Vice President Mike Pence “won” the debate Wednesday night, but not by enough to win the election.
Pence needed to pound home the accurate message that people should be frightened of Sen. Kamala Harris being one heartbeat away from the presidency of a doddering old man. Why? Because she is a maliciously partisan California radical with dangerous policies and temperament.
Pence is a good man of admirable competence and steadiness. He surely turned off some voters by refusing to stay within time limits in the debate, a factor of added importance after President Trump’s hyperactive rudeness in the prior week’s debate, but otherwise, Pence made his points effectively and with presidential mien. In contrast to Harris’s nasally evasiveness and disconcerting facial expressions, Pence was the more likable and persuasive candidate.
Still, he didn’t drive home a message galvanizing enough to cause the massive change in campaign trajectory his ticket needs. The best and truest message would have been to make Harris herself the issue. He could have done it by sticking to facts and public issues, without getting inordinately personal.
Back in August at National Review Online, amid a longer piece, Dan McLaughlin produced a comprehensive compendium of Harris’s radicalism. Please do read it at this link, because it covers much more ground than I will focus on. Suffice it to say, McLaughlin’s case against her is compelling.
That said, Pence could have honed the case down to three main points and led the debate with them. As in:
No American should want Senator Harris to be a heartbeat from the presidency, because her record is radically outside the American tradition. She holds her positions honestly; I just think they’re wrong. Take just three of many examples. First, she has a weird attraction to street protests, so much so that even as Minneapolis was violently burning, she was threatening (“Beware!,” she said) that the protests would continue all year, beyond the elections, while she personally raised money for a group posting bail even for Minneapolis murderers. Second, she repeatedly has proposed power grabs hostile to American tradition by threatening to kill the Senate filibuster that protects minority rights and to violate 150 years of tradition by adding several new justices to the Supreme Court — deliberately to create a radical majority from thin air.
Third, but definitely not finally, although it’s all I have the time for here, even liberal Newsweek reported that her record was more radical-liberal than socialist Bernie Sanders, and her full embrace of radical congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would cost more than 6 trillion dollars a year. That’s like taking the entire bloated federal budget, doubling it, and then adding another 30% on top of the double.
There. Even speaking slowly, Pence could have said that in 90 seconds. He could have spent the rest of the debate finding occasions to elaborate on those points.
For a killer fourth point, one showing Harris’s bent for malicious personal attacks, Pence could later have reminded the public that she attacked the racial record even of her own running mate and, worse, that it was Harris who took the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to their lowest low. Harris literally read into the congressional record, not just the allegation that Kavanaugh once drunkenly jumped on top of Christine Blasey Ford, but that he regularly spiked the punch at parties in order to facilitate gang rapes of unsuspecting girls.
That’s the vilest character assassination imaginable.
Kamala Harris has neither the judgment, the decency, nor the American values to be vice president, especially for the oldest president in history. Electing her would be a cataclysmic disaster.
