Winning 'The Name Game' at the Upcoming Debate
Next Tuesday night (September 10), the two major party presidential nominees will confront one another in an all-important televised encounter that may shape the final outcome of the election.
We know that they will respond to a series of questions from two moderators from ABC News, following the same ground rules that applied to the fateful (and for Joe Biden’s candidacy, fatal) June 27th debate between Biden and Trump.
But what we don’t know is how the two current contenders, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, will speak of one another on stage in the debate. That undetermined detail could play a significant role in the audience's perceptions of the candidates and play a meaningful part in settling a close race.
Neither of these contenders is likely to use formal titles (“Vice President Harris” or “Former President Trump”) for two reasons. For one thing, pronouncing those titles on a regular basis would eat up seconds of precious and tightly limited time allotted by the rules. More importantly, invoking the official title of a rival, grants precisely the sort of respect that neither candidate wants to confer on an opponent in this year’s bitter race.
It's particularly likely that Trump, who’s made something of a fetish of mispronouncing the name “Kamala”, will find some derisive way of referring to her, and perhaps of addressing her, in the course of their climactic showdown. Throughout his political career, he’s proudly brandished insulting nicknames against his opponents, in the hope that supporters and friendly journalists will repeat those designations in discussing the race. Who can forget “Sleepy Joe” or “Crooked Joe,” not to mention “Governor DeSanctimonious” or “Lyin’ Ted” or “Little Marco”?
Most recently, he seems to have settled on “Comrade Kamala” as the sobriquet for Vice President Harris, evoking her alleged background as a Marxist extremist. Despite the handy alliteration, the problem with this reference is that aging baby boomers like Trump (and me) may remember the days of “Comrade Khrushchev” and “Comrade Brezhnev,” but most of today’s electorate is too young to make the association between that exotic nickname and an ongoing, world-wide Communist conspiracy. This means Trump (and others who resort to the term “Comrade Kamala”) may be called upon to explain it, and to try to advance the ridiculous notion that Harris is a radical revolutionary determined to overthrow the capitalist system. But if this conversation pops up in any form in the debate, doesn’t the Republican side gain some undeniable advantage by planting questions, or even suspicions, about the possible radicalism of the Democratic standard-bearer?
If Trump does use the term “Comrade Kamala” at any point in the debate, is it possible that one of the two moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, asks him whether he seriously believes that his opponent is a committed Communist? Or could Comrade Kamala herself gain ground by standing up against the wild, paranoid and insulting quality of Trump’s campaign to date? She might not win a debating point on this issue, but that sort of confrontation would certainly make for some dramatic and memorable television.
As far as Kamala’s references to Trump, the deployment of the respectful invocation of “President Trump” or “Former President Trump” or even “Mr. Trump” seems entirely unlikely. She will probably feel most comfortable addressing him as “Donald” with the implied informality a means of cutting him down to size. In Trump’s rally speeches, whenever he describes his conversations with other human beings, he invariably suggests they always address him as “Sir.” The Vice President could resort to the first name alone as a way of puncturing his pretensions of grandeur, suggesting an easygoing familiarity with someone the former president actually doesn’t know and very clearly doesn’t like.
In the course of the evening, a large and curious audience will almost certainly get a chance to witness the sort of sharply competitive and perhaps even substantive debate that Joe Biden’s sad unraveling denied them at the end of June. And the one designation that both battlers will feel most passionately determined to avoid, will be the one title they each dread most: that of loser.