Also: Frank Bruni on that fly.
 | By John Guida Politics Editor, Opinion |
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Last night’s vice-presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence featured more plexiglass and fewer interruptions than last week’s presidential event. It was also more in keeping with what we expect from American political debates (for better or worse). |
Kamala Harris kept her cool, even at her most tenacious. When Mike Pence spouted some particularly outrageous nonsense, she just smiled and shook her head. (Joe Biden did something similar in his debate with President Trump.) This was important not only in terms of telegraphing her dismay at Pence’s absurdity. It also kept her from being hit with that most toxic and unfair of labels: the angry Black woman. |
Vice-presidential debates usually don’t matter; I doubt this one was any different. But Mike Pence showed Republican senators what might have been — if they had removed Trump from office in January, they might well be poised to keep the White House this November. |
Mike Pence was unyielding in his advocacy of Donald Trump and showed that the case for re-election can be made with both substance and civility. He will have reassured a lot of Republican voters and given wavering voters new reason to think about a G.O.P. ticket that they might have turned against last week. |
This debate sounded quite a lot like what politics used to sound like, before the collapse of discourse norms — but different in a subtle way, feverish, almost volatile. Harris and Pence are both seasoned politicians who operate well in the now old-fashioned milieu, where competing sides wish one another well and congratulate one another, but those notes sound hollow now. That’s because we’re not living in a brief departure from the era of civil political discourse; we’re living in the post-civil discourse era, and every instance of that ancient etiquette now is just imitation. |
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