COVID-19
at the Vice-Presidential Debate
Mike Pence’s debate
performance was a reminder not only of how little the Administration has
learned but of its stubborn refusal to learn anything at all. Then there was
that fly.
October 8, 2020
At the end of the debate
between Vice-President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala
Harris, the candidates’ spouses joined them onstage. Harris’s
husband, Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, wore a mask, as he had throughout the
debate. Karen Pence had worn one while sitting in the audience, as the rules
required. She had little choice—members of the Trump family, along with the
chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had so blatantly broken the mask rules at the
first Presidential debate that the organizers made it clear that, this time,
they would ask anyone without a mask, other than the two candidates and the
moderator, to leave. But, as Karen Pence approached the stage, she took hers
off. Perhaps she thought that Donald
Trump—who tore off his own mask before walking into the White House
with an active case of covid-19, and on Thursday said that he would refuse to participate
in the next Presidential debate if it was held virtually—wouldn’t like how it
looked if she kept it on. Perhaps she herself really doesn’t care about rules
or masks. (Back in April, she defended her husband after he visited the Mayo
Clinic without one, in violation of that institution’s rules.) After all, the
debate organizers couldn’t really throw the Pences out—they were leaving
anyway.
That
moment, even more than the fly that landed on Mike Pence’s hair, as he defended
the failure to prosecute police officers in Louisville for the shooting
of Breonna Taylor—a fly that, intriguingly, would
not depart, even as Pence bobbed and tilted his head, apparently oblivious to
its presence—spoke to the strangely furtive character of the Pence
Vice-Presidency. He is sometimes praised for small differences with Trump, such
as not actually shouting at his opponent or the moderator (this time, Susan
Page, of USA Today) throughout the debate, as Trump did last week.
But the debate was a reminder that Pence’s role is not just to dodge
responsibility for his boss’s disastrous acts and lies; he nurtures and amplifies them, and tells his own
lies, too. That is particularly true when it comes to the handling of the pandemic.
Pence, after all, is the head of the coronavirus task force for a White House
that is now itself a hot spot; more than two hundred thousand Americans are dead,
and, as Page noted in her opening question to Harris, about what a Biden
Administration would do differently, “the coronavirus is not under control.”
“The
American people have witnessed the greatest failure of any Presidential
Administration in our country,” Harris began. She repeated a number that gets
worse with each day and each debate: two hundred and ten thousand Americans are
dead; but she also connected that figure to the problems of inequality and the
economy. “We’re looking at front-line workers who have been treated like
sacrificial workers. We are looking at over thirty million people who in the
last several months had to file for unemployment,” she said. It was a reminder
of the self-destructiveness of the Trump Administration’s lackadaisical
approach to the pandemic. Failing to deal seriously with the public-health
emergency only extends it, as new outbreaks lead to new closures and, even in
the absence of legal strictures, a reluctance of customers and businesses to
fully return.
“Here’s
the thing,” Harris continued. “On January 28th, the Vice-President and the
President were informed about the nature of this pandemic. . . . They knew what
was happening, and they didn’t tell you.” This was a reference to reporting in
Bob Woodward’s recent book, “Rage,” which includes an
interview in which Trump speaks in far more dire terms about the coronavirus to
Woodward than he did to the public. Harris echoed one of Biden’s lines from the
first debate, which also sums up a basic truth: “They still don’t have a plan.”
And, in answer to Page’s original question, she added, “Joe Biden does. And our
plan is about what we need to do around a national strategy for contact
tracing, for testing, for administration of the vaccine, and making sure that
it will be free for all.” That is a sketch; the point, she emphasized, was that
“this Administration has forfeited their right to reëlection based on this.”
When
Page turned to Pence, she had a direct question for him: “Why is the U.S. death
toll, as a percentage of our population, higher than that of almost every other
wealthy country?” Trump’s tendency, when asked a question like that, is to say
that the questioner’s numbers are wrong, or the wrong ones to look at, and that
actually, according to some mysterious measures that may exist only in his
imagination, America is doing great—better than anybody else. Pence just
ignored the factual premise of the question and stuck to portraying the
President as a hero who had saved hundreds of thousands of lives. He said that
Trump had quickly “suspended all travel from China” and that Biden had opposed
that decision as “xenophobic.” According to the Washington Post’s Fact
Checker, both parts of that are untrue: the suspension was only partial, and
Biden had been referring to Trump’s xenophobia as a generally unhelpful element
in a pandemic response, and not to the travel restrictions in particular.
More
to the point, there was no effective testing or contact-tracing regimen for
those travellers who did arrive, either from Asia or from Europe—and Europe,
studies show, was the source of the strain of the virus that ravaged New York
City. Testing was botched at every crucial stage. And yet, in the debate,
Pence, as he has throughout the pandemic, spoke of the President’s response
with wonder and awe, and showed no humility; he bragged about the disaster and
his own role in it. He said that “having led the coronavirus task force,” he
could assure people that the President’s decisions had saved lives—as if having
led it was a token of expertise, not shame—and told Harris that Biden’s
comprehensive plan “reads an awful lot like what President Trump, and I, and
our task force, have been doing every step of the way.” He added a cheap,
Trumpian shot: “It looks a little bit like plagiarism, which is something Joe
Biden knows a little bit about.” This was a reference to a speech Biden gave in
1987—thirty-three years ago—that borrowed lines of what was presented as family
history from a speech by the British politician Neil Kinnock.
Page
asked Harris to respond, and she came back with a memorable line: “Whatever the
Vice-President is claiming the Administration has done, clearly it hasn’t
worked—when you’re looking at over two hundred and ten thousand dead bodies in
our country.” This was the moment for the senator to go in for a winning shot.
How could Pence claim that there is a comprehensive testing and contact-tracing
plan in place when the Administration can’t even maintain its own protocols and
track an outbreak in the White House? (Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are
also quarantining, after senior military officials, including the
second-highest-ranking Marine and Coast Guard officers, tested positive—a
reminder of the pandemic’s possible threat to national security.) Pence had boasted
about all the personal protective equipment the Administration had
manufactured—did he regret the moment when Trump told governors, on a phone call,
that they were on their own? How about the need for people in the public to
wear masks right now?
Instead,
Harris returned to January 28th, when the President first learned about the
pandemic. It is a good point, but one she had already made. A more effective
use of her time would have been to point to the many missteps in the months
since. Harris also needs to work on her answer on vaccines; she said that if
one was approved by public-health authorities she would be the first in line,
“but if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it.” It
would have been helpful if she had qualified that remark, for example, by
saying that if Trump alone says it’s safe, contradicting
public-health authorities, she would be reluctant to be vaccinated—given that
the President had previously mooted injecting bleach and has all but guaranteed
voters a vaccine before the election, suggesting a political, rather than
scientific, timetable. As it is, she opened herself to the criticism, which
Pence quickly made, that any vaccine that emerged during the Trump
Administration would be unacceptable to her.
Those
shortfalls were eclipsed by the outrageousness of Pence’s responses. “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,” he told her—a blatantly false rendition of what Harris had just said.
She had spoken about “the Administration” not “the American people”—though they
are terms that Trump, too, likes to confuse. Pence kept evading and lying: when
Page asked him about the ceremony introducing Amy Coney Barrett as Trump’s
Supreme Court nominee, which, in her words, is looking like “a superspreader
event,” he first spoke vaguely about how the American people could be trusted
to do whatever it was they ought to be doing, but that “the work of the
President of the United States goes on”—as if the essence of that work was to
stage maskless, undistanced gatherings. As for the Barrett introduction, he
said, “It was an outdoor event, which all of our scientists regularly and
routinely advise.” As Pence well knows, part of the event was held indoors, in
crowded and closely confined rooms in the White House, and even outdoor events
shouldn’t involve the close seating, mingling, and hugging on display in the
Rose Garden. As Pence—as the head of the task force—also should have known, the
tests that the attendees took before the event are not completely reliable. His
debate performance was a reminder not only of how little the Administration has
learned but of its stubborn refusal to learn anything at all.
And
Harris, like Biden, managed to connect the pandemic to the fate of the
Affordable Care Act, which the Administration is currently trying to invalidate
in court. Harris hammered on the point that the Administration is pursuing that
case “literally in the midst of a public-health pandemic, when over two hundred
and ten thousand people have died”—that key number again—“and seven million
people probably have what will be in the future considered a preëxisting
condition, because you contracted the virus.” Where would they go for
insurance? The answer depends on when Donald Trump and Mike Pence will be
leaving not only the debate stage but the White House.
