Why Mike Pence’s debate performance bugged me
We need to talk about that fly.
It was a fly, wasn’t it? If not, it was a bug doing an ace interpretation of a fly, and about two-thirds of the way through the debate in Salt Lake City on Wednesday night, it took up residence in Vice President Mike Pence’s hair, a smudge of black against a shock of white, where it lingered for a few minutes before undoubtedly realizing that there was warmer, more demonstrably human real estate to be had.
Off it flew, and on Pence droned. He never exhibited any awareness — not the subtlest glance upward, not the slightest flinch or twitch — that his head had been colonized. I first found this strange and then realized it was everything. Pence’s years of obsequiousness to Donald Trump had beaten all sensitivity and capacity for revulsion out of him.
How could he be expected to register or exile an itty-bitty pest when he routinely puts up with a great big one? That fly was some crazy combo of metaphor, visitation and karmic joke.
At this point, Pence is the poster boy for unflappability, an automaton of reflexive kudos for Trump in the key of smarmy. He’s bloodless. He’s ice. Add that constipated half- smile of his and he’s weirdly riveting.
Fortunately for Joe Biden and Democrats in general, Sen. Kamala Harris is plenty steely herself, while also exhibiting a discernible pulse. I think she had a very good night. She was too scripted, yes, and painfully evasive when it came to a question about whether Biden would or should pack the Supreme Court.
But she pushed back forcefully whenever Pence tried to paint her and Biden as radical leftists. She kept returning to the subject of COVID-19. She repeatedly reminded Americans of the Trump administration’s sustained effort to abolish Obamacare, at one point staring directly into the camera to explain what that means.
“If you have a preexisting condition — heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer — they’re coming for you,” she said. “If you love someone who has a preexisting condition, they’re coming for you. If you are under the age of 26 on your parents’ coverage, they’re coming for you.”
She assailed Trump’s character on all the right fronts and with all the right passion, so that Pence’s assurances of the president’s integrity seemed as pallid as the rest of him. Was Pence marble or man? The bug, I’m confident, shared my bafflement.
And his evasions were the rival of hers. He never did offer any explanation of how the United States ended up the world leader in recorded deaths related to the coronavirus. He instead tried to suggest that Harris, in calling out the country’s failures on that score, was insulting Americans.
No, Vice President Pence. She was insulting you and your boss.
It was a memorable debate even apart from the insect. ( Now there’s a sentence I never imagined writing.) It was historic: Harris is the first woman of color on the presidential ticket of one of America’s two major parties.
But Pence kept talking over the moderator, Susan Page of USA Today, ignoring her alerts that his two minutes were up so that he could commandeer more time than Harris got. Page was left to sputter endlessly, “Thank you, Vice President Pence. Thank you, Vice President Pence. Thank you, Vice President Pence.” But more than a thanking he needed a spanking.
Bullying comes in many different forms: red-faced and furious like Trump’s; chalk-faced and funereal like Pence’s. Shamelessness, too. Pence’s boasts and lies may not be as gilded and rococo as the president’s, but they’re fanciful all the same.
Pence followed his orders when they were ludicrous, stuck to the script when it was laughable and never betrayed an iota of discomfort, because he never really betrays anything — except the supposed principles he once had.