The Harris-Pence Debate (October 7th 2020) was the only US vice presidential debate in 2020. Democrat Kamala Harris, a Black female centre-right senator from California, squared off against Republican Mike Pence, a White male hard-right vice president. It was not the dumpster fire that last week’s presidential debate was. In fact, it was so lacklustre that a fly that landed on Pence’s head made the news.
Say it, don’t spray it: They were separated by two clear plastic dividers (pictured above) due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Pence spent most of the debate avoiding answering questions. He is the head of the coronavirus task force. With 210,000 Americans now dead, he could not answer why the US death rate was 2.5 times higher than in neighbouring Canada. And, ominously, would not give a straight answer about a peaceful transfer of power.
Harris spent most of the debate avoiding coming off as an Angry Black Woman – even as Pence talked over her:
“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”
She was firm but had to sugar-coat it with smiles and charm. Harris, like Biden last week, sidestepped the question of whether she would add seats to the Supreme Court (which sounds like a “yes”).
Of Breonna Taylor: Pence:
“the family of Breonna Taylor has our sympathies. But I trust our justice system, a grand jury that reviews the evidence. And it really is remarkable, that as a former prosecutor, you would assume that in a panel grand jury, looking at all the evidence, got it all wrong. […] this presumption that you hear consistently from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that America is systemically racist, that as Joe Biden said, that he believes that law enforcement has an implicit bias against minorities, is a great insult to the men and women who serve in law enforcement.”
Fact check: Here are the statements that slightly-left-of-centre PolitiFact counts as “wrong”, “false” or “mostly false” (but not those that were merely “half true”, “misleading” or “needs context”):
Kamala Harris:
- False: “The president said (the coronavirus) was a hoax.” (Not quite what he said. Trump: “They tried the impeachment hoax. That was not a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”)
Mike Pence:
- Wrong: The Rose Garden event with Judge Amy Coney Barrett “was an outdoor event, which all of our scientists regularly and routinely advised.” (part of it was indoors. And even outdoors most did not wear masks or social distance.)
- Mostly false: The Obama administration “left the strategic national stockpile empty.” (it was hardly empty, but it was short on N95 masks)
- False: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris “want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking.” (just new fracking on public lands. Most fracking takes place on private land. Biden never said he would abolish fossil fuels, though he does want net-zero emissions by 2050 by moving to clean energy.)
– Abagond, 2020.
Source: PolitiFact.
See also:
- C-SPAN – for the video on YouTube (106 minutes)
- USA Today – for the transcript
- The Kaine-Pence Debate – the VP debate four years ago
- The 2020 election for US president
- Biden-Trump Debate I: stand by and stand back – last week’s presidential debate
- Mike Pence – written in 2016
- Kamala Harris
- The Sapphire stereotype – the main stereotype White people have about Black women
- The coronavirus
- Breonna Taylor
- IAT: Implicit Association Test
- grand jury
- just world doctrine
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The fly on Pence’s head. The fly was the star of the debate.
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Thank you Abagond for this post. However, I’m going to use the space here to reply to a completely different post in an effort to avoid discussing this post in particular. Just kidding… I was channeling VP Pence.
Pence isn’t running for anything and wasn’t under any scrutiny from Trump supporters who would vote for Trump if his VP candidate was a bag of sand or the grand wizard of the KKK. The news cycle seems to have picked out the fly and the “I’m speaking.” moments as the highlights of the debate and both moments made Pence look trivial but, I doubt that matters one bit to a Trump voter.
Senator Harris did a near perfect job of walking the razor-thin line she needed to. She also had little to gain in terms of building support or energizing people to vote for Biden. But, she had everything to lose. I do think we may find that the “I’m speaking” moment, directed at a condescending man talking over a woman, might actually sway some of the women who voted Trump and who polling shows have been turned off by Trump’s racism. I had previously figured those women would just stay home but, if they now feel a kinship with Senator Harris, they might surprise everyone on election night.
I think Biden/Harris can count the debate as a victory for their campaign but, at the same time, I don’t think the Trump campaign lost anything either.
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Pence is so full of poop he attracts flies.
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