Opinion by Thomas L. Friedman on Sept. 9, 2024.

“Joe and I got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong, too — and here is what I have learned.”

For my money, uttering those 23 words, or something like them, is the key for Vice President Kamala Harris to win Tuesday’s debate against former President Donald Trump — and the election.

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Utter them, and she will hugely improve her chances to win more of the undecided voters in this tight race. Fail to utter them or continue to disguise her policy shifts with the incoherent statement she used in the CNN interview — that while her positions might have changed on fracking and immigration, “my values have not changed” — and she will struggle.

Madam VP, if you say your positions have changed but your values haven’t, what does that even mean? And what should we expect from your presidency — your values or your actions? Our latest poll shows too many voters still don’t know.

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It’s OK to say: “I learned a lot as vice president. I’m proud of our record of putting America on a sustainable path to a clean energy future. It will make us more secure and more prosperous. But I also see that we can’t get there overnight. For reasons of both economic security and national security, we need an all-of-the-above energy strategy right now. So you can trust that in a Harris presidency, America will continue to lead the world in exploiting our oil and gas advantages but we will do it in the cleanest way possible while making the transition as fast possible.”

It’s OK to say: “President Biden and I inherited a cruel Trump border policy that included separating parents from their children. Maybe, out of an excess of compassion, we rolled it back too far. But we learned from it — we learned that only comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform can give us the solution we need, controlling illegal immigration — while continuing to be a beacon for legal immigration. So our administration sat down with one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and hammered out a bipartisan immigration bill that would have done just that. And what did Trump do? He ordered Republicans to kill it, so he could keep exploiting immigration as a wedge issue. And you’re asking me if I’ve flip-flopped?”

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Politicians always underestimate how much voters (and the news media) respect a leader who can say, “We didn’t get this quite right the first time, and I’m going to fix it” — something Trump can never, ever do. As James Carville recently put it in a New York Times Opinion guest essay, “A leader who can openly admit a change in her understanding would feel like a breath of spring air for a lot of voters.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Thomas L. Friedman/Bridget Bennett
c. 2024 The New York Times Company