THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: PENCE AND HARRIS HAVE THEIR SAY

 

Vice presidential debates are seldom memorable, but the October 7 contest between Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Kamala Harris broke new ground. Aside from the first appearance by a woman of color on the vice presidential debate stage,

this debate featured a fly who by the end of the evening had 4,067 social media followers. The Fly landed in Vice President Pence’s hair and stayed over two minutes. We could comment on the symbolism. But we won’t. Don’t ever say 2020 hasn’t been a strange year.

Beyond the adventures of The Fly, most post-debate analysis focused on whether it

changed the trajectory of a race that’s looking like a potential blowout. The Biden-Harris ticket entered the debate leading by 9.5 points in the fivethirtyeight.com polling average. Polls released right before the debate showed Biden-Harris ahead by as much as 16 points.

We agree with the pundit consensus that

nothing in the debate fundamentally changed the race even though CNN’s instant poll showed Harris winning, 59-38.   Women thought Harris won, 69-31.

 

Each Had Their Moments

Both candidates entered the debate with specific objectives, some multi-layered and nuanced. Pence, a smooth speaker who

politely, even gently, parrots Republican talking points, defended President Trump’s disturbing coronavirus, climate change, and foreign policy failures. He tried presenting more of a conventional Republican agenda and less of Trump’s personality cult, arguably describing a presidency that doesn’t exist. He pushed the

case Harris will lead Biden down a leftist, socialist path that over- taxes and overregulates. Pence made his points and got whatever mileage he could out of raising that set of issues.

Harris, being part of a ticket that’s ahead, but

still somewhat unknown herself, had to get people comfortable with the idea she can handle the presidency since Biden would take office at age 78. Responding to the succession question, she reminded voters of her resume as a three-time

elected official. She had strong moments on restoring America’s role in the world and the virtue in the Biden-Harris candidacy of having significant Republican support. She also tried laying out the ticket’s program since Biden didn’t get to in the first presidential debate

because of Trump’s interruptions and bullying. She effectively put the Affordable Care Act on the ballot with the reminder, “They’re coming for you,” when she identified a list of impacts terminating the act would cause. The instant poll results and the commentary suggested she succeeded.

 

Missed Opportunities

If both candidates had their moments, both missed opportunities. Harris, for example, could have used the Breonna Taylor question

in promoting how a Biden Justice Department might use federal civil rights laws in such cases and remedy the failures of Bill Barr as attorney general.  She also could have been stronger in her condemnation of the White House events that apparently spread the corona virus.

Pence, for his part, simply ducked a number of questions, like whether he had conferred with Trump about a transfer of power in light of the president’s covid-19 illness. The country needs an answer to that question and a good one might have done the Trump campaign some political good.  Pence may have been catering to Trump with his refusal to adhere to the time limits, but had he followed them, he might have gained credibility for making the debate process more dignified and civil. Critically, Pence didn’t answer the core values question of whether Trump will peacefully transfer power if he loses.             

 

Gender and Race

Inevitably gender and race were likely to

become part of this debate. The historic nature of the Harris candidacy assured that. The gender component manifest itself most in Pence’s incessant habit of exceeding his time (which moderator Susan Page of USA Today tried

controlling, mostly unsuccessfully) and the fact he frequently interrupted Harris. He didn’t do it as rudely and as aggressively as Trump did on September 29, but he did it. It didn’t go unnoticed. Women commentators on the cable networks took him to task, as did our female life partners. Like Harris, they didn’t appreciate Pence’s “lectures” about her record or approach to certain issues.

Pence also probably didn’t earn the Republican ticket any minority group votes by denying the existence of systemic racism or by supporting the grand jury findings in the Taylor case that resulted in no indictments against the police officers who killed her. Given the racial reckoning going on in the country, few reasons exist for taking those positions except knee jerk support for police or cultivating the backing of white nationalists and similar minded individuals. Perhaps Pence feared distinguishing himself from Trump.    

 

Back to the Fly

The Fly generated a lot of post-debate frivolity,

including Biden’s use of a fly swatter in a fundraising pitch. Debates in presidential campaigns often disappoint and people need something to talk about aside from each candidate’s delivery and style. The Fly added that this time. Still, it

was serious business as the vice-presidential debate – and we usually only have one – has become an important part in the process of electing a president. With both presidential candidates in their 70s, getting a sense of the woman and man who might replace them mattered.

Voters who want Trump’s policies – if not his style –  can take comfort in Pence’s performance, for all its flaws. He has some of Trump’s capacity for rudeness, but he wasn’t outlandish, just disconcerting. He knows the drill on the Republican agenda.

Harris showed she and Biden are on the same page. We think they have the better of it on policy, character, and preparation. Harris showed herself capable of taking the baton from Biden and running with it should that become necessary, suggesting she achieved her most important objective.           

KAMALA HARRIS AND HISTORY PART I: SHE WHO WOULD BE VICE PRESIDENT

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s selection of

California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate prompts a serious review of the historical dimensions of his choice. Her selection during the 100-year anniversary of the constitutional amendment

giving women the right to vote made even more significant the possibility Harris could very well stand on the U.S. capitol steps on January 20, 2021, raise her right hand, and take the oath as the nation’s first female vice president.

                  

Harris wouldn’t reach that place alone. She’d

    

follow in the footsteps of Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Carol Mosley Braun, and many

others who led the way in getting women, including women of color, voting rights and meaningful participation in American political life. The long road to potentially having a woman one heartbeat from the presidency deserves an examination we’ll present in this post and our next one.

 

Women and Voting

Political movements aimed at gaining women the right to vote sprang up in the first half of the  nineteenth century, culminating in an 1848 convention at Seneca Falls, New York that called for full political equality for women. Congress took up a women’s suffrage constitutional amendment in 1878, but defeated it nine years later. The all-male U.S. Supreme Court rejected theories that the equal protection and anti-slavery amendments guaranteed women the vote.

America’s entry into World War I opened a new argument for suffragists. With women joining the labor force and serving in the military, the idea women should have a greater say in the nation’s political life gained traction. President Woodrow Wilson, facing protests that included women going on hunger strikes after  being arrested for demon-

strating in favor of suffrage, supported a constitutional amend- ment. The measure passed the House on May 21, 1919, the Senate on June 4, 1919, and went to the states for ratification. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the necessary 36^th state to ratify the 19^th amendment.

 

The Racial Divide

Middle class white women ran the women’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 19^th amendment didn’t mention race. It prohibited denying the vote on the basis of sex, but it didn’t uniformly benefit black women. African American women in northern and border states could and did register to vote after the amendment passed. Indeed, when it was challenged as violating Maryland’s state constitution which limited voting to men, one of the women involved was Mary D. Randolph, “a colored female citizen” of Baltimore who had registered along with a white woman, Cecilia Waters. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld their registration.

Things were different in the South, where local officials resisted voting by African Americans of either sex. Literacy tests, poll taxes (outlawed in the 1960s by the twenty-fourth amendment), and other barriers kept many black women from voting. Even before passage of the 19^th amendment, black women

banded together in  suffrage organizations. Ida B. Wells, for example, helped found the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913, likely the first African American women’s suffrage organization in the United States.

Only the 1965 Voting Rights Act finally addressed the problem by eliminating the barriers southern states used in keeping all blacks from voting. Though the statute didn’t mention sex, within a year of passage, it allowed registration of half a million African American voters in the South and ten million by 1980, many of them women.

 

Office Holding

The first woman elected to Congress reached

that body before enactment of the 19^th amendment. Montana gave women the vote in 1914, six years before ratification of the federal suffrage amendment. Jeanette Rankin won a House of Representatives seat from Montana in 1916.  

Harris would go to the vice presidency from the U.S. Senate, where no woman sat until November 21, 1922, when 87-year old Rebecca Felton of Georgia was sworn in to serve one day in filling a vacancy. The first woman elected to the Senate was Hattie Caraway Arkansas’s in 1932. In 1978, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas became the first woman elected to a full senate term whose husband hadn’t been in Congress before her.

Carol Mosley Braun won a U.S. Senate seat

from  Illinois in 1992, ousting Alan Dixon largely over his vote in favor of confirming Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. In doing so, she became the first black woman in the senate.  Kamala Harris became the second with her 2016 election from California. Before that, she’d won two statewide races for California Attorney General, and served as San Francisco’s district attorney.     

Harris has often acknowledged how the career of Chisholm, a New York Democrat, influenced her. Chisholm became the first black woman elected to the House when she won her seat in 1968 and in 1972 became the first woman and the first black person to seek the presidential nomination of a major party.

Chisholm, in advocating the importance of women in public office, once famously said, “Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.”  In line with Chisholm’s view, we see the change the Harris candidacy represents as long overdue. What do you think?

In Part II we’ll look at the nation’s response to female vice presidential candidates and more deeply at Harris herself.