The Left Should Not Be Excited About A Harris-Pence Debate


Written by Peter Heck

I watched her speech thinking it might change my opinion. It didn’t.

So I’m just going to be honest and say if there’s one thing I don’t understand, it’s the pretend giddiness being exhibited by the left when they anticipate the coming Vice-Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. For instance:

Don’t get me wrong. Precisely no one is surprised to see Stephen Colbert posting this kind of side-splitting, high-level humor we’ve all come to expect from him. Somewhere along the line – perhaps working with Jon Stewart – Colbert became convinced that one-sided political advocacy is how you do comedy.

His August 11th (the day Harris was announced) Twitter feed could have been easily confused with the DNC’s.

But in this case, it’s not just Colbert. There exists a self-evident sense of joyous anticipation for the moment Pence has to square off against Harris. I’m left asking why.

I know she’s a former prosecutor, but everyone saw her shockingly bad debate performances in the Democrat primary. Her strongest moment was when she was attacking Biden for his position on bussing. But how strong could it have been given that he is the nominee choosing her to tag along and not vice versa? And don’t forget that she leveled that attack right before staggering and stumbling herself when asked if she would support federally mandated busing to address school segregation today.

And “staggering and stumbling” is the best description of how Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard left Harris when she went after her egregious record as a prosecutor:

There is no way that attack should have blindsided Harris. There is no way that she should have been unprepared to defend her record. That’s debate prep 101, after all. And yet Harris was so dumbfounded, so speechless, so thunderstruck by Gabbard’s offensive that she never recovered – in that debate or in the presidential primary. She consistently lost polling ground and dropped out two months before the Iowa Caucus.

What makes anyone think that she will perform better against Pence? Pence is, after all, one of the more polished speakers in D.C. The former talk radio host has a tranquil personality by nature and is rarely if ever unprepared.

It could be that all the excitement on the left will prove well founded. It could be that Harris will come out of the blocks and pummel Pence with prosecutorial precision. All I’m saying is that such an occurrence would be totally out of character for both Harris and Pence, and that the far greater possibility is that the left is setting themselves up for a big disappointment.

This article was originally published at Disrn.com.


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categories Federal Elections, Political | | datetime August 22, 2020 6:30 AM