defensive approach: hiding their candidate from the media, eschewing policy specifics, and generally acting as if they have something to hide about her.” With pollster wizard Nate Silver claiming Trump the favorite to win the Electoral College in November there was a mounting fear that Kamala’s September 10th debate might be a nightmarish replay of June 27th, when a cloistered and over-prepared Joe Biden saw not only his debate performance falter but also his hopes for a second presidential term unravel. The vibes were tight. The vibes were nervous. Just like in the final weeks of the Biden campaign, we were getting the vibe that if we don’t get serious Democracy would die and it would be all our fault.
Last night, when the much-anticipated debate finally began, the sight of Kamala and Trump walking out into the silence of an empty auditorium felt as surreal as anything conjured up in dreams. The moderators began the debate by asking Kamala a standard kickoff question, “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” Her response was awkward and overly scripted, veering from recollections of her Middle-Class childhood to forward-looking plans about small business tax incentives rather than highlighting any material progress made by average Americans during her four years as Biden’s Vice President. Her voice faltered at times, her eyes betrayed worry, and the two-minute response felt less like a straightforward answer to the question and more like a jumble of rehearsed talking points. Maybe the campaign team had good reason to hide her these past few weeks.
Rather than press Harris on her failure to directly answer the question about Americans’ well-being now compared to four years ago, Trump dove headlong into a hyperbolic rant about tariffs, inflation and immigrants “violently” entering the country. As Trump made one of his trademark lies about inflation being “probably the worst in our nation’s history” I could see a glimmer in Kamala’s eyes. It was the same mischievously joyful smile she had given me in my dream the night before, just as we burst out into laughter. The gloves were off, the fight was on and you could see the prosecutor eager to emerge from the stiff, overly choreographed politician Kamala's handlers had molded her into over the previous month.
Like any good prosecutor, Kamala needled at her opponent’s deepest insecurities. She mentioned her economic plan being favored over Trump’s by Wharton Business School. Trump took the bait, wasting valuable time to inform viewers that he was a Wharton Graduate. She mocked Trump’s fawning tweet to Xi Jinping during the Covid pandemic and promised a tougher stance on China. Trump responded by saying she stole so many of his ideas he was going to send her a MAGA hat before a few seconds later declaring, “She’s a Marxist!” By the time Kamala landed a shot about crowds leaving Trump’s precious rallies early, the rout was on and Trump was falling apart.
Harris delivered big time on the prosecutor versus felon hype. Her dismantling of Trump felt less like sparring with opposing counsel and more like a precise cross-examination, turning the defendant's fragile ego against his own self-interest, goading him into revealing his depraved heart for all to see. From post-birth abortions to Haitian immigrants eating household pets, Trump was spewing one toxic absurdity after another, drowning in a stew of the most ridiculous and (let’s just say it ) “weird” right-wing obsessions. Throughout it all, Kamala remained, poised, intelligible, and relatable to viewers struggling to follow Trump’s twisted and confused ramblings.
As I closed my laptop and got into bed last night, I realized the September 10th debate ended up being a replay of the June 27th debate after all, just not in the way Democrats had feared. Biden’s blank stares and incoherent mumblings on June 27th proved that the President was much closer to the most uncharitable online clips of geriatric decline than to the reassurances by Democrats that he was fit to serve another four years. The insane rants that Kamala baited Trump into last night proved that Trump was much closer to the most uncharitable online clips of MAGA rally psycho-babble than to the reassurances by Republicans that he is a human being who should be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.
Dreams are supposedly an expression of our repressed desires. If my dream the night before the debate symbolized anything, it was the desire to see a more recklessly joyful Kamala shake off her repressive handlers so she could get out there and do more than quietly sit back and listen to admirers say nice things about her. I slept more peacefully last night than the night before. If I had a dream I didn’t remember it. There was no need to dream. The debate was a dream come true. All that repressed desire for a more dynamic campaign was fulfilled in Kamala’s thorough thrashing of Trump on the debate stage. Her campaign must learn from last night’s debate that joyful provocation, not stiffly scripted centrism, is the way to convince Americans that Kamala is the obvious choice for president over the declining and demented Donald. If she is allowed to keep the pressure on Trump and goad him into blunders that make the strongest case against his candidacy then the path to victory is in reach. Maybe then we can finally wake up from this decade-long nightmare in American political history.