Tulsi Gabbard Looks More and More Like a Troll With a Glass Jaw

During the second Democratic debate, Tulsi Gabbard confronted Kamala Harris’s record as a prosecutor for the state of California. Senator Harris’s assessment of that exchange reflected a grasp of something that, in this particular situation, proved to a judicious move and a cautionary note to all of us: don’t take the bait. Gabbard attempted to bait Harris into a sixty-second defense of matters far too complex to have deconstructed right there and then. She wanted to drag the senator into the weeds on her criminal justice record as San Francisco’s District Attorney and then as California’s Attorney General. To be fair, the senator does need to do an in depth interview on why she did the things she did: Harris does need to parse her role as “prosecutor” vs. as “progressive activist.” But there will be time for that and that moment was not the time or place, so Harris wouldn’t go there. In my view, notwithstanding the intensity of the moment, it was an overwhelming fail for Gabbard in the long haul as the congresswoman is not the candidate best qualified to call anyone else out on any earlier policy positions.

I think most reasonable people take it on faith that anyone who has taken incoming fire on the ground in Iraq — as Gabbard has — has earned the right to have a strong opinion about the United States military presence there. I…