Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate already feels like it took place in the Cretaceous era, but it is worth reflecting on the back-and-forth over the COVID-19 pandemic because it reflects a troubling arrogance on the part of the Democratic Party that may control much of Washington in the near future.
The debate was not so much a clash of different ideas as the clash between different realities. In Vice President Mike Pence’s world, President Trump has led bravely and well in response to the pandemic. He banned travel from China, “reinvented” testing, and launched “Operation Warp Speed” to develop new treatments and a vaccine that will be widely available by the end of the year. Pence invoked the names of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx to claim that, absent shutting down half of the economy, more than 2 million people in the country would have died, and even if we did everything right, we could still lose more than 200,000 people. This is roughly the number we have lost to the disease thus far, so clearly, we did everything right.
This narrative is strained or inaccurate in many respects. Fact-checkers are having a field day with it. But it is also completely unsurprising in almost every respect. The vice president has been making essentially the same arguments, often word for word, for months. Anyone who has been watching him would know what to expect when the debate turned to the topic of COVID-19.
Clearly, Sen. Kamala Harris has not been watching. In her reality, the failures of the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic are so glaringly obvious that she needn’t even explain or enumerate them. So, she didn’t.
Instead, she latched onto the timeline of Trump’s response. She highlighted that the president knew of the threat posed by COVID-19 on Jan. 28 but didn’t admit it publicly until March 13. “Can you imagine if you knew on Jan. 28, as opposed to March 13, what they knew, what you might’ve done to prepare?” she asked.
And, honestly, seven months into this pandemic and working from home, when every day feels like “Blursday,” I don’t have the first damned clue what I would have done differently in that six-week period last winter if I’d had a clearer warning about the dangers ahead. Not one frickin’ clue.
Look, I think the president should have been immediately honest with the public. I think he has been painfully irresponsible in his response to this crisis. I think Congress should pass additional pandemic relief (though not the full wish list of Speaker Nancy Pelosi) immediately, if not sooner.
But Harris’s line is hardly the most effective attack on the president’s response. It’s not in the top 10. And, in the opening moments of this nationally televised debate, when the pandemic is the No. 1 issue on the minds of the nation, it is the height of arrogance for the Democratic vice presidential nominee not to offer a detailed critique of the Trump administration’s response and an equally detailed explanation of what a Biden administration would do differently and better.
No one votes for a president based on his or her vice presidential pick. And no one likely made up his or her mind this year based on the vice presidential debate. But, with former Vice President Joe Biden’s promises of bipartisanship and his experience working across the aisle in the Senate, it is a troubling sign that his running mate doesn’t seem to have bothered to listen to the arguments that Trump and his supporters are making, nor respected them enough to offer a real rebuttal.
Michael Steel (@Michael_Steel) served as press secretary for former House Speaker John Boehner from 2008 to 2015. He also served as press secretary for Paul Ryan during the 2012 presidential election.
