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When Vice President Mike Pence and rival candidate Kamala Harris find themselves on a socially distant stage for the only debate they will have in this election, President Donald Trump will remain isolated, recovering from Covid-19. The vice presidential candidate clash does not usually attract much attention, but this time things are different. The bar is so high that John Hudak, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Efficient Public Management, wrote that this will be “the most important since the vice-presidential debates began” 40 years ago.
In the half-empty auditorium of the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, there will be possible substitutes for the president of the United States. With Trump infected with covid-19 and Joe Biden almost 78, which will make him the oldest president in history if elected, the question is morbid but necessary: which of these two vice presidential candidates is better equipped to occupy the highest position in the White House, if necessary?
This is what the audience will be asked to imagine face to face between incumbent Mike Pence and his rival Kamala Harris, who will be separated by acrylic and almost four meters apart, As a precautionary measure. The moderator of the debate, journalist Susan Page USA Today, did not disclose the topics to be discussed. But it’s not difficult to predict where the night will go, and the ubiquitous Covid-19 pandemic should be a central theme. Not just because Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump are infected, but because there are a dozen administration and party officials with positive diagnoses. This is the case with the president’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway, the White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany, the press adviser Hope Hicks and the director of the re-election campaign Bill Steipen. Other Republican politicians who contracted the disease, reportedly during an event in the White House’s Rose Garden on September 26, are Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel, Senators Thom Tillis, Mike Lee, and Ron Johnson, the president of University. Notre Dame John Jenkins and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who groomed Trump for the debate with Biden.
They are expected to ask Mike Pence about the workgroup that the Trump administration created in March to deal with the pandemic and led by the vice president. Seven months have passed since the outbreak in Wuhan turned into a global crisis and the United States has become the country in the world most affected by the health emergency, with 7.4 million patients and 210,000 deaths and an economic recession to the view.
Kamala Harris should not only insist on the idea that the Trump-Pence duo did not respond to the pandemic, but also stress that the administration is in court trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. (ACA, better known as Obamacare), through which about 20 million people in the United States have access to health care.
Supreme Court and racial tensions
Here, the composition of the Supreme Court will be a relevant issue, because Trump appointed conservative Amy Coney Barrett to the vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the panel of judges will decide on the future of the ACA shortly after the election. At stake is the Republican argument that the law passed by Barack Obama is unconstitutional; Coney Barrett, in the past, has expressed her position that the ACA damages the Constitution of the United States.
If the judge is confirmed and the court has six6 conservative judges, the possibility of changing the right to abortion will also be on the table, which is a costly issue for evangelical Mike Pence, who opposes abortion rights. and for the progressive Kamala Harris, who is in favor.
Due to the unstable situation in cities like Portland, where protests against police violence and injustice continue, it is to be expected that racial tensions will be part of the debate. Mike Pence is expected to argue that the Trump administration is about “law and order” and could criticize Kamala Harris’ record as a prosecutor for the city of San Francisco and then the state of California.
But It will be the aggressive stance of the former prosecutor that can make her stand out in this face-to-face, as happened in the round of debates that opposed the many candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2019. It was then that the national profile of Kamala Harris rose and it was probably decided by the choice of Vice President Joe Biden, once a rival in the Democratic Party.
Harris is an assertive, unabashed speaker, and Pence is an effective and calm speaker, with a style diametrically opposed to Donald Trump. Therefore, the debate should be very different from the hour and a half of insults and interruptions that we saw between Trump and Biden at the end of September. It will also be the first time that a multiracial woman (Indian mother, Jamaican father) enters the debate stage as a candidate for vice president. The result, John Hudak wrote in an opinion at the Brookings Institute, will be the opportunity to see “adults” debate in the room. They may be “the presidential candidates that America wants and needs right now.”
