If that first Joe Biden-Donald Trump brawl turned out to be an unwatchable fiasco, we got something a whole lot more civil tonight.
That’s about it.
Vice-presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Mike Pence chided each other. They refused to answer direct questions. All told, though, it was much more of what we think of as a “debate,” given that they were able to answer each other’s accusatory rhetoric.
I suppose one takeaway was how Vice President Pence talked over Sen. Harris’s answers, to which she would scold him, “I am talking, Mr. Vice President.”
To her credit, Harris didn’t interrupt Pence … except perhaps for a time or two.
I remain committed to supporting the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket. Based on what I witnessed tonight, Pence did nothing to persuade me to even think about supporting his side.
He didn’t answer questions related to the pandemic and his role as leader of the White House response team; Pence sought to pivot at times from a direct question to speak about an unrelated issue.
As for Harris, I just wish she would have answered the question about whether she supports adding to the Supreme Court if the Senate confirms Amy Coney Barrett as the next justice. She danced away from it.
Still, I declare Kamala Harris the winner by a split decision.
The Biden-Harris ticket remains in the lead. I just hope now that they can hold onto it through the end of this most unusual campaign.
I am going to suspend reality for a few moments and pretend I am working for a newspaper and that I am going to write an endorsement for president of the United States.
Here is what it would say:
***
Americans took a gamble in 2016 when a businessman/TV celebrity became president of the United States.
The gamble did not pay off. Indeed, the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, has been an abject failure as the nation’s chief executive. Accordingly, Americans have a chance in just a few days to make a serious course correction.
They can do so by electing Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president of the United States.
Biden served two successful terms as vice president during the Barack Obama administration. Prior to that he served for 36 years in the U.S. Senate, being elected to the body at the age of 29; he would become old enough to serve by the time he took office.
Joe Biden’s love of country has been on full display for his entire time — nearly 48 years — on the national stage.
He vows to restore our nation’s soul. Biden wants to revive what the late Sen. John McCain — one of Biden’s best friends — used to call “regular order” in the governing process. Donald Trump knows nothing about regular order and the slipshod governance that has resulted has delivered all the proof we need of Trump’s ignorance about government and his inability to learn how it works.
Whereas Trump has spoken directly only to his base of supporters, Biden vows to be president for all Americans. He said at Gettysburg, Pa., just this week that he will be president even for those who vote against him. When has Donald Trump ever pledged such a thing?
Trump has botched the nation’s pandemic response. Biden plans to institute a national policy on Day One of his presidency. He vows to institute a mandatory mask policy on all federal property. Biden promises to fast-track testing nationally and to push Congress to invest in the equipment required to protect all Americans from getting infected.
Biden wants to re-engage our allies. He intends as well to challenge our adversaries, not coddle them the way Trump has done. Biden promises to return to the Paris Climate Accords and to return the United States to the World Health Organization.
Let’s also take note that Joe Biden has chosen a capable, dynamic running mate in U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, who clearly is not the flaming lefty that the Democratic ticket’s foes have sought to portray her.
Biden has experience helping revive a fallen economy. He took on that task by managing the nation’s response to the Great Recession in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. It succeeded famously. He vows to deploy that experience to revive an economy that has collapsed under the weight of the pandemic.
Joe Biden, lastly, will deliver a sense of empathy and compassion to a grieving nation. We have lost more than 200,000 of our citizens to a killer virus. Donald Trump has been MIA as comforter in chief. Joe Biden has suffered intense personal tragedy already, with the death of his first wife and his young daughter shortly before he took office in the Senate. He feels the pain of those who suffer during this pandemic.
The nation needs that compassion from the president.
Joe Biden isn’t the perfect candidate, but we shouldn’t demand presidential perfection. We should demand — in the context of this election — that we choose someone who knows how government works and who is capable of working across the aisle with those of the other party.
That candidate is Joseph R. Biden Jr. who, with Kamala Harris as his governing partner, can deliver the goods for a nation that has suffered from too much government incompetence.
I guess you could say I have come full circle on this early-voting matter.
There once was a day when I would resist casting my ballot early, fearing that my candidate(s) would do something stupid or possibly illegal between the time I cast my vote and Election Day.
Those days have been plowed asunder over concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. I now am anxious to vote and to vote early.
Texans can begin voting next Tuesday. My wife and I will venture to First Baptist Church in Princeton to cast our ballots. My hope now is simply to cast my vote and to ensure that it is recorded properly in the Collin County election system, which is as high-tech an apparatus as you’ll see anywhere.
Am I concerned about voting in person? Yes, but only a little. We voted at the church in this year’s primary and we were impressed with the care the poll workers took to ensure we were masked up, that kept appropriate “social distance” and that we didn’t touch anything that didn’t relate directly to the act of voting. Through it all the poll workers were spraying every surface they could find with disinfectant.
We are going to have our voices heard no matter what. I guess my preference would have been to vote by mail. We have chosen instead to troop down the street for just a few minutes to vote in person.
We have heard the message from Joe Biden and others who back him: Vote early, either in person or by mail … just be sure to vote.
Vice-presidential political debates always should be deemed critical to a campaign, given that the principals involved are vying to be next in line to the presidency of the United States.
Tonight’s encounter with Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence has taken on new urgency. I’ll state the obvious reason first: the age of the president and his Democratic Party challenger.
Donald Trump is 74; former VP Joe Biden is 77. I am not being ghoulish in determining that the age of the presidential candidates is a critical part of the VP debate. We need to assess whether either Sen. Harris or VP Pence is ready to become president at a moment’s notice.
We also have this COVID-19 matter. Perhaps you’ve heard, but Donald Trump is infected with a potentially fatal virus. He spent three days in the hospital. He returned to the White House and is continuing to pose an immediate threat to those around him by, um, refusing to wear a mask or observe “social distancing.”
This brings me to an essential question that Harris — or perhaps moderator Susan Page — needs to pose to Pence.
The VP heads the White House coronavirus response task force. Pence needs to answer this question: If you are seeking to stay in office, how is it that you not only have failed to protect Americans — more than 200,000 of whom have died from this disease — but you also failed to protect the president of the United States?Â
A host of related questions can arise from that. Why haven’t you insisted at Donald Trump observe medical experts’ warnings? Are you leading by example? Is the task force performing a worthwhile function if POTUS is ignoring your advice? How can you defend the president’s conduct when he jeopardizes the health of those around him?
I believe Pence’s record as head of the response task force needs careful examination in tonight’s encounter.
Donald Trump simply couldn’t settle for just being a national security threat by virtue of his behavior regarding the Russians and North Koreans.
Oh, no. He had to become infected with a potentially fatal virus and then flout medical experts’ guidelines and rules about how to conduct himself. He has become a one-man “super spreader” of the disease that is afflicting more than a dozen of his key White House advisers, members of the U.S. Senate, top officers among his military command staff.
Trump returned to the White House on Monday, shucked the mask he was told to wear, stood and offered a stiff salute while gasping for breath, then went into the White House to mingle with staffers and employees. Did he observe “social distancing”? Hah! Not even …
Now he wants to take part in a presidential encounter with the man who appears poised to defeat him Nov. 3, Joe Biden. That will occur on Oct. 15. Maybe!
I am not at all sure it ought to happen, with Biden and Trump standing/sitting on the same stage. Perhaps they could do a “virtual” confrontation, with the adversaries sitting in their own environments. Whatever.
I am simply flabbergasted that Trump continues to offer the happy talk that he “we have done a tremendous job,” that the virus is “under control,” that it will “disappear like a miracle.”
Let me be crystal clear. Donald Trump is not cured of anything. He continues to expose those around him to a potentially fatal disease. He came out of Walter Reed Medical Center prematurely. I do not believe the White House medical staff that expressed “support” for Trump’s decision to leave the hospital; I was struck by the absence of the word “approve” when discussing the decision to exit the medical center.
Trump is a menace. He said he would listen to the medical experts, but hasn’t exhibited any sort of wisdom in heeding his own advice. He is threatening our national security by ignoring the recommendations provided by the medical experts all around him.
He isn’t making America great with his reckless, feckless behavior.
On a day when Donald Trump decided to quit working with Democrats in Congress over a coronavirus relief package — sending the stock market straight into the dumper — Joe Biden delivered a high-minded speech about unity and our national soul on the site of a revered Civil War battlefield.
One of these fellows is campaigning like a winner; the other is acting like an expected loser.
Hmmm. Who is whom?
It looks to me as though Joe Biden’s decision today to speak to our nation’s better angels without once mentioning Donald Trump’s name is the winner here. Trump? Well, he’s looking more desperate with each passing day.
Does this mean Biden should coast during the campaign’s final 28 days? Hardly. It means only that he took time today to forgo a partisan attack and sought instead to speak to our higher ideals.
As for Trump, he wouldn’t know a higher ideal if it bit him on his ample backside. He has no view of what’s noble or good. He deals in invective and innuendo. He campaigned that way en route to victory in 2016 and has governed that way as president.
Trump decided today that he wouldn’t negotiate with congressional Democrats to find a solution to a coronavirus relief bill; he will talk after the election, he said. To what end is this man refusing to talk to the “other party”?
I cannot or will not predict this presages a Biden victory. Trump, after all, faced grim odds before heading down the stretch four years ago against Hillary Clinton … and then he won!
Oh, but I do hope we are thrashing our way out of the darkness.
Donald J. Trump is back in the White House after spending about 70 hours at Walter Reed Medical Center.
He is infected with the coronavirus, the one that’s killing Americans every single day.
His response to the virus? Don’t worry about it, he said upon departing the hospital for the residence at the White House. Don’t worry? Is this man nuts? Don’t answer that. I know what you would say … and I would agree.
Donald Trump will never get it. That much is now as clear as it gets.
He doesn’t harbor an ounce of empathy for those who have lost loved ones to the dreaded virus. Trump doesn’t understand what it means to suffer such grievous loss, which is a tough thing to say about a man whose brother died of alcohol abuse. Still, he says things about not worrying about the coronavirus without grasping how those words fall on the ears of those who are mourning the loss of a loved one who has died from it.
I have said before and I’ll say it again that I am hoping that Trump recovers fully from the disease. I want him to stand for re-election on Nov. 3. I also want him to lose bigly. I want Joe Biden to be elected president.
Why? Donald Trump’s behavior while being holed up at Walter Reed and his comments upon leaving it tell me he cannot lead the nation in this dark pandemic era.
What’s more, I haven’t even mentioned until right now how he shucked the mask upon entering the White House.
What do I wish at the end of this bizarre presidential campaign season?
A lot of things, to be candid. One of them happens to be a standard by which we don’t call attention to simple gestures that we used to take for granted.
Former President Obama wrote this on Twitter:
Michelle and I hope that the President, First Lady, and all those affected by the coronavirus around the country are getting the care they need and are on the path to a speedy recovery. Obviously, we’re in the midst of a big political battle right now, and while there’s a lot at stake, let’s remember that we’re all Americans. We’re all human beings. And we want everyone to be healthy, no matter our party.
Donald Trump’s hospitalization, along with first lady Melania Trump’s affliction with the COVID-19 virus, brings to mind the expressions of concern that have come from Joe Biden, among others. Then we have President Obama offering his own good wishes to the man who despises him.
This kind of once-common outreach has been plowed asunder by the venom, vitriol and venality of the past four years. It has sickened me beyond belief. Yes, I have been sucked into it at times and I do regret some of the hyper-angry rhetoric that has poured forth on this blog.
I want a return to civility. They call it “comity” in the halls of power. It’s just another word for civility and courtesy. There has been so little of it coming from the White House and, yes, from Capitol Hill.
Joe Biden spent 36 years in the Senate before becoming vice president during the Obama years. He says he wants to restore our national “soul.” Part of what has been missing from our political discourse has been the common touch of decency that used to be commonplace.
You’ll recall when the gunman opened fire in 2017 on Republican members of Congress practicing for the bipartisan baseball game. House GOP Whip Steve Scalise was nearly killed by the lunatic. When he returned to the House floor, all the members stood and applauded. Leading the applause was House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who said in that moment “we were all Italian.”
One of many fond hopes I have for a Biden presidency if it comes to that after the election is that we can set aside the hatred and the view that our foes are our “enemies.”
It is utterly impossible to avoid putting a political spin on news that Donald and Melania Trump have contracted the coronavirus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans.
I wish a complete recovery for the first couple.
I also believe that Trump should pay the ultimate political price because of what has transpired. He has tested positive for a virus he once called a “Democrat hoax,” which he has sought to play down because he didn’t want to “panic” Americans, which he keeps telling us is “under control” and which he has said will be disappear miraculously.
Donald Trump now becomes the leading exhibit for discussion about the falsehoods he has been telling for most of this year.
The pandemic is not getting any better. We’re in the middle apparently of yet another surge in illness and death.
Donald Trump is running for re-election partly by touting the “fantastic job” he says his administration has done. He has ignored medical experts’ advice about wearing a mask or keeping a social distance from others.
He is now paying a price. Trump is likely to pay a steep political price as well … as he should.
Trump mocked Joe Biden earlier this week because the Democratic Party presidential nominee wears a mask. Unbelievable! Biden shrugged it off with a chuckle.
We are heading now into the final month of the most unusual election season in anyone’s memory. Yes, the election will be a referendum on Donald Trump’s mishandling of the initial response to the pandemic. Indeed, his continued response has been an exercise in fecklessness, too.
There will be no more claims of “Democrat hoax.” Nor will there be any more mocking of those who wear masks or keep their distance from others. That’s all fine. The damage politically has been done to Trump, in my view.
