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Kamala Harris was content to let Mike Pence ramble on throughout the debate.
When a fly can dominate the public’s post-debate commentary, that’s a pretty good sign that the debate itself didn’t really make much impact. In fact, it didn’t.
For Kamala Harris, the evening was an exercise in self-suppression. Pence misstates reality? Bring it up gently on the next go-round, but don’t rush in to correct. Pence neglects to answer a question about Trump’s nonexistent pre-existing conditions plan? Forgo pointing that out. Pence ignores moderator Susan Page’s gazillion attempts to enforce agreed-upon time limits? The viewers can see that for themselves.
Clearly, the California senator’s debate preppers made sure she understood three Whereases and One Resolved: Whereas we’re up by ten points; whereas you’re Black; whereas you’re a woman, Therefore, be it resolved that you do nothing that may be construed as contentious!
Corollaries: Be nice. Be relatable. Indict the administration. Spell out the Biden program. But if zingers come to mind, leave them unzung.
That was the game plan and Harris stuck to it. Like Biden, she was most effective when looking directly into the camera while spelling out how particular proposals they’d made would benefit particular groups of viewers—like 20-somethings on their parents’ insurance policies, or people with pre-existing conditions. On a few occasions, she was able to launch concise and effective attacks without benefit of a zinger, as when she raised the question of who Trump owes that $400 million to, and the policy implications thereof.
For his part, Pence assumed the oxymoronic posture of a kinder, gentler Trump. Without ranting or seething, he still managed to follow in his boss’s footsteps as an interrupter and filibusterer, evader of questions and denier of facts. If Trump’s out-of-control rage in last week’s debate likely repelled the swing women voters whom his campaign needs to win back, Pence’s determination to keep droning on through Harris’s allotted time may have reminded them that nonviolent men can be abusive, too, or simply babble on so much, and so boringly, that it sends them screaming from the house. It may have reminded them of their workplace, or their home, and having a woman in the split screen, enduring the mansplaining in relative silence, was no doubt relatable.
While the debate was also billed as the first event of the 2024 presidential contest, I’ve never bought that, chiefly because of the vice president’s limited prospects. While Pence had his 2004-era fiscal and social conservatism mixed with belligerent foreign policy down pat, he will never be the candidate of the old Republican establishment. Nor does he have what it takes to be the favorite of the Trump true believers who constitute the bulk of the increasingly neofascist GOP (that lane will be filled by the snarling likes of Tucker Carlson or Tom Cotton, or some such more presentable petit-Mussolini like Josh Hawley). Barring some unforeseeable cataclysm, Harris, on the other hand, will likely be the Democratic establishment’s favorite. We have no idea which Democrats will present themselves as the more progressive alternatives; we only know they’re out there.
Vice-presidential debates almost never affect the outcome of presidential elections. Last night’s will be no exception to that rule, which is just as the Biden camp wanted it.
