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The Chilling Normalcy of Mike Pence’s Debate Performance
Everything is not fine. But to hear it from the vice president, it’s all going according to plan.
Since President Donald Trump’s diagnosis with Covid-19, decency compelled most people to wish him well despite whatever schadenfreude they might have secretly harbored. Boaters for Trump may have sunk, but Trump himself seemed immune to the consequences of nature or law. Then a cascade of diagnoses stemming from the White House’s Amy Coney Barrett celebrations suggested a superspreader event. Within a week, some people broke down and started tweeting about karma and acts of God.
And perhaps in a cosmic sort of butterfly effect, whatever comeuppance is at work, last night in Utah it landed atop Vice President Mike Pence’s snowy hair.
The vice presidential debate carried the timbre and intensity of normal discourse—the tone, the demands for fair time, the avoidance of questions the candidates didn’t want to answer. It was notable for its resemblance to other debates, an experience that left viewers less wrecked than the out-of-control debacle a week ago. Of course, the extraordinary nature of Sen. Kamala Harris’s candidacy, as a Black and South Asian woman on a major party presidential ticket, made it historic. The professional and personal authority with which she responded to Pence’s denial that implicit bias exists was powerfully necessary. But Pence’s retread of talking points he’s uttered so many times in this campaign were also notable — not for their animatronic delivery or folksy demeanor but in their undeniable detachment from reality. It takes a near-bottomless gall to tout the administration’s work on the pandemic as Covid-19 continues to sweep the nation and threatens the president himself. There’s great nerve in trying to rattle a nation by evoking what could have happened, in a parallel reality, if under the Obama administration the swine flu had been as dangerous as Covid-19, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described a “complex, multi-faceted and long-term response” to H1N1. We are still living through a year stacked with the actual traumas of Covid-19.
In the past four years, Pence has dutifully mastered the art of feeding and celebrating Trump’s alternate…
