Chris Matthews: How Kamala Harris should approach the next 98 days

I have a long political memory. It reaches back to the 1962 Pennsylvania gubernatorial campaign when Rep. Bill Scranton beat Philadelphia Mayor Richardson Dilworth by a half million votes.

He did it with an old rule: Spend the first half of the governor’s campaign beating the heck out of your opponent. Spend the second half talking about the future you want for Pennsylvania.

I remember that race well and the truth of that rule. That was especially the case when Scranton showed up for a TV debate holding “a bucket painted with whitewash and a paintbrush adorned in the same way.” He accused Dilworth of using his campaign to “whitewash” the city’s Democratic record.

None of this was true, of course. Dilworth was as clean as they come politically. But it worked, winning by 500,000 votes at a time the Democratic party under President John F. Kennedy was dominating national politics.

I give you here the perfect model for Kamala Harris to put to work in the days remaining before now and November.

She should spend the first 50 days as a single-minded prosecutor reminding us of what Donald Trump has either been convicted or has admitted publicly.

I can give you two reasons.

First, the charges against Trump, illegal or otherwise contemptible, were construed by his MAGA supporters as a way to scratch him from the race.

Two, it gives the vice president a chance to perform in the democratic arena as the prosecutor she was on her way to Washington. This is how she rose to power, serving as the pro “cop” San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general.

It allows her to present the charges against Trump, not before a New York jury but to the American voter.

Harris can walk before the U.S. electorate — or on a TV debate — and cite those charges as a Democratic candidate asking democratic voters to support her:

How candidate Trump told me in Green Bay Wisconsin in 2015 that women who have abortions should suffer “some form of punishment” under the law.

How Trump said on the Access Hollywood tape, that he can grab women in their private parts whenever he felt like it.

That Donald Trump was convicted of committing that very crime — violating columnist E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf-Goodman changing room.

That Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts for paying a porn star “hush money” to quiet her about his behavior during the 2016 election.

Added to that, President Trump led a “stop the steal” rally to spark the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an act of political violence intended to prevent the normal counting of the 2020 electoral votes, an attack that led to death of U.S. Capitol police officers.

Kamala Harris has changed the partisan ballgame.

Kamala Harris, as we’ve seen, has changed the partisan ballgame. It is no longer an intellectual fight between democracy and autocracy. With Harris in there fighting, we can see it as a struggle against real-life threats to the American people.

She stands out there on her own, a woman of color attempting to change history. It is not a courtroom battle in New York anymore, but Harris against Trump, a David vs. Goliath as we are ever likely to see.

Here’s what Harris told supporters at a campaign stop in Wisconsin last week. She began by talking about her previous posts as district attorney and attorney general.

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Who is not threatened by Donald Trump’s type?

I go back to that old, proven rule of Pennsylvania partisanship: Start on the offensive, end with the aspirational.

The 2024 election makes our commonwealth the Keystone State once again — as it was in the Battle of Gettysburg. Kamala Harris can not only make history, but also hold this country together.

Chris Matthews anchored MSNBC’s “Hardball” for a quarter century, and he regularly appears on the network’s “Morning Joe.”