Hindsight

 

A CAMPAIGN CAREENING TOWARDS THE FINISH LINE”: THE PENCE–HARRIS DEBATE WAS A FEEBLE ATTEMPT AT NORMAL

The Hive tuned in as Kamala Harris and Mike Pence play-acted a politics of the past—through a double layer of plexiglass. As for Pence, “People gonna get it from him tonight!” messaged one political operative in response to his potential symptoms.

BY THE HIVE

OCTOBER 8, 2020

 

In the end the fly stole the show, a spectacle that delivered unto vice-presidential-debate watchers the single molecule of serotonin they had been craving for the past six months. Before that two-minute interlude, Kamala Harris and Mike Pence faced off through layers of plexiglass in a debate much more reminiscent of traditional politics. Both candidates largely stuck to their scripts, with Pence adopting a tone of false sincerity to stick up for his boss, and Harris seething with appropriate indignation at the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans. Here’s what the Hive team took away from Wednesday night.

Chris Smith: Those watching the debate on MSNBC only got to see the plexiglass shields once all night. It was seconds after Harris and Pence had taken their seats onstage for the vice presidential debate. It was a camera angle from Harris’s right side, aimed toward Pence, that made both candidates look like upscale bank tellers. For the next 90 minutes, it was standard, boring split screen. But the presence of those shields was what this night, and this election, is really all about.

Sure, there were interesting exchanges on other subjects: Pence delivered a cogent, if intellectually bankrupt, recitation of conservative economic ideology. Harris was eloquent on the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Fracking got a whole lot of airtime, thanks to Pennsylvania’s electoral college importance. But the reason the country, and President Donald Trump, are in such trouble right now is the coronavirus. Harris was forceful in spelling out Trump’s failures when the question was about possible vaccines (“If Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it”), and she did her best to keep rerouting the conversation back to the pandemic, even when the question was about foreign relations (“Donald Trump…doesn’t understand what it means to be honest”) or climate change (“There was a time when our country believed in science”). Pence trotted out Trump’s Hey, it could have been worse! claim that if not for the president’s genius, the carnage would be up to 2 million. But the (grim) stars of the show remained the barriers erected to try to prevent the candidates from being infected by the virus that has killed 210,000 Americans in seven months—a disaster that Pence has supposedly been the point man in trying to stop. To borrow from a tweet by my friend Jordan Klepper: “The. Head. Of. The. Coronavirus. Task. Force. Is. Debating. Half. A. Year. Later. Through. Two. Layers. Of. Plexiglass.” Harris and Pence spilled a lot of words. Those virus barriers said everything, and they were a clear indictment of Trump and Pence.

Gabriel Sherman: Trump administration officials know that when they appear on television, they are speaking to an audience of one: Donald Trump. And that’s what made tonight’s debate so unwatchable. Instead of trying to appeal to voters, Pence spent the night appealing to a 74-year-old man who had spent the past 24 hours rage-tweeting conspiracies and tanking the stock market—all while sick with a potentially deadly virus. Pence’s reality denial was on full display from the beginning, from his assertion that “the American people know that this is a president who has put the health of America first” to his claim that “the V-shape recovery [is] underway right now.” Of course Pence made sure to name-check Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, the Green New Deal, the radical environmental agenda, the Washington establishment, the news media, and rioting and looting. There was something dissonant listening to Pence talk like Trump’s Twitter feed but in a cadence that oozed Midwestern smarm. The fly that landed on Pence’s head midway through was bound to anger the image-obsessed Trump. But in Pence’s defense, he had an impossible assignment: defending the indefensible. As a former West Wing official told me this morning, “This is a White House and a campaign careening towards the finish line.”

William D. Cohan: It’s important to say that I thank Susan Page, Harris, and—yes—Pence for returning a modicum of civility to the debate stage. It was most welcome. Without question, Harris has proven herself to be a savvy, articulate, smart, and charming advocate for the Biden–Harris ticket. She won every round of the debate without question. I feel sorry for Pence. He is nothing more than a pathetic sycophant. He’ll say whatever he has to say to avoid being honest with the American people and to not offend Dear Leader.

Joe Hagan: Listening to Pence debate is like having your face slowly sanded off with a fine-grit paper. When he earnestly implored Harris to “stop playing politics with people’s lives”—attacking her for questioning Trump’s promised coronavirus vaccine—the hypocrisy was so breathtaking, it was downright impressive. Of course Pence had no choice but to jujitsu: He was being asked to defend—celebrate!—a president who has put his own political survival before people’s lives and tried selling it back to them as a big success story. Only alternative facts were possible. Pence’s lies puffed out in earnest whispers: There’s no systemic racism; there’s no climate change; Trump didn’t lie to Americans about the virus. To his credit, Pence held his own, projecting a reasonably humanlike form through the fog of insincerity. 

Meanwhile, Harris had all the facts on her side and chose to lean into emotional connection. When she looked directly into the camera to get real with the TV, she made Pence, in split screen, look wooden and shifty. His beady pink eye seemed to boil. When Harris sheared him on China trade and the failure to contain the pandemic, CNN’s test audience jammed their little buttons and made the meters spike. They liked her. But she could have done more. It was perhaps malpractice for Harris not to detonate the biggest bomb in the room: the coronavirus spread in Trump's own White House. On last count, Trump’s glaring disregard for reality has led to 34 staffers and allies getting COVID-19—and required plexiglass windows on the debate stage to protect Harris from possible infection from Pence, who should have been in quarantine with “Mother.” Why not bring that up repeatedly? Why not blow up the room? Perhaps to appear more presidential. And maybe that was Joe Biden’s phantom presence—hold back, rise above. Alas, that left it to the performance artist on Pence’s head, the fly, whose two-minute star turn created the most obvious metaphor of the night and was instantly memed—including by wags on Biden’s campaign, who posted a picture of Biden with a fly swatter.

Bess Levin: When Biden announced Harris as his V.P. pick, the immediate response was: She’s going to destroy Pence. And unsurprisingly, she did. While Pence evaded questions, lied about the Trump administration’s record, and appeared to decompose before our very eyes, Harris eviscerated the V.P. and his boss with surgical precision, opening with the compelling, accurate argument that “the American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country.” She reminded viewers that Trump knowingly lied about COVID-19 (“They knew and they covered it up”); managed to work in the news that the president paid just $750 in federal income taxes (which Pence didn’t even try to defend, saying merely that “the president said those public reports are not accurate”); and made it clear that in the midst of a pandemic, Trump and Pence want to leave people for dead (“If you have a preexisting condition—heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer—they’re coming for you”). By the end there wasn’t much left to say other than: “This administration has forfeited their right to reelection.”

Eric Lutz: It’s always difficult for people who aren’t Donald Trump to serve as stand-ins for Trumpism. The president has plenty of trouble speaking on his own behalf, but he gets by on his cult of personality. His television surrogates, the knock-off candidates who have tried to emulate him, and other would-be Trump translators can channel their guy, but without that grotesque je ne sais quoi about them, their efforts tend to be tortured and unconvincing. Such was the case Wednesday night with Pence. He fared better, and came off smoother, than Trump did against Biden last week, but all he had to do to clear that bar was to not put his pants on backward. For the duration of his debate against Harris, the vice president testified to his fundamental blandness. This nonpresence might sound appealing after four years under his boss’s belligerence, but Pence has debased himself more than almost anybody—with the possible exception of Lindsey Graham—in pretending this naked emperor is fully clothed. Harris capably skewered him for it, pointing out Trump’s obvious shortcomings and emphasizing the vice president’s culpability in the administration’s failings, including its catastrophic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abigail Tracy: “I expect Senator Harris to tap into her time as a prosecutor and fully prosecute the case against Mike Pence,” Democratic strategist Cooper Teboe, who’s working with the Biden campaign, said shortly before the two were scheduled to face off. Harris did just that, opening by slamming the White House response to the disease as “the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country” and arguing that Donald Trump and the vice president had “forfeited their right to reelection.” Her attacks were pointed and compelling and, ultimately, effective. 

Pence managed to dodge and blunt a number of them by lobbing answers to unasked questions and talking over the California senator and moderator Susan Page. The performance was emblematic of how Pence remains the perfect counterweight to Trump: They employ many of the same tactics, but Pence is the decaf version. Back in 2016, Trump needed Pence to bring white evangelical voters into the fold. But Pence, on the fast track to irrelevance, also needed Trump. “In Indiana, people might say that he might be the luckiest politician of all time,” Michael Leppert, an Indiana-based Democratic lobbyist, told me back in 2017. Pence’s ascension can’t just be chalked up to luck, though. “The main thing that he has skill-wise is incredible message discipline,” Leppert added. “He has the ability to stick to the talking points…and he doesn’t get rattled.” On Wednesday night Pence stuck to the script. Fortunately for Harris, it was a really bad script.

Emily Jane Fox: Senator Harris bringing up “Infrastructure Week” was triggering, and I’ll tell you why. With the world-altering events of late—a global pandemic, an economic crisis, a president in the hospital, the White House in chaos, the campaign in flux—I had forgotten all about the many times the Trump administration had declared it “Infrastructure Week” in the West Wing, only to have the days descend into crippling chaos. Sometimes “Infrastructure Weeks” were interrupted by President Trump separating children from their parents at the border. Sometimes news from the special counsel’s office would overtake the week. Other times one of Trump’s lawyers/campaign managers/advisers would get indicted or arrested (it’s happened a lot!). Whatever the reason, “Infrastructure Weeks” always started with a promise and ended in an entirely different hellscape. So when Harris brought up this relic of the past four years, it reminded me of all the tumult we’ve lived through. It reminded me, also, that it didn’t have to be this way. An infrastructure week is a great idea! It’s politically popular! It’s incredibly necessary! It would have been a surefire way to make this presidential race a heck of a lot closer! But the Trump White House never did get out of its own way. Maybe by the next “Infrastructure Week” under a new administration, in 2021 or 2025, when it’s actually safe to get on an airplane again, LaGuardia will look like it once again belongs in the 21st century. Until then, I guess we found the silver lining for not being able to go anywhere. 

Joe Pompeo: Scrolling through my admittedly self-selecting Twitter feed, there were two topics (before the fly) that people seemed to be piping up about the most. One was Pence’s apparent possible case of pink eye. (You can read about conjunctivitis and COVID-19 here.) “If I had to be there I would be so bummed,” said a political-operative pal I was DMing with. “People gonna get it from him tonight!”

The other topic du jour was Page. In these debates the moderator often elicits just as much scrutiny and criticism as the candidates themselves. Last week things obviously went off the rails when it was Chris Wallace’s turn at bat. But for all the dunking Wallace received, he’s a tough interviewer, and honestly is there anything anyone could have done to rein in Trump’s histrionics? Pence was like a mild-mannered kitten by comparison. But Page, the Washington bureau chief of USA Today, still had a hard time stopping the vice president from going over time or straying off topic. Media Twitter was all over it. “Susan Page struggling to get Pence to actually answer the questions she’s asking,” said The Daily host Michael Barbaro, “and is not really following up when he ignores them.” Others were less charitable. Here’s former Time Inc. chief John Huey: “Note to moderator: ‘Thank you, vice president’ is not an effective intervention. But a great drinking game phrase if you’re so inclined.” And NPR TV critic Eric Deggans: “Susan Page is way too focused on being polite.”

It’s a hard job, to be fair, but there was clearly a yearning for more aggression. “It was definitely frustrating to hear the question and then not hear a follow-up” when the question was ignored, Dana Bash said during CNN’s postdebate coverage. (Shortly thereafter, CNN was able to confirm that each candidate clocked in at around 36 minutes of speaking time.) Now let’s daydream for a moment. “I’d like @karaswisher to be the next moderator,” one random Twitter user chimed in. To which Swisher replied, “Me too at this point. Interrupting man is my specialty.”

Tarisai Ngangura: I needed the moderator to use the same bass in her voice when telling Pence to stop talking that she used on Harris. Pence showed an unmatched ability to not answer questions, lie, and distort facts all while calm and completely straight-faced. The most unsurprising thing about Wednesday night, other than his rewriting of history, was Pence bringing up looting when asked about Breonna Taylor and police violence. Black women are intimately familiar with being gaslit and having our experiences and efforts rewritten, misconstrued, and undermined. Last night Harris endured that on a national scale with thousands of eyes watching. Her ability to stay resolute and on message should not be taken lightly. She came armed with facts, and Pence could do nothing but sidestep questions and play host to a fly.

T.A. Frank: Lacking a transcript, I can’t count the percentage of questions that went unanswered as the candidates proceeded to talk about whatever pleased them. But it might have been around 100. Both Pence and Harris were full of it most of the time, but lest I be accused of both-sides-ism, I’ll say Pence was 85% full of it, while Harris was about 55% full of it, in case that helps. Was Mike Pence really attacking the North American Free Trade Agreement as if he couldn’t imagine how his opponents could allow such a thing—as if he hadn’t defended it himself and voted for all of its siblings? Yes, he was. Was he really claiming the White House had been transparent about Trump’s hospital stay, or anything else? Yes, he was. Was he really trotting out that line about Trump’s half-assed ban on travel from China saving the day? Yes, he was. Was Harris really promising that Joe Biden was, on his first day in office, going to repeal a tax bill that only Congress could undo? Yes, she was. Was she really saying that Donald Trump called COVID a hoax? Yes, she was. Both, to quote Richard Nixon, seemed to say “any goddamn thing” that came to them.

These were two politicians, real politicians, the old-fashioned kind that traffic in rehearsed lines and focus groups. The depths of Trump can make you miss such specimens—even pine for them—but it must be said that Pence and Harris are the sort of candidates who remind you of why the blow-it-all-up vote shows up once in a while (and also why many of Biden’s gaffes and flaws work in his favor in this race). As she showed with her throwaway claim about Biden’s first-day tax repeal, Harris has no apparent interest in policymaking. She’ll sponsor the Green New Deal and “Medicare for all” one day and ditch them the next. Pence, for his part, is ideological enough to care about policy but craven enough to flip a 180 to please the boss, all while claiming up is down. He’s jettisoned half of his principles already, and he’s holding the bag upside down and ready to dump out the rest. So who won? It doesn’t matter. Barring supernatural intervention—and, to be fair, 2020 has been on that glide path, but still—Harris is going to be vice president soon anyway. Let’s see if we care then.