The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President (and convicted felon) Donald Trump put a smile on the face of anyone who has ever felt degraded or dismissed as weak, inconsequential or otherwise put down by a bully. Harris was “presidential.” Not only did she stand up to Trump verbally, but she used her body language and facial gestures to register other forms of disapproval and diminish his stature. She got under his skin, artfully baiting him, teasing out the former President’s worst enemy, himself. Even a Fox commentator called his performance “a train wreck.”

He ranted. He raved. He lied. When he had legitimate policy challenges to make against Harris, he couldn’t resist defaulting to the hordes of Haitian immigrants, mentally deranged, criminals, who, he falsely and ludicrously claimed, were taking American jobs, voting in our elections, using up our health care and, in Springfield, Ohio, cooking and eating the pet cats and dogs of local citizens. Flailing further, he accused Democrats of killing babies after they were born and doing transgender operations in schools and prisons. ABC Moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis didn’t press hard with follow-up and didn’t do a lot of fact-checking, but they did work at keeping the guardrails in place around Trump’s most outlandish lunacy.

Harris took charge from the outset, striding boldly toward him and extending her hand for the ultimate germophobe to shake. When he said she was unfit to be Commander-in-Chief, she let it be known that he was weak on foreign policy, that he admires dictators, and that they, in turn, can manipulate him with flattery and favors. She was superb in her defense of Ukraine and the global fight for democracy, in which scores of other nations look to the United States for leadership.

Her defense of reproductive freedom, the restoration of Roe v. Wade, the protection of fertility treatments and contraception, – in short, the need to keep the government and Donald Trump out of the doctor’s examining room – was impassioned and powerfully effective. He muddled about, failing to say whether he would or would not sign a federal ban on abortion.

In one debate you can’t get to every issue, but I would have liked them to talk about Artificial Intelligence as well as artificial insemination. No one asked them about the federal debt and deficit, and, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, no one discussed the palpable risks to our homeland from international and domestic terrorism.

Even among those who think Harris won the debate, a majority still think Trump would do better on the economy and immigration. She was far more effective on economic policy than she had been previously, but, in laying out her plan, she sidestepped Trump’s question of why such steps were not taken in the last 3 1/2 years.

Trump’s repeated attempts to use the Biden/Harris administration’s failures on border security were thwarted by Harris’s attacking Trump’s big-footing Congressional Republicans to halt the bipartisan border bill to ensure he could have it as a campaign issue. Why did you do that, she asked him. He didn’t answer, and the moderators didn’t press for one. Nor was she pressed about Biden’s failure to act aggressively on the border until the last year of his administration.

Harris never conceded the tragic mess that was the departure from Afghanistan under the Biden administration. The moderators didn’t push her. She focused on the deal that Trump had made with the Taliban that undermined the Afghan government. She skillfully bridged to how he invited Taliban terrorists to the hallowed grounds of Camp David, and reminded viewers how frequently Trump has disparaged the military.

To her supporters and even to many critics, Harris’s debate performance showed she has the intellect, poise, experience and stature to do the job. She prepared hard for this event and was extraordinarily well coached, but I feel that some of the pivotal “undecideds” may still see her as inauthentic and unrelatable.

In addressing her changed positions from 2019, she missed an opportunity to show herself as someone who can grow, whose fundamental values are firm but whose approaches to specific issues can evolve as she learns new things – in contrast to Trump, whose values are all negotiable based on self-aggrandizement.

We won’t know what kind of bounce Harris will get from the debate for several days, but it’s sobering to remember that voter views are so fixed that neither did Biden drop significantly after his disastrous debate performance nor did Trump get any real bounce after the assassination attempt.

And remember, in 2016 Hillary Clinton debated Donald Trump three times. She was widely regarded to have won all three debates. She won the popular vote, but she lost the Presidency. The Constitutionally mandated electoral system favors the Republicans. The next 55 days could feel like a very long time.