In the first Democratic debates, Kamala Harris turned Joe Biden — and 2020 race — upside down | Will Bunch

Superstars have an uncanny knack for knowing when it’s time to step up and make the big play. Carli Lloyd blasting that shot over the goalkeeper’s head in the 2015 World Cup final, or Toronto’s Kawhi Leonard making that damned buzzer beater against the Sixers in the NBA playoffs, even after the entire Western Hemisphere knew he was getting the ball.

For three hours, the state-of-play in the Democrats’ 20-candidate free-for-all first 2020 presidential debate was solid yet unspectacular. The crowded, awkward format and the shared desire by candidates to prove their bona fides as an anti-Trump — serious about policy, honest, and not crazy or cruel — seemed to ensure that. But with the fourth quarter looming, there was one person on the floor who understood the moment, the stakes — and launched a three-pointer from deep.

Sen. Kamala Harris drained her shot over front-runner Joe Biden, the former vice president who’s back and rusty after two long years out of the game, with the California coolness of her fellow Golden State warrior Steph Curry. For a Democratic rank-and-file desperate for the best candidate to defeat President Trump next November, Harris’ withering yet passionate prosecution of Biden’s history on racial issues was a game changer, a statement that everything voters thought they knew before Tuesday night was wrong.

In an instant that will be dissected by poli-sci majors for decades to come, the Democratic primaries went from a supposed Biden rout that was always paper-thin to a free-for-all that will surely benefit Harris and her breakout performance, as well as Wednesday night’s steely populist winner Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and younger candidates like Julian Castro and Pete Buttigieg who all play well to the new zeitgeist: That the Democratic Party desperately needs a new direction.

But it was Harris who seized the day at roughly the one-hour mark, turning to Biden with his big lead in the polls and doing something that 18 other rivals (including the 10 with the misfortune to draw the Wednesday night stage) had avoided: Challenge him directly. She honed in on the sensitive matter of race, including both his opposition to busing for school integration in the 1970s and his comment just last week that he got things done in the Senate with southern segregationists.

“I do not believe you are a racist,” said Harris, who electrified the big room in Miami and about 15 million TV viewers simply by turning to the former Delaware senator and focusing on his record. The former San Francisco DA and California AG combined prosecutorial precision with the profoundly personal, calling Biden’s highlighting of his ability to work with Mississippi white supremacist Sen. James Eastland “hurtful” and recalling her own experience integrating public schools in Berkeley, California, that “that little girl was me.”

Biden — who won his first Senate election just days after Harris’ 8th birthday and is now 76 — seemed to confirm what viewers were already feeling after the first 60 minutes, that he is tired when so many of the other Democrats are fresh. Given an opportunity to defend a lifelong evolution on thorny racial issues, the former veep seemed to instead defend a version of “states rights” that would have been more at home in Ronald Reagan’s Mississippi-launched 1980 race than in 2019. It set the stage for Biden’s bizarre statement later in the debate that the first thing he’d do as president is “defeat Donald Trump” — seemingly ratifying the fear that he has no real plan for governing.

But the Harris-Biden moment mattered less over the specifics of racial policy but more for its imagery and how the first-term California senator grabbed the mantle of what Democrats want most: A candidate who can stand up to Donald Trump in the fall of 2020. By 10:05 p.m., it was impossible not to imagine Harris eviscerating the 45th president on a debate stage in a way that a stiffly-rehearsed-yet-sometimes-stumbling Biden simply could not.

Her viral moment was sandwiched by other breakout moments. She balanced toughness with poise — breaking up a noisy squabble with, “America does not want to witness a food fight … They want to know how we’re going to put food on their table” — and an empathy for children detained at the southern border that connected with the raw emotions of the anti-Trump electorate.

The crazy two-night format — necessitated by the bonfire of vanities that is 25 Democratic candidates and counting — was quite unfair to the top performers on Wednesday night. That would be Warren, who showed up in purple and gave a Prince-like performance of populist fire that illuminated her policy ideas that have been the best and the boldest so far, with a silver medal to former Cabinet secretary Castro who brings both deep thinking and a real passion to the charged humanitarian crisis at the border.

But arguably what Harris accomplished Thursday night was not so much to make herself the front-runner — her star turn now guarantees a new focus on her controversial actions as a career prosecutor and as a shape-shifter who lacks consistency on policy — as to blow it all up and ensure that everyone gets a fresh look. The prime beneficiaries will be not just Harris but Warren and arguably Buttigieg, a white man whose humble and seemingly heartfelt response to racial problems in South Bend, Indiana — where he’s the mayor — was everything that Biden’s defensiveness was not.

The other overriding vibe is that the Democratic base — angry and frustrated over the failures to impeach Trump or figure out how to challenge him on the border atrocities — is going to want to change the party in the spring of 2020 as a prelude toward changing the White House in the fall. Biden may have looked mired in the muck of the past, but so did Bernie Sanders — arguably a victim of his own success. The Vermont senator’s big ideas from 2016 — Medicare for all, free public college — have become so ingrained that voters seem more focused now on his style., which can be, ahem, grating.

Let’s hope that the Democrats can make things right, format-wise, for the next debate and set up the clash of titans that the party really needs right now — Warren and the white-hot power of her big plans vs. the azure cool of Harris and her natural charisma. By 11 p.m. Thursday night, the notion that only a straight white man can defeat Trump lay shredded on a Miami sound stage. Biden’s mumbled line that “Anyway, my time is up … I’m sorry” felt like a political epitaph. And Harris’ big shot from downtown nailed the real story of 2020′s first debates, that sisters are doing for themselves.