With their orders “in-hand” and “in-head”, Sen. Kamala Harris, vice-presidential candidate for Joe Biden and Mike Pence, Vice-President for incumbent president, Donald Trump stepped onto the stage at the arts center of the University of Utah Wednesday night, they represented their bosses, and had tasks at hand: for Harris to define, and identity, who she was to an audience that mostly does not know her, and for Pence to hit the reset button, for an Administration that has slipped badly in the polls, mostly for the way that it has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis, and may lose the election,as evidenced by Biden subsequently capturing in a recent CNN poll a good chunk of possible electoral votes.
Hitting that button proved difficult for Pence as he faced the former California prosecutor as she attacked both he and the president, for their mishandling of the pandemic, after an early warning, and the many foreign policy fumbles that cost America confidence from foreign allies and friends.
Harris’s “straight out of the gate” tactic was well-timed with criticism flowing across the media about not simply the missteps made early on when the president had the data, but the way in which the president’s positivity and hospitalization for the virus was handled, with information that was kept from the public by his personal physician, and others at the Walter Reed Hospital.
While many supporters were pleased with her opening salvo, some were surprised that she did not follow through with a fastball focusing on the president’s positivity as a symptom of the White House response to the pandemic.
Since this was a “one-shot affair” (there is only one vicepresidencial debate) Harris could have been saving it for Biden, but regardless, she left viewers with this one memorable line: "The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country.”
Predictably, Pence’s answer was scripted, and said that early action from the administration saved lives, but the record does not show that.
The civil tone of the debate was a welcome contrast to the one between Biden and Trump last week, but it’s clear from the numbers that the Trump camp has a lot to worry about.
An example is the CNN poll where, “the Democratic presidential nominee crosses the 270 threshold for the first time this year. If you add up the states that are currently rated as solidly in his camp (203 electoral votes) and those leaning in his direction (87 electoral votes), it brings his total to 290 electoral votes.”
The singular issue that is at work here is the administration's weak response to the pandemic, and as we noted in May: “President Trump’s early statements were positive and reassuring, but quickly devolved into a series of questionable statements that made many anxious, as if he was dismissing the threat to Americans, and some observers, and critics, said that this was done, in order to preserve his major reelection plank: that the economy was strong stable and secure.”
At the debate, Harris, in full prosecutorial style, gave her opening statement, and then followed it up with a direct appeal to the jury: "I want to ask the American people: How calm were you when you were panicked about where you were going to get your next roll of toilet paper?" and then, "How calm were you when your kids were sent home from school and you didn't know when they could go back? How calm were you when your children couldn't see your parents because you were afraid they could kill them?"
Trump, while on a state visit to India, at that time, said that it was all under control.
What the evening offered was a more substantive discussion, despite the well-rehearsed lines, and gave showed that not only was the U.S. facing a national emergency of its own, but its moral compass, with a leader who remarkably and routinely verbally attacks men and women in the armed forces by calling them “suckers”.
In one remarkable moment, last year, Trump asked aides what had happened at Pearl Harbor to merit his presence at a memorial service.
Yet, it was the presence of the pandemic, the third “person” in the room that gave credence to the sharp differences between not only Harris and Pence, and by turn the direction that America could turn to.
It was revealing that Pence, sidestepped a direct answer towards the administration and said instead, “"When you say what the American people have done over these last eight months hasn't worked, that's a great disservice to the sacrifices the American people have made," the vice president said. "The reality is, Dr. Fauci said everything that he told the president in the Oval Office the president told the American people."
This side step is emblematic of recent White House actions, the most notable being the Sept. 26t “superspreader” event in the White House Rose Garden when Trump introduced Amy Coney Barrett, his Supreme Court nominee, an occasion where almost no one was wearing masks, including Barrett herself, and was followed by a reception in the Blue Room, where again, few masks were in evidence and the White House butlers (almost all of whom are Black) were exposed to the virus, and also the invited guests, staff, and the Marine Guards.
The response has been that, like the fundraiser at the Trump golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., shortly after he was diagnosed as positive for Covid, was that there was rapid testing done, which has not shown reliability, and can also lead to false positives.
While no political observers can state that any debate will change voters' minds, this one was notable for its general tone of civility, and only a few interruptions, (that were quickly squashed by Harris) but it also gave viewers, and listeners the opportunity to see two possible future presidents whose bosses are septuagenarians, and that was well worth the price of admission.
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