[ad_1]
Media playback is not supported by your device
A live television debate between vice presidential candidates ahead of next month’s US elections has seen fierce clashes over the coronavirus pandemic.
Democrat Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump of “the greatest failure of any presidential administration” in history.
Vice President Mike Pence, a Republican, said his party’s pandemic plan amounted to “plagiarism.”
Democratic candidate Joe Biden leads Trump with 26 days to vote.
Opinion polls indicate that the Republican president is behind in the single digits in a handful of states on the battlefield that will decide who wins.
This was a civil debate between two fluent communicators compared to last week’s belligerent showdown between Trump and Biden, which degenerated into name calling and name calling.
Mr. Pence didn’t interrupt as much as the President did last week, but when he did, Ms. Harris chimed in: “Mr. Vice President, I speak, I speak.”
In fact, the viral moment Wednesday night that seemed to generate the most buzz was a fly that landed on Pence’s head and stayed there for about two minutes.
But there were heated exchanges.
What was the main topic of conversation?
In the 90-minute live debate at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Harris accused Pence and the president of deliberately misleading Americans about the lethality of the coronavirus.
“They knew it and covered it up,” he said, adding that “they had lost their right to reelection.”
Pence accused the Biden-Harris campaign of copying the White House’s pandemic strategy, alluding to a mistake that ended Biden’s presidential bid in 1987 when he plagiarized a speech by then-British Labor leader Neil Kinnock.
The moderator asked Ms Harris if she would take an approved Covid-19 vaccine distributed before the election.
Media playback is not supported by your device
The 55-year-old California senator said she would not take a Trump-touted coup without the consent of medical professionals.
Pence, who heads the White House coronavirus task force, replied: “I think that the fact that it continues to undermine public confidence in a vaccine if the vaccine comes up during the Trump administration is inconceivable.”
The Plexiglass barriers separating the two debaters seated 12 feet (3.6 m) apart were a vivid reminder of the pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans.
The president, who is recovering from the virus, returned to the White House Monday night after three nights in the hospital, and opinion poll numbers dropped.
On Wednesday, he declared that contracting the disease was a “blessing from God” that exposed him to experimental treatments that he promised would be free to all Americans.
- Who is Vice President Mike Pence?
- Profile: Who is Kamala Harris?
Meanwhile, the virus has spread to the west wing of the White House, infecting figures within the president’s re-election campaign and senior Pentagon officials.
What were the other key moments?
On the issue of racial justice, Pence expressed shock at the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. But he added: “There is no excuse for the riots and looting that followed.”
He pointed to one of his guests in the auditorium, Flora Westbrooks, a black woman whose hair salon was destroyed during the riots in Minneapolis.
Media playback is not supported by your device
He said that Biden and Harris’s claim that the United States is systematically racist and that the police have an implicit bias against minorities is “a great insult.”
Harris, who was making history by becoming the first black woman to be on a vice presidential debating stage, said: “Last week, the President of the United States took a debating stage in front of 70 million Americans and refused to condemn white supremacists.. ”
- A Simple Guide to the American Elections
- How is Donald Trump doing in the polls?
“It’s not true, it’s not true,” Pence said, arguing that when Ms. Harris was a prosecutor in San Francisco, African Americans were more likely to be prosecuted for misdemeanor drug offenses than whites or Latinos.
Media playback is not supported by your device
At other key flash points:
- Ms Harris said Trump’s tariffs on China had caused a manufacturing recession, adding: “You lost that trade war. You lost it.” Mr. Pence replied, “Did he lose the trade war with China? Joe Biden never fought it. Joe Biden has been an entertainer for communist China for the past decades.”
- Harris attacked Trump for paying $ 750 a year in federal income taxes as president, according to a New York Times investigation. “When I first found out, I literally said, ‘You mean $ 750,000?’ And it was like, ‘No, $ 750.’
- Harris said Trump “betrayed our friends and embraced dictators around the world.” Pence said Trump had ordered operations that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Iranian senior general Qasem Soleimani.
What questions did they avoid?
The debate was characterized by questions that the candidates did not answer directly.
Pence pressed Harris twice on whether Biden would expand the number of seats on the Supreme Court, which has held nine justices for a century and a half, but she spoke instead about Trump’s current judicial nominee.
Pence, a mild-mannered former Indiana governor known for his steadfast loyalty to Trump, did not answer questions about whether he would want his home state of Indiana to ban abortion, or how the Trump administration would guarantee health coverage for sick Americans.
Media playback is not supported by your device
The focus on running mates has intensified given Trump’s 74-year-old Covid-19 diagnosis and the fact that Biden would be the oldest president to take office at 78.
But when asked by the debate moderator about his chances of assuming the presidency, both candidates avoided the issue.
Pence, 61, attacked Biden’s handling of the 2009 swine flu outbreak, and Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, spoke of her own biography.
