So, I decided to watch the VP debate last night, and I agree with James Joyner that it wasn’t an especially consequential event. One thing that I have to note (and Trump tried to do the same thing to Harris, although less well than Vance), is that Vance kept stating that as Vice President, Harris should have already implemented all her policy goals. I mean, Vance knows he is running to be emergency backup equipment, right?
On the one hand, I get it: the goal of the challenger is to make the incumbent administration look like it had its chance. But, the ongoing rhetorical attempt to make it sound like the Vice President should have initiated a series of policies is grating to the ears of anyone who has an inkling of how the government works.
On balance, the debate was kind of boring and it felt more “normal” than our politics have felt in a while. Vance was not as smarmy as I expected and Walz was nervous and less folksy attack-doggy than he can be in speeches. I suspect that the overall view of who won will correlate highly with general partisan priors.
But, of course, we can’t ignore the 2020 denialism of it all and the centrality of the previous veep in those events.
This is the key clip of the whole debate, although even it fits into my gripe above because what Vance is talking about is the Biden administration’s attempts to keep misinformation about the pandemic off social media, but somehow it becomes an action by the Vice President.
And I would note the following from Vance,
“Yeah, well, look, Tim, first of all, it’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
While it is true that Trump slunk away on the 20th. But the event of January 6th plainly underscores that for the first time in our history, we did not have a peaceful transfer of power. We clearly had a violent disruption of a constitutionally mandated stage of the election and one that was incited by the sitting president. Who, again, after watching the events for hours on TV and not trying to stop any of it, told the insurrectionists that he loved them and understood them.
So, it is worth remembering that the one truly consequential thing that Mike Pence did as Vice President was doing his constitutional duty in certifying legitimately cast electoral votes. He could have further disrupted the moment and created a constitutional crisis if he had done what Trump, Eastman, Lee, and others wanted him to do. But he didn’t, and as Walz noted last night, “that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”
JD Vance is willing to propagate the big lie about 2020 and he is signaling that if he ever gets the chance, he won’t be a Mike Pence.
