Picture: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
There’s a standard misperception about who prosecutors are and what they do. I’m loath to disclose this as a result of, as a former prosecutor myself, it usually works to my benefit. However I’ll pop the balloon.
Opposite to what we’ve all seen in films and on TV, prosecutors will not be, actually, swashbuckling, badass courtroom gunslingers. Actual felony circumstances aren’t gained with Sleepers-style shock witnesses, or A Few Good Males–fashion cross-examination beatdowns, or The Brady Bunch–fashion spontaneous courtroom demonstrations. In the true world, prosecutors goal to play it straight, drama free, and, if mandatory, boring.
On this election season, Vice-President Kamala Harris is counting on her prosecutorial chops — however not how popular culture would situation us to count on. She’s not courting explosive confrontation or searching for mic-drop moments. She’s sticking to main themes, she’s controlling her personal surroundings, and he or she’s minimizing danger. Some Democrats desperately need to forged Harris as some striding superhero, however she’s a prosecutorial pragmatist at coronary heart.
Fast story: The evening earlier than I gave my first-ever jury deal with, I requested my supervisor a query that, on reflection, is cringeworthy: “What precisely am I imagined to be tomorrow? Once I stand in entrance of the jury, how am I imagined to act?” My supervisor managed to not chuckle and instructed me, in essence, this: “Your solely job is to be clear and credible. Neglect in regards to the emoting and the dramatics. Depart that crap for the protection lawyer. You simply put in your case.” After all, that doesn’t imply a prosecutor have to be robotic or boring. However prosecutors normally win with fundamentals, not drama.
Harris should know that. She served as a rank-and-file assistant district lawyer, then because the San Francisco district lawyer, and eventually as California lawyer common. She carries these experiences together with her now on the marketing campaign path, and to this point they’ve aided her political ascent in refined however substantial methods.
Assume again to Harris’s hotly anticipated interview on CNN final week, her first since changing into the Democratic nominee. (I’m a CNN contributor.) That interview occurred simply eight days in the past. Do you bear in mind something particular from it? Did Harris create any second, any clip, that we’ll see on a loop between now and November? She sat down with Dana Bash, did simply superb, and obtained out of there. She didn’t really wow anybody. However she obtained the interview completed, she did no hurt, and he or she ended the pesky story line about how she hadn’t confronted the media in an unscripted setting. Mission completed.
If something, Harris deliberately walked away from an opportunity to showboat throughout the interview. At one level, Bash requested Harris about Trump’s assaults on Harris’s racial identification. The chance, and certainly the temptation, was proper there for Harris to launch right into a righteous tirade in opposition to Trump’s outrageous ways. As an alternative, Harris took the excessive street. “Usual drained playbook. Subsequent query, please.” Excellent. She handed on the drama, she rose above her opponent’s antics, and he or she turned the main target proper again to the significant substance — all in seven phrases.
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Or return one other week, to the Democratic Nationwide Conference (which feels prefer it was six months in the past). On the conference’s closing evening, the sector and social media had been abuzz with rumors of a megawatt thriller visitor: Beyoncé goes to carry the nominee out, or Taylor Swift will, or perhaps each of them collectively! As an alternative, the one who instantly preceded Harris on the stage was … centrist Democratic North Carolina governor Roy Cooper. Even watching on TV, you can sense a second of disappointment sweeping over the gang: Wait, that’s it? No pop stars? Nope. No sequins or strutting, simply the precise particular person working for the very best workplace within the land, sporting a navy-blue Chloé pantsuit with a tonal shirt. (I might need regarded that up.)
I’m anticipating extra of the identical from Harris when she shares the stage with Trump subsequent week at their first (and possibly solely) debate. I’m not saying Harris will let Trump get away with no matter he needs; actually, I wager she’ll have a rhetorical smackdown or two chambered and able to go. However on the entire, look ahead to Harris to name on her prosecutorial roots. She’ll goal to remain cool and centered whereas her opponent rants and seethes and spits bile.
And I don’t suppose Trump’s inevitable histrionics will bump Harris, both. She has spent a lot of her profession in a courtroom, and belief me: She’s seen worse. (Nicely, perhaps she’s seen equally unhealthy.) I do not know who will win the talk on the deserves and who will articulate a extra persuasive imaginative and prescient for his or her presidency. However I do count on Harris to win on the all-important demeanor take a look at — who regarded and acted extra calm, extra poised, extra presidential? As a result of she is aware of the prosecutor’s actual secret: Depart the drama to the opposite man.
This text additionally appeared within the free CAFE Transient e-newsletter. You could find extra evaluation of legislation and politics from Elie Honig, Preet Bharara, Joyce Vance, and different CAFE contributors at cafe.com.
