Photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters

Kamala Harris faced a delicate task in the first presidential debate. She is trained and skilled as a prosecutor, but her primary task was not that of a prosecutor. She had to present herself to an electorate whose crucial bloc still knows too little about her to be sure that she is worth supporting.

Harris’s response to this dilemma was either a brilliant strategy or a happy accident. She got Donald Trump to lose his composure and then used the visual contrast between them to establish herself as not just a credible president, but the only credible president on the stage.

Harris revealed her plan early in the debate when she invited the audience to watch a Trump rally, leaking something that only the politically obsessed know: The Trump who appears at rallies is a terrifying, deranged clown whose incoherence is hard to capture in the brief snippets that appear on the news.

Harris also did something clever by pointing out that audiences leave his rallies early because they’re bored. Trump is oddly obsessed with the crowds at his rallies (as Barack Obama noted during his speech at the Democratic National Convention), and questioning their size throws him off.

From that point on, Trump behaved in the same way he did at rallies. He yelled endlessly, ranted and raved, had trouble staying on topic or articulating his concepts in a way that non-superfans could follow. He made bizarre, false claims that illegal immigrants were eating pets, blamed the January 6 insurrection on “out-of-control cops,” and repeated his false claim that he won the 2020 election.

Harris’s engagement on substantive issues has been largely, if not consistently, successful. She could not explain all of the shifts in opinion on substantive issues from her 2019 campaign. On several early questions, she resorted to filler words to keep her sentences moving. She asserted forcefully, “You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me,” but did only a mediocre job of distancing herself from a president who has poor approval ratings. (On the abortion issue, she ripped Trump to shreds and watched him squirm under questions about whether he would veto a national abortion ban.)

Harris’s most notable success came in her role as president. She repeatedly unveiled her economic plan, dispelling accusations that she lacked ideas and was portrayed as a lightweight. She did so by touting her foreign policy experience, meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky and organizing a NATO response to the Russian invasion. The importance of these endorsements may be overlooked, but many Americans have old-fashioned views of the qualifications of a president and associate them with masculinity.

And most importantly, she established herself as president by appearing calm and confident – ​​in stark contrast to the screaming madman on the stage next to her.

The Republican reaction speaks volumes about the outcome. Conservatives complained about the moderators (who actually gave Trump ten minutes more time than Harris). Reince Priebus blithely said that Trump’s numbers would never change, a defensive reaction to the implied fear that his numbers would drop. Trump seemed to realize he was losing, a realization that may have angered him even more.

Harris’ debate schedule couldn’t have gone much better.