Re: Discussion of the 2020 American Federal Election
On the plus side (sort of), at least the VP debate wasn't a complete shit-show. It didn't exactly blow my mind, but I have a few take-aways from it.
1. Harris owned all over Pence. The way she calmly addressed him while he was interrupting her, the way she remained respectful even when she was spitting fire, is laudable. Pence kept his cool too. He didn't badger and bully, so much as he would. not. shut. up. I've come to feel lately that this is the ironic role of republicans, especially white male republicans. They're so used to telling the story that they don't take it well when they're called upon to let someone else have their fair share of the time.
2. Harris highlighted the Covid strategy extremely well (i.e., there hasn't been one, Trump's fuck-ups have costs far too many lives, science wins the day). All Pence could really do was say that Trump trusts the American people...except, as Harris rightly pointed out, the way you trust the American people is to give them the facts, tell them the truth. You can't simultaneously believe in the American people and want to keep them in the dark because you're afraid they'll panic. Either you trust them or you don't, and I think she shot an absolute killer with this one.
3. Later in the debate, there was talk about whether or not Biden would pack the supreme court if given the chance to do so. First of all, this is a question asked in bad faith, and Harris turned it properly on its ear by talking about how Trump has already been stacking courts and appointments with reckless abandon (and interestingly, not one of his appointees to judicial courts is black). I wish Harris had raised the point that it was republicans, not democrats, who were rushing to get Coney-Barrett installed before the election in an unprecedented power grab to tip the supreme court into a 6-3 right majority. The fact is, republicans and democrats alike have moved to protect their interests here, and it's not outside the realm of possibility that Biden might want to push back in this area. But there's no point in asking this question; its only aim is to undermine faith in the democratic process, but it does so only by suggesting that one side, and not both, is implicit in that damaged relationship with justice.
4. I appreciated how Harris called out all violence, brought up Trump's disdain for the military he claims to want to back, and used her own prosecutorial history as a means of explaining that she is uniquely qualified to continue the reform that America needs. Pence tried to attack her and the Obama administration for some bad stuff that happened, but it didn't really do much damage as far as I'm concerned. Sure, Harris has done stuff she shouldn't have; she's been historically harder on drugs than she needed to be in the past, and I think she realizes that she has some learning and growing to do, even still. But her promise to abolish private prisons, to decriminalize marijuana, to fix the broken justice system and to continue police reform to ban neck and choke holds was a point in her favour.
5. Pence still seems to want to paint the president as someone who has brought jobs to America, even though he hasn't, as someone who has responded properly to a pandemic, which he hasn't, and as someone who cares about the American people, which he doesn't. I think Harris dealt with this pretty well on the whole.
6. Pence seriously needs to listen when the moderator says, "Thank you, Mr. Vice-President". Camala ran over time a couple of times, by five to ten seconds, but with Pence it was a constant issue, and eventually Harris fought back by asking for some extra time to repudiate some claims made against her record, which she mostly did. She repeated herself a little bit though.
This debate won't upset the apple-cart and won't change minds. If you're committed to supporting a dictator, you're still gonna vote Trump. But I liked the message that Harris was sending here, even if I thought in some instances she was too gentle and didn't go straight for the throat in the way I was hoping she would. I especially found it instructive when she told Mike Pence that she wouldn't be quiet and be lectured by him about the law, when she has spent her life as a prosecutor and would be considered an expert in the field. And, as I said before, her way of dealing with him when he interrupted her - which was relatively uncommon, thankfully - was instructive. I'm glad that Pence was generally more polite and considerate, even if he was lying through his teeth or misrepresenting facts 88% of the time. If it were Mike Pence sitting in the president's chair right now, I still wouldn't be happy with him, but I strongly suspect we'd never have had this level of egomaniacal lunacy in the decision-making process. Fewer Americans would be dead from Covid-19 almost certainly. Fewer bridges would be burned in public relations, certainly. And you wouldn't have ninety million or so Americans screaming for his blood. You also wouldn't have folks wishing him to die of Covid-19, either, because as much as I'm not republican in any way, Pence is a dude I dislike because of what he stands for as opposed to how he represents himself. He sounds like a typical moderate republican of yesteryear, but I think America lost its chance to see the republican ticket as moderate last Tuesday.
Conclusion: Ship is still sinking, and I'm going to do everything I can, within reason, to speed it along.
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