Very true - unfortunately. Me, I LIKE having smart people i charge! 
Wow. Just Wow.
Though I would have settled for Pence to just grab the fly and pop it in his mouth like an M&M.
The moderator was a wimp, but that’s not the only problem going on here, folks. Pence has an extremely low regard for women. According to his religious beliefs, women should be subservient to men in all ways, so he has no respect for them, especially strong women. His talking over the moderator and over Harris was just his way of trying to assert dominance. It showed his contempt and disregard for what they had to say.
Republican senators should have dumped Trump in impeachment and let Pence take over.
Pence saying a lot of Biden’s Covid-response ideas are in hand with what the Covid-task force he leads has been proposing is an indirect dig at his boss. Because that means it’s all Trump’s fault that nothing has been enforced. But if Pence was POTUS now he’d be pushing it all through and Biden would have nothing to counter.
Exactly she would have been described as angry and hostile, implying that she was irrational. She had to walk a tightrope that a lot of viewers are oblivious to, at least male viewers. Add to the fact that she’s a woman of color and she had to be even more careful.
Harris needed a lot of fact checking! Repeating debunked things.
I am wondering what those who thought Harris performed poorly expected? She repeatedly drove home the failure of leadership theme, she called out enough BS, she asserted her law and order background enough without leaving herself too open, and repeatedly came across as the adult in the room, correcting the word salad diarrhea when Pence went on and on. She also stood her ground on equal time when needed. She spoke directly to the camera. She related to the public, and especially the public that is sick of the Trump/ Pence BS and bluster- she acted as their voice many times.
She did dodge the SCOTUS question, so watching how that plays out for the rest of the month will be interesting.
More than anything I think, Pence came across as the old misogynistic out of touch white guy that he is. He continued to hold fast to the “Christian Conservative” message as if that was what people still wanted, and tried the liberal/ progressive boogeyman approach, with the mandatory AOC mention and association. That message is not hitting home anymore, with exception to the base voters that he and DT are relying on. People want progress. Not necessarily radical changes, but progress nonetheless.
You might find this interesting. It’s a pretty good summary of the ones that stuck out to me:
I pretty much agree with most of this, but I don’t think it was nearly as much of a shitshow as the first presidential debate, mainly because you didn’t have one candidate who was a pathologically insane mental toddler. But I thought the moderation was much worse.
For all the criticism that Chris Wallace got for the first debate, I thought Page was much worse. Her timid approach to shutting Pence up was certainly maddening. While it’s true that Harris also took advantage to try to get equal time, there was a very stark difference in their approach to answering the questions, and that’s what really pisses me off. Pence evaded question after question with non-answers that were just off-topic ramblings.
It began with Page’s excellent question about the spectacularly high rates of COVID and COVID-caused deaths in the US compared to all other advanced countries. Pence of course had no answer, and just blathered on incongruously about the terrific job that Trump was doing. Yet he was allowed to get away with it, with Page failing to point out the he never even came close to answering the question, and then it happened again and again throughout the debate. Neither Page nor, disappointingly, Harris, called him out on his obvious evasions. He wasn’t called out on his many lies, either, but that was in the predetermined rules, the idea being that fact-checking could be done later. But being allowed to completely evade critically important questions was just not acceptable, and I hope it’s widely publicized how blatantly Pence failed to do so.
He seems to have adopted Trump’s strategy: as long as your pie-hole is flapping, you’re doing well. What you actually say is immaterial. Certainly works for the typical Trumpist acolyte. People who actually comprehend words and their meanings, in both the questions and the answers, will see it differently.
That fact-check needs an optics-check. As far as Trump’s core supporters are concerned, he did call the virus a hoax; specifically referring to Democrats’ criticism came later.
“Shrill” – that’s the one we gotta watch out for.
The amount of gymnastics Harris has to do right now is just staggering: be assertive, but not too “aggressive” or “shrill” or “nasty” or “bitchy” or any of the other attacks wielded at women and especially women of color ALL THE TIME.
(My bold)
Okay. 'Nuff said.
I’m guilty of using this one, but … I want to offer a defense along with it.
I was chatting with my mother, and mentioned that HRC’s voice – particularly her laugh – was nails on a chalkboard to me.
But … I said … the mere sound of DJT’s voice – his voice, itself – turns my stomach.
So … did that make my use of the word ‘shrill’ misogynistic ?
I’m definitely in the camp of those who believe that Harris had extra factors that were unique to her – lines she had to be extremely careful not to cross – because of sex and race. I think she handled that bit quite deftly.
I’m not using (and wouldn’t use) the term mysogynistic, but I implore you, let’s puuuhhhleeeese not go down that sidetrack in this thread.
I also cannot bear the sound of trump’s voice, and the last time I listened to more than a few words from him was his debate with Hillary. I don’t watch TV news, but if a sound-bite of him comes on the radio, I turn it off and count about 20 seconds.
In general, I don’t think that debates move the needle that much and vice presidential debates are even less consequential. I think that the danger is in making an error, like having pink eye with a fly on your head while behind a plexiglass screen to protect other people from you.
This is what I thought last night too. But being eternally optimistic, after a full nights sleep, I am willing to believe that perhaps as long as they are far ahead in polling they are already working on being “an administration for the whole nation - not just the ones who voted for me”. Perhaps by not attacking the stuff everyone knows about anyway they can more readily absorb reasonable Trump supporters starting in January.
Oxymoron
Remember back when we had a president who knew how to handle a fly?
English …!
Do. You. Speak it? or:
“What does two minutes look like?”
I didn’t watch it but was following twitter.I do think Debates are pointless, all republicans will think their candidate slayed and all democratic the same. When has that Not happened?
Ann Coulter tweeted that the pick of Harris as VP was affirmative action. She said Amy, Pete or Bernie would have done better. I think after watching Pete on FOX this morn, everyone is wondering why he isn’t the candidate.