by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The Presidential debate series continued October 7 with a far more polite conversation between Vice-President Mike Pence of Indiana and Senator Kamala Harris of California than the one we got on September 29 between the two heads of their tickets, President Donald Trump and former vice-president Joe Biden. It helped that Pence is a far less confrontational and openly judgmental public performer than Trump, and that Harris is considerably younger and quicker on her feet, mentally, than Biden.
Though this debate -- moderated by Susan Page of USA Today, who sometimes had to talk over the candidates to get them to cut short their answers and stay within the time limits of the debate format but had an easier job than Chris Wallace, who moderated (or tried to) the Trump-Biden debate eight days earlier -- was considerably more collegial, it also exposed the deep fault lines that divide American politics today.
Mike Pence was an articulate spokesperson (far more so than his boss!) for a Republican vision of America in which taxes are cut to the bone for the wealthiest American individuals and corporations. Supposedly the benefits from this are supposed to “trickle down” to everyone else through increased investment that puts more people to work and thus benefits the non-rich. Throughout the debate Pence repeated the Republican mantra that tax cuts, deregulating business, “unleashing” the American energy sector through continued production of fossil fuels by hydraulic fracturing (so-called “fracking”) and adopting a lassiez-faire attitude towards regulation and capitalism in general is the way to ensure economic prosperity.
And yet when Pence was asked, via a question about Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett of Indiana to the U.S. Supreme Court and the possibility (actually a virtual certainty, given her writings in judicial opinions and law review articles) that she will provide the fifth vote at long last to reverse the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that gave American women a constitutional right to some (though not all) abortions, he made it clear not only his own so-called “pro-life” views but his willingness to use the powers of government to make them the law of the land. Because Mike Pence personally believes abortion is wrong, he wants states to have the power to make it illegal (though he dodged Page’s question of whether he would support an attempt in Indiana to make abortion illegal if Roe is overturned).
One of the most fascinating aspect of American politics over the last 40 years has been the extraordinary longevity of the Republican coalition between economic libertarians and social conservatives. When religious leaders like Jerry Falwell, Sr. and Pat Robertson brought the radical Christian Right into the Republican Party in 1980 a lot of people, including me, thought that coalition was inherently unstable and would soon collapse. After all, it argued that government should keep its hands off the private business sector and the economy as a whole -- but we should have the biggest of big governments when it came to people’s most intimate decisions about their private lives, particularly their sex lives and how they shoud deal with the consequences therefrom, good and bad.
It wasn’t always like this. Before Falwell, Robertson and others brought the Christian Right into the Republican Party in the late 1970’s and started saying their issue positions were the only “moral” ones, militant Christians involved in politics, from William Jennings Bryan to Jimmy Carter, had generally been economic progressives who believed government should use its power to redress economic inequality and the exploitative aspects of capitalism. Also, secular conservatives like Barry Goldwater had usually applied the philosophy of “that government is best that governs least” to the bedroom as well as the boardroom -- which is why Goldwater shocked quite a few younger Rightists when in the 1980’s he came out as pro-choice on abortion and for adding Queer people to the protected classes under the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which, ironically, he’d voted against in the first place).
Today, however, there is virtually no dissent within the Republican Party on either lassiez-faire economics or a highly interventionist government policing people’s private behavior. Republicans have accepted the seemingly contradictory position that we should have “small government” when it comes to the economy and “big government” when it comes to sex. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party remains deeply divided between so-called “progressives” and “moderates” -- between supporters of broad social change and limits on capital, particularly to address environmental threats and economic inequality (though there was almost no talk at all from either candidates or moderators at both debates so far about economic inequality) and those who want to tinker at the edges of capitalism to alleviate some of its problems without fundamentally changing or challenging the system.
The Democrats are acutely vulnerable in each election cycle over those differences and the need to unite the two wings of the party. Since 1968, when between them Richard Nixon and George Wallace won 57 percent of the Presidential vote to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent (thus spelling the end of the Democratic New Deal coalition and the rise of the Right-wing consensus that has mostly --- though not totally -- dominated American politics since), Republicans have won eight Presidential elections to the Democrats’ five. The three Democrats who have won Presidential elections since 1968 -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- were all relatively young and were able to “square the circle” by appearing more progressive than they really were, thereby holding younger, more Left voters while not scaring off the moderates.
Obviously, Joe Biden is not that sort of candidate. In 2017 the then-70-year-old Donald Trump broke Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest person ever inaugurated as President. Now Trump is 74 and Biden is 78, so if he wins Biden will break Trump’s record as the oldest President ever. Ironically, Biden ended up as Obama’s vice-president for the same reason Dick Cheney ended up as George W. Bush’s -- both Bush and Obama were seen as relative lightweights because of their relative youth and they needed older running mates to offer experience and gravitas to their tickets -- but Biden faced the same problem in picking his running mate in 2020 that Trump did in 2016.
Trump’s problem was that he needed to shore up his support from the evangelical Christian side of the Republican base -- so he recruited a hard-core dyed-in-the-wool evangelical to convince the Christian Right they could safely vote for Trump despite his three wives, his numerous adulteries, his ownership of casinos (gambling is supposed to be a big bozo-no-no among Right-wing Christians) and his overall image as an amoral huckster. Biden’s problem was he needed a running mate that would check off some affirmative-action boxes and get the progressives more excited about him while still not alienating the moderates.
In the last debate between Biden and his last remaining rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, Biden carefully parsed his words and said he would appoint a woman (her race carefully unspecified) as his running mate and a Black woman to his first vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. From that I guessed who he had in mind was Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar for vice-president and Michelle Obama for the high court. Then African-American George Floyd was killed in Klobuchar’s home state by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a nationwide protest movement erupted -- and it turned out in her previous jobs as district attorney of Hennepin County (which includes Minneapolis) and attorney general of Minnesota, Klobuchar had had the chance to prosecute Chauvin on one or more of the 17 previous complaints of police brutality against him -- and she hadn’t.
So, realizing that she had become a political liability to the Democratic Party in general and the African-Americans of its voting base in particular, Klobuchar took herself out of the running and suggested that Biden pick a woman of color. Accordingly Biden picked Kamala Harris, partly because of her bi-racial background (her father was African-American and her mom was from India) and partly because she had a similar political trajectory to Klobuchar’s -- from county district attorney to state attorney general to U.S. Senator. Biden was clearly hoping that putting a career prosecutor on his ticket would help neutralize the inevitable Republican accusations that a President Biden would be “soft on crime.”
In tonight’s debate, that dynamic played out in some interesting and surprising ways. Harris pointed out that she was the only person on the stage who had actually prosecuted criminals -- including white-collar criminals like bankers as well as murderers. Pence attacked her from the Left, saying that during Harris’s tenure as California attorney general Black people were prosecuted 19 times as often as white people committing similar crimes. It was a reflection of a criticism Trump could be making of Biden as well -- it was Biden who was the principal Senate sponsor of the 1994 crime bill that made so-called “no-knock warrants” in drug cases, like the one that got Breonna Taylor killed, legal -- and Trump who signed into law the “First Step Act” to start minimizing the inequalities in sentencing white and Black people for similar crimes. But it’s hard for either Trump or Pence to make that case when they’re also telling white suburban voters to be very, very afraid of being murdered in their beds by Antifa thugs if Biden and Harris are elected.
Indeed, Pence’s comment was indicative of one of the major problems with this debate -- and with debates in general. Both candidates were spitting out a lot of statistics at each other and the audience with virtually no opportunity to fact-check them. Ironically it was Pence who quoted more than once the famous line from the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that “everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own set of facts.” It’s a phrase that’s become a staple of Trump’s opponents, but Pence used it tonight to suggest that the Democrats in general and Harris in particular were attacking Trump’s wonderful, glowing record without any hard evidence to back them up.
A few more random notes about tonight’s debate: Harris was considerably less edgy through most of it than she’s been confronting Trump administration officials and nominees as a Senator in committee hearings. It’s also clear that, though Hillary Clinton may have lost the 2016 election, she’s won the Battle of the Pantsuits. Through most of my lifetime women candidates for political office wouldn’t have dared show up for a debate or any other formal campaign occasion in anything but a dress. Harris came out in a black pantsuit so severely cut it looked almost like a twin of Pence’s.
Perhaps the most interesting exchanges of the debate were the ones about climate change, whether humans are responsible for any of it and what can be done to stop it. Here the irony was that it was Pence, forced to defend the record of a President who has referred to human-caused climate change as a “hoax,” who was pledging that the administration in which he serves would “follow the science” on climate change. Trump’s record on climate change is similar to his record on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: he “follows the science,” all right, but he cherry-picks the scientists he’s going to follow and rejects the mainstream in favor of oddballs who agree with him.
Here Pence was cleverly attempting to split that delicate balance any Democratic Presidential candidate has to walk between holding young progressive voters while not alienating older moderate ones. The more Harris repeated that neither she nor Biden wanted an outright ban on fracking -- an insanely destructive environmental practice in its own right that releases fossil fuels that, for the sake of the earth and its continued ability to sustain human life, damned well better be left in the ground -- the more she demoralized younger (and some not-so-younger, like me) Democratic voters who believe that stopping climate change before it’s too late is the political issue of our time.
Pence also praised President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris accords on climate change -- the ones widely criticized by environmentalists for not being stringent enough to achieve the sweeping reductions in earth and ocean temperatures we need to preserve our planet’s ability to sustain human life -- and said that efforts to protect the environment are “job-killers.” His most absurd moment said when he claimed Biden had a ridiculous plan to retrofit four million buildings with solar panels, which he said would destroy American jobs. It didn’t seem to occur to him -- and since this was at the end of an exchange Harris didn’t have the chance to point it out, either -- that if you want to retrofit four million buildings with solar panels you’re going to have to pay people to do that work, and therefore you will be creating jobs.
Overall, at tonight’s debate Pence came off as a sort of kinder, gentler Trump -- but still a spokesperson for a very noxious agenda. His most hectoring moment came when he asked Harris again and again if she and Biden would seek to add more justices to the Supreme Court if Barrett is confirmed and Trump’s first term ends with a 6-3 Right-wing Court majority. I have a hard time believing Biden, even with a Democratic Senate, could “pack” the Court even if they wanted to. If Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t do it in 1937, coming off a landslide re-election and with much larger Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress than Biden could even dream of, it’s hard to believe Biden can.
But if Biden wins, the Senate goes Democratic and the new majority eliminates the filibuster, we could be setting the stage for an epic confrontation between the political branches and a court merrily striking down everything the rest of the government tries to do as unconstitutional. Then enough Senate and House Democrats could end up seeing diluting the Right-wing hold on the Supreme Court as a matter of sheer political survival.
A lot of it also will depend on how radical the new hard-Right court is. If they not only overthrow the Affordable Care Act but so severely restrict the application of the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause as to restrict virtually any attempts by the federal government to regulate the economy, then just about every American with politics even slightly left of center could demand Court expansion as an antidote to control of the government by “unelected judges” the way their ancestors were doing when the Court declared war on the New Deal in the mid-1930’s.
In some ways, the debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris was everything the September 29 Trump-Biden debate should have been but wasn’t. Part of the difference was Pence himself: though both he and Harris occasionally interrupted each other in their eternal quest for the Last Word, he was a far more gentlemanly figure who didn’t go all out to disrupt the debate so he could tell a rally audience later that “I had fun.” Part of it was Harris, who was less combative and “prosecutorial” than we’ve seen her at other times and who managed to evade one of Pence’s traps for her: he tried to pin her to support of the “Green New Deal.”
There isn’t just one “Green New Deal,” just as there isn’t just one definition of “Defund the police” -- though the names tend to put moderate voters off, there are ways of defining both the “Green New Deal” and “Defund the police” in ways that make them sound less scary while still representing positive change. Pence accused both Biden and Harris of being committed to a program that would cost several trillion dollars -- though you could make a case that several trillion dollars is a small price to pay for our continued ability to survive on this planet -- but my fear on the climate issue is that the current worldwide ruling class has such a stranglehold on both policy and public opinion it has the power to prevent the radical changes we need to be able to survive as a species on the only planet we’ve got.
