The Press Box - Pence-Harris Debate Instant Reaction

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker react to the 2020 vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. They discuss each side's game plan, who came out victorious, and how they expect this debate to impact the candidates' respective campaigns going forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, media consumers. This is the press box. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here with your instant reaction to the vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. Woo! We're going to talk about Pence ignoring the time limits. Harris saying, Mr. Vice President, I'm speaking. And oh yes, that fly that landed on Pence's head

and just stayed there. All that after a quick word from our sponsors. There's no point in David and I breaking. breaking down the vice presidential debate. If you're not ready to vote with Election Day on its way, have you figured out where you're going to vote yet? Hit up Ballotready.org to find your polling place. Did you know you can vote before November 3rd in most states?

Check if you can mail in your ballot or vote early in person at Ballotready.org. That's Ballotready.org. This is way important to wait. Do it now. All right, David. Your first impressions of tonight's debate? Is it too soon to bring up the fly? Hold on.

A better question. Is it too soon to have opened this beer? Hold on. Listen, my first note is that I'm really mad at the fly for just not to throw out all this great pink eye material that I had been storing up for the first hour of the debate. But if you want me to make a serious point and I'll struggle to make it, it's that. Kamala Harris was supremely impressive. My big takeaway was that Pence does a really good job of making the Trump agenda platform, whatever, sound reasonable.

I think in a different world, we would say palatable, but what shown through more than anything to me tonight was that I don't think anybody would vote for the Mike Pence platform. I don't think there's a constituency. and I don't want to make any like turd polishing jokes too early again but I just it just felt like it felt like in debate terms it was like Harris was like an A and and Pince but Pince was like a you know B minus something like that he was in there but content wise I just don't think it was there was any competition what do you think I think first of all I have the words turd polishing somewhere in this Google dog so it is

It is not too early to talk about the fly, and it's not too early to say the words turd polish. Let's just put that out there. I was amazed just at the performative aspects of it. First of all, I was kind of wondering whether Kamala Harris was going to come out and do a thoughts and prayers for Trump at the beginning of the debate. Nope. She went right in, right? Greatest failure of any administration in the history of our country.

Then she went right to the Biden happy warrior look, right, that we saw from Biden last week. Mike Pence insults me. I'm going to smile. But when Mike Pence tries to cut me off, nope, nope, nope, nope, that's not going to work. I'm going to say, Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, I was speaking. And by the way, what a contrast in the split screen to Harris smiling, looking engaged Pence, especially the first part of the bait, just looking peevish and pissed off. I thought that was really interesting. I just thought, I almost completely agree with your grades. I thought Harris had just about a perfect night tonight, given everything. She had a really, really good night tonight.

Pence trying to, as best you can't, as you say, to sell Donald Trump had an okay night, right? Bulldozing through the time limits, trying to just run out the clock on all the segments, had a pretty good night. And I guess I do want to start with Mike Pence so when we talk about it. What was his game plan tonight, David? don't you think it was basically to do the Trump game plan, but a much softer spoken version of it? Yeah.

I mean, he actually did the like the respectable version of Trump policy, but the tune of the song was the respectable version of interrupting Trump, right? I mean, it was basically the same thing. I mean, listen, his game plan coming in was like, thank you for your question, but I'd like to talk a little bit about the playlist I listened to on the way over here, right? I mean, like, no matter what, it was a, it was an evasion or a deflection. And, and, and his best moment of the night was, I mean, I guess was it was trying to get Harris on the record about packing the court. Yep.

But even that was a, was an evasion, right? I mean, he was talking, they were talking about pre-exist, the question was about pre-existing conditions. And that's what led him into that thing. I mean, we can talk about that in more depth. But he was certainly interrupted. He was certainly trying to sort of maintain a stranglehold on the kind of terms of conflict. But and to a large degree, I mean, I felt like he was effective. When I saw that's what he was doing up front, I kind of, I kind of gritted my teeth,

thinking that this is going to be really awkward. It seemed like a lot of his, I mean, Pence has been a serviceable to good debater for his entire career. Yes. There were definitely points where it felt like he was being. hamstrung by whatever mandates the campaign had given him, whatever coaching the campaign had given him. But overall, I mean, if the plan was just to interrupt and to, and to, you know, get one or two gotches, I guess it was somewhat successful. If the plan was to have a flylight

on your head and just turn the entire debate into a, into a meme, then, you know, so let's start lighting fireworks, because this guy just did exactly what they wanted to do. I think you hit on it there, which is that Mike Pence is a really good debater. This is not the debate he would have wanted to have where he had to bulldoze the time limits and just constantly try to bring up things like, oh, but wait, wait, what about court packing? What about that thing? Joe Biden did that one time. That's not an ideal Mike Pence, right? Mike Pence wants to sit back and smarm it up and be clever and be the likable one on stage.

He had to be the unlikable one on the stage tonight. Yeah. He really did. And you could tell that wasn't an especially comfortable place for him to be. I did love the turd polishing him because coming in, I was like, what is he possibly going to say? He's very skillful at this, right? Well, when Kamala Harris said Trump did a bad job on the coronavirus,

Mike Pence's response was, are you saying the American people have done a bad job on the no, she wasn't? I wanted that to keep coming back. That would have been an incredible refrain. If every time, at every, every comment that, I mean, every negative comment that Senator Harris made, if it was just like, are you saying that the American people are polluting the environment and contributing to global warming? He said that like nine times tonight.

I know. He kept answering with the American people. And it's true. Kamala Harris is not going to beat all of the American people in a debate. There was another, there was the other one where Harris criticized Trump's doctors for giving misleading information about his health over the last couple of days. Mike Pence's answer,

I've been so touched by the outpouring we've received from, get ready for it, the American people. That was his answer for everything. right it was this just little thing and then really trying to turn the corner and hit at joe bide you also notice the thing he did tonight david he would ignore a question or even a new topic in the debate would start and he would go back to the last topic yeah and be like oh no no no no i want to talk about something else that she just said for some reason he felt like he could not leave a single charge lying on the table tonight which is something we see in debates right i think joe bryton

Biden had a little bit of that last week, but it made for a really strange kind of ragged performance, did it not? Well, yeah, because structurally, and he, you know, talked over his time and was, you know, repeatedly sort of had to be kind of cut off by the moderator. Kamala Harris certainly went over her time a few times too. But overall, structurally, this was a much more sort of traditional debate format. It was just like question, answer. And then a lot of times the questions were specifically tailored to each candidate, right?

So it would be like, we're going to talk about whatever, the economy. This is your question, Senator Harris. This is your question, Vice President Pence. It felt very structured in a hypothetical way. But then when it actually got to the, if you didn't speak English, you might think this was an incredibly structured debate. But the actual content of the answers had very little to do with the question that was being asked, right?

I mean, coming from Mike Pence. He constantly went back. And yes, there was an element to which he wouldn't let certain subjects lie, right, or die or whatever you want to say. But much more it just felt like filibustering, right? It's sort of like he's like he was comfortable on four subjects. And just as long as there was an opportunity to keep going on one of those, he took that opportunity. He's very good at what aboutism. You notice that when Harris brought up the coronavirus, he said, well, what about the swine flu?

everybody at home was going, what about the swine flu? When Harris was criticizing their response to the coronavirus, he said, well, you know, Joe Biden almost plagiarized his plan from our plan. And by the way,

did you know that Joe Biden was a plagiarist back in 1988? Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like, but it's almost too headspinning a what aboutism that I don't know that any of that actually really connects.

I'm not sure that the plagiarism accusation is anything other but like like a cute story about a about a you know an old man who is who is more of a wild thing in his heyday or right you know i don't think that's going to land at all um we all did things we regret like plagiarizing a speech from a british politician listen yeah pants some guys in the fraternity and uh yeah uh but the i don't think that his i mean yeah the what about i think the What Aboutism is, number one, I mean, just pure evidence that their platform or their campaign is totally empty and devoid of ideas and arguments, right?

I mean, if you just kind of have to do, if you have to basically be a 24-year-old Twitter troll in a debate to fill time, you know, then like you're not, I mean, if you're not arguing good faith, then you're just, you don't have good content, right? And so I do think that there's the what about. to that extent was it just felt really, really empty. Even the points that were that were valid, I thought were just, I don't know, it felt like something that would have made a lot more, would have had a lot more potency coming out of the president's mouth, right?

Because he knows how to land an insult just by like the tone of his voice and the, and, you know, his posture. Mike Pence just, the what aboutism just didn't, doesn't work for him. he has a tweet from NBC's KZ Hunt. If you can't answer the question directly, you are the one who is losing, which is a pretty fair summation of what happened tonight.

I noticed two other things about Pence, and then we'll move on. He had this tick that he almost never looked at Harris when she was looking at him. Did you notice this? She would do the turn to address him. Yeah. And he would wait till she kind of looked back at the camera before he looked at her.

I did notice this. And part of me, at first I was like, maybe the camera angle that I'm looking at makes that is making me see a thing that's not there. And then when I got to look at where they were actually positioned, I was like, actually the camera angle is doing a disservice to the degree that he refuses to look at her. I think that, I mean, it was a, you know, if there had been more wide shots, I think it would have been much more awkward for the vice president. But yes, he constantly looked down and then looked up at the end. He would not make eye contact with her, which is, it's like an okay debate tactic, I guess, but is going to rightfully be read as something more significant than that, something deeper than that. And the one time that he talked over sort of performatively, the one time she sort of let him continue,

he went on for about five more seconds and then just, you know, seated the conversation back to Harris. It didn't seem like the whole, the technique was particularly effective. And that's what I'm talking about him not, him being put in uncomfortable position. I don't think Mike Pence wants to be the interrupter. I really don't think that is his preferred mode. But he knows how badly he and Trump are trailing in this race, right? He knows the stakes of tonight. He knows he has to, quote, the old.

ultimately cliche I saw on every show before the debate started, stop the bleeding tonight. So you have to get out of your comfort zone, right? You can't be, you know, I'm Mike Pence. I'm sitting back and just making sense to the American people. You've got to, you've got to be in this kind of grading attack mode. Can I say one thing about Pence before we totally move on? He didn't have an answer. He didn't, he didn't totally avoid the question, but he did not have an answer for the abortion question that I thought was it. a pretty straightforward, a good question that was posed to him. Yep. And this is a, we've talked about this in the show before. This is a, a real problem for Republicans overall.

I mean, you can, it's a very, you and I can understand how this could be a very big problem for, like an economic Republican who had been sort of, you know, I'm talking about politicians, senators, congressmen, whatever, who have been embracing the kind of religious conservative voters to, to, you know, run up their numbers. And now suddenly this thing is a, you know, having another Supreme Court justice makes the abortion issue not just a hypothetical issue, right? But it's, but it's a thing. It's a real issue for someone like Mike Pence, too, who is someone who really, really believes that abortion should be illegal. And it's something that he can't say. And you can see Mike Pence has a, and we talked about this when, when were we talking about him lying? What was the thing? He was on the air defending Trump and it was, and he just made an ass for himself because

he refused to lie, but he was clearly misdirecting everybody. But he doesn't want to lie about this. He wants to go out there and say, yeah, abortion should be legal. I signed a bill into law to mandate that women pay for funerals for miscarriages. Like, this is who this man is, but he can't say it, right? And now he's in this, like, incredible position of having to, I mean, I honestly don't believe he wants to get out there and lie. I think he wants to dissemble.

I think he wants to bullshit. I don't think, I think that I believe this man doesn't want to lie, but he gets out there and now all he can say, I mean, the one thing he believes more than anything else in the world is a point that he can't make in a debate. And that just sort of exemplifies this entire, the entire political position he's put himself in. He didn't necessarily sign on for all the eccentricities and evil of Trumpism, but he's put himself in a really untenable position to be a politician, a public figure. I mean, and it's, and it's shown through tonight. He had nothing there. Yeah, it's really interesting because Susan Page asked a good question. If you were governor of

Indiana, what would you want the law in Indiana to be regarding abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned as a very interesting way to ask a question. And as you say, he skipped it entirely, then sort of came back and gave a real general answer about abortion and the sanctity of life, quote, unquote, and all that stuff later, but did not answer the question. We'll keep fighting for it. We'll keep fighting. That and, I mean, people, I saw people online who were kind of touchy about the fracking issue and rightfully so, like, whatever. But there were a couple. of the points where well we can move on to Kamala Harris now there are a couple of points where it seemed like she maybe was not it was not interested in in saying the the right thing for

fear of offending you know a tiny percentage of people but um and the Democratic Party overall the Biden campaign has chosen to talk about health care over the right to choice right but but you know, she avoided the, like I thought it would have been one of the most potent parts of the debate because yes, Mike Pence very clearly

doesn't want women to be able to have abortions and you know, totally danced around it. The turd polishing of his that I just found the most unbelievable was we're talking about that Rose Garden Super Spreader event, which we now

know. And his line was that people in the Rose Garden were, quote, Destined for the coronavirus. Destined for the coronavirus. If you want to talk about spinning meets this kind of weird quasi-religious sort of language there, destined for the coronavirus. Oh, man. Yeah, I knew that he was a serious Christian. I didn't know he was a Calvinist. It was a... The predestined, David, for the coronavirus? Yeah. That whole thing was very, very, very strange. I mean, I was conflicted about this. I kind of went into today half wondering if it was, if this entire debate was going to be about

the president getting coronavirus, right? I mean, like, you could have talked about that for an hour easily. Oh, that could have been subjects one through nine tonight. But yeah, I mean, you mentioned the swine flu. That whole thing was just utter nonsense. Like you said, the only reason anyone knows what the swine flu is is because people register it as like a positive talking point for the Biden campaign. right? And then, I mean, and it's, I don't know. I mean, it was, it's something to answer, right? It answers an unanswerable question, which is what about your conduct of the coronavirus? You got nothing, right? So, hey, what about the swine flu? What about the swine flu? And listen, and like we talked about how the fly, I joked about how the fly got the, you ruined all my pink eye jokes. But I mean, listen, not a representative sample of America, but the degree to which people were focusing on his, the oddity of his left eye.

and trying to read coronavirus symptoms into that, I think is kind of, listen, does it bear mention? Maybe not. But is that a thing that, you know, I think like there were probably grandmas at home thinking about, yeah, probably. All right, David, more on the vice presidential debate after this quick break. Let's talk about Kamala Harris. She had a very simple game plan per axios that was complicated to carry out. She wanted to tie Pence to Donald Trump, right? She did not want Mike Pence to cover Donald Trump's record in this glitzy wrapping paper and to resell it to the American people as something other than it was.

That is a simple mission tonight. A couple of things that I thought were really interesting tonight. One is she got the coronavirus question first and she was able to answer that question first. So right out of the gate, she gives us very powerful answer. They knew about this disease, but they didn't tell you, right? They knew, but they didn't tell you. The other thing she did tonight really well, David, I think, was she was really, really tough. Very early in the debate, you will let me talk, right?

A lot of phrases like you respect the American people, Pence had brought up respect when you tell them the truth, right? And the other thing is, you know, Mike Pence has this trick in debates. People wrote about this a little bit this week where he's good at getting under the skin of his abonance of pissing them off. Yeah. I tweeted a couple of stories into our. timeline where people talk about that. It's really interesting because I thought, if anything, I thought she pissed him off early and really did a good job at keeping her cool, right?

When he brought up plagiarism or when he would bring up random things that are just designed to annoy the other candidate on stage, she was really good about keeping her cool, smiling, and going right back into the subject of town. What was that? I'm sorry, I don't have my notes. I don't think I can't see this in my notes, but there was a moment at least one time where he actually started nodding in agreement with one of her points. disputing him. I mean, he was, he was really off, like, off guard. I felt like through a lot of,

a lot of what, a lot of the things that Kamala Harris said. I thought she was really effective. I was there, I mean, listen, I know that we said, and this is an obvious thing about this debate, the, both the, both the presidential candidates are old men, 74 and 78, I believe I said 75 or something, or 73 and 78. This, you know, this debate, one of these people could be, could be president. you know, in the next four years, you know, I mean, and I don't, I hope that's not too gloomy for me to say, but, you know, the president has coronavirus right now and his opponent's older than him. I mean, it's a real consideration. Part of me wonders if we're

heading towards the future where you nominate the person, you nominate someone who's, who has the whatever credentials that the, the party machine wants to get out there and be president, but that the vice presidential nomination, the vice presidential selection is much more significant, right? I mean, if we're, if we're destined for a future of Joe Biden's and whatever, the Republican Joe Biden's, because I do believe the Republican Party is going to institute some, some, some stricter criteria after Trump made it through, right? I mean, it's going to be a, it's going to be a future of Bidens and Bushes. I, you know, maybe these VP debates will take on a whole new level of significance. Tonight,

what Kamala Harris was able to do was make the case why she should be president. you know i mean was make the i mean and certainly and certainly make the case why joe biden should be president because man if she's number two that speaks well of him well first of all it was her best debate in the cycle she did she did a number of them during the primary period was by far in a way her best performance from beginning to end she's a one-on-one debater i mean that's it i mean she's a prosecutor and i will add this david just to just to bump it up it was way better than joe biden's performance last week oh yeah needless to say right she gave such a much crisper difference right. Biden cares about workers. Trump cares about rich people. Putting Amy Coney

Barrett on the Supreme Court is not just about abortion rights, but it's about protecting the Affordable Care Act, right? It was just a much more obvious, this is, this is door number one, this is door number two, then Biden was capable of delivering last week. I also thought she had those great one-liners when she was talking about Trump's taxes and she said when she's like Trump being in debt and she said, when we say in debt, it means you owe money. to somebody. Just stopping to say that and to underline just what that means, that was very, very effective. And I'll give you one more thing that she, I think she actually borrowed from Biden and perhaps

even improved was the trick of looking straight into the camera. People wrote about how I think I'm stealing this or somebody on Twitter, but Pence loves to look into the camera. I mean, that, right, that's a Mike Pence move, just kind of shrug his shoulders and squint his eyes and look into the camera. Kamala Harris was the one that owned the camera. night looking into the camera and delivering. And so I'm going to talk directly to the American people and I'm not going to mess with you over here. Yeah, I mean, Biden did a really good job in the last

debate of trying to connect with the American people. When he looked into the camera, it was like you, you, you were right there. I am talking to you. Senator Harris did something different, I think. And maybe it's a subtle distinction. But when she looked at the camera, it was to make a very specific point to help explain something like you just said and to explain a point that was being discussed at that right at that moment it wasn't so much a specific emotional connection that she was striving for it was a emotional connection that she probably achieved just with her eyes and nothing else but it wasn't like some emotional plea it was hey you right there this is the what matters and and and and i thought that was she did a really good job of it we should also know

because this is in the background, right? When a female candidate comes out and speaks in front of a nation in a form like this, they are playing in a totally different game, right, than a male candidate. We saw this with Hillary Clinton. Remember you see Hillary Clinton's tweet last week? Somebody said, Hillary Clinton would have loved to have told Donald Trump to shut up like Joe Biden did. And Hillary Clinton's back, you bet I did, right? I saw this tweet from Maya Watson, the amount of mind Olympics Kamala has.

to do to not come across as angry, emotional, combative, but also be firm, warm, honest direct. She did a marvelous job of that tonight, right? And by the way, it's really, really stupid that we grade, we as a society grade candidates differently, but she did a marvelous job tonight. She really, really did. Yeah, and I think that's, I mean, in some ways, that that's indirectly the point that I was, that I was trying to make earlier, is that it's not just that she had to be quote unquote presidential because Joe Biden might not live for more years. That's a really dire way of saying it. But she had a much higher bar just presentation wise to the way that she was going to appear

on stage next to Vice President Pence. She achieved that with just amazingly. I mean, she is a, like, I mean, the fact that I'm sure many people, myself included, walked away saying, yes, she should be president is all needs to be said. Let's talk about the moderator, Susan Page. She is the Washington Bureau Chief of USA Today. I saw an interesting Twitter consensus, which was this. She asked really, really clever questions. And I agree, they were much sharper and sort of more interesting than many of the questions. Chris Wallace asked last week. There was just one problem. She didn't make the candidates answer the question.

So you had the situation where they were skipping around, again, mostly Pence. They were ignoring new topics. And the debate got a little bit out of her control. Yeah, I do think, I mean, maybe this is, we'll be totally forgotten and maybe this is not a significant thing. But it did seem like she had a deliberate, she made a deliberate choice just to continue talking over both candidates when they went over their time. where she wasn't going to raise her voice, she wasn't going to do anything to actually disrupt them. And this is much more Mike Pence.

She wasn't going to do anything to disrupt Mike Pence. But she sure made sure that whatever soundbite he was going for during that overtalking was going to be, you know, overdubbed with her saying, Vice President Pence, Vice President Pence, Vice President Pence. So, I mean, I don't know if that, and that's the sort of thing that might discourage somebody the next time out. And there's not going to be another vice president's,

obey and Trump will not be discouraged. But there was a little bit of, it seemed that that was a decisive move. But yeah, I mean, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? I mean, she came in knowing that this is going to be, she, I mean, the entire infrastructure of this debate came in knowing that this is going to, there's a strong possibility this was going to happen. And I mean, more than anything, it was Kamala Harris who gave structure to the debate, right, by insisting upon her own right to speak. Oh, absolutely. I also wanted to touch on some of the jockeying behind the scenes, David, that started before the debate.

They moved the desks from six feet apart to 12 feet apart after Trump's coronavirus diagnosis. Kamala Harris asked for and got the plexiglass shields between the two desks there, which gave me a little bit of a sports announcer before the game vibe, you know, where we always see them in the booth and there's a plexiglass shield now. between them. That was kind of interesting. Mike Pence's office had scoffed at the idea that there would be this shield. Katie Miller Penn spokeswoman said, if Senator Harris wants to use a fortress around herself, have at it. And then updates Stephen Miller, who is Katie's husband, was diagnosed with COVID-19 on Tuesday.

I don't know, I didn't read any of the TikTok about this stuff, but it really felt a lot like the bite that the Trump campaign agreed to the Plexiglass. And then when Trump got back to the to the White House, he was like, what do you? you know, what's he's doing. And they had to go and they had to retract. But yeah, I mean, that whole, I mean, that, this whole thing is just so, I don't know what you do. I don't know what you do. I mean, it's like, you know, I, I, I, we, none of us will be surprised if the

vice president is diagnosed with coronavirus tomorrow, right? And yet you have to go sit on stage next to him. I mean, the whole thing just seems, I don't know. I mean, there have been people trying to reconstruct the timeline saying, that Trump might have, I mean, had an idea that he was, he'd been infected during the last debate, you know, and who knows if that's true. But like, this is the, this is the hypothetical that you're dealing with when you go, go on stage. It's not a joke. Yeah. And that's what's so weird, right? I mean, we're, we're in this thing where all those kinds of scenarios are actually

believable, right? Or at least you could sort of imaginable in something. Yes, you're, I mean, and also you're watching a presentation that you have people sitting in desk chairs, like so many of us around the world right now. The one thing we've learned over the past six months is there probably is no reason for Pence and Harris to be in the same room, right? And let alone, I mean, in the same city

even, you know, but like, you know, we're going to put them on stage and risk, you know, just infection and potential death because that's the way we do things. While I wake for some instant polls, should we talk about the twin obsessions of the debate, Mike Pence's eye

and the fly that landed on his head and stayed there for several minutes. I need to say this. Before the fly, now the real portion of the podcast begins, right? The rest, this was all prelude. Go ahead, I'm looking at Twitter right now and Jeff Goldblum is trending,

which means my capper joke for the end of the podcast is ruined now. Not only do I not have any pink eye jokes, my closing line about who should play, who should play the fly on SNL is ruined. You couldn't have thought that would last, by the way. That was, well, no. I saw that last like 10 seconds after the fly.

Go ahead. I before the fly and actually before the pink eye thing really started landing, I was paying attention to Twitter where these two phrases were trending. Has Pence and does Pence were both trending. And I know that doesn't make a lot of sense, but you click through and it's a lot of like, does Pence even believe a word he's saying? Or has Pence been paying attention the past four years?

or you know does pince pick out his own clothes or does his wife do it form there's obviously many iterations of this but it's a lot of just the sort of passive aggressive uh you know like pince bashing and um you know that then was sort of superseded by the pink eye which you know what are you going to do and then and this is not the I mean listen this is not the first time that like somebody's eyes a candidate's like eyes you know filtered through whoever's TV and probably Photoshop have become a big thing. There was something deeply weird about his eye, but like... But this is the first time in the middle of a pandemic where we're all on edge that that is

happening during this kind of television event, is it not? Yes, yes. Oh, you go to Bob Costas at the Sochi Olympics or something, but it wasn't like in the middle of a national, international pandemic. It was, we're all on edge, right? And just want to make sure everybody's healthy up there on the stage. I was just thinking if he definitely has something, even if it is just pink eye or something. It is impressive that they have like put enough steroids in his system that it's only

in one little corner of his eye. And what would they do? I mean, like, what would they have done if Vice President Pence had shown up with just like his eyes just like heavy and like oozing? I mean, do they, do they cancel the debate on the spot? It's a, it's a tough one, right? It kind of has to go on, right? You can't say, I'm not feeling well. You know, that's kind of a problem, right? You got to go out there and. Well, certainly not the Trump campaign. Some overwork Twitter jokes about the fly. Not only the David Cronenberg movie, but I saw The Fly Who Loved Me.

That was one. Also like flies to shit. That was another big thing. David, the weirdest low-key background effect of the night. Was it just me or did you hear a person repeatedly coughing in the auditorium? Oh, I saw people commenting on it, but I didn't actually hear it. No. It's always weird in public right now when somebody has a wet hacking cough a couple of feet from you.

If you are in a vice presidential debate, again, in these kind of circumstances where something really bad has just happened to the president, somebody with a wet hacking cough a couple of feet from you would really, really freak me out. Oh, absolutely. I think if I were on the stage, I would just stop. And just one more, David, a worst dirty trick of the evening. This was reported by the spectators Amber Athy. The Trump campaign is leaving a ticket for Tupac Shakur at tonight's VP debate because Kamala Harris

called him her favorite rapper alive. And then she adds, this is not a joke and was confirmed by Trump campaign senior advisor Jason Miller on a press call. They left a ticket for Tupac Shakur. Even the dirty tricks have gotten really, really lame. That's all you got? It's hard to imagine who that joke is landing with, right? And the gotcha is that she refers to.

to a deceased rapper as her favorite living rapper when asked the question. I mean, it's just, it's just so, it's just so dumb. It's so dumb. Again, if that's, if that's all you got, then, you know, why bother? If we had cousin Sal here, David, I would ask him, what are the odds that there will be a Biden-Trump debate next week? And then maybe secondarily, what are the odds that they will be standing on the same stage? Biden said he'll only show up if Trump isn't contagious? I mean, Trump was certainly fainting at avoiding, trying to get out of the debate, too, whether or not

that was because that was in the early stages of his diagnosis and he didn't think he was going to be able to make it. But so far, it does feel a little bit like, you know, two kids in the schooly yard who were just like, you know, desperately hoping that somebody holds both of them back when it actually

comes time to swing. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm not seeing any instant polls online here. So we'll have to, uh, we'll have to deal with that next week. I'm expecting enough for both sides to declare victory, unlike last week when it was pretty obvious for Biden. But I think, well, listen, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, but I just think Harris had the better night. I really think she did. I think she had the better night. I think that she did an incredibly good job, but actually just like laying out the things that the Biden campaign stands for, uh, which I think will, you know, continue to not be the, maybe not the objective even of Biden.

Like I said early on, I think that Pence did a fairly good job at sort of making Trumpism or, you know, the Trump campaign seem a little bit more comprehensible, but I don't think that there's much to Trumpism absent the personality, absent the delivery and the demeanor. And so I'm not really sure what that did. Listen, if it was a draw, that's a huge win for the Biden Harris campaign. Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. I mean, it's just we're 20, what, 27 days away, 26 days away is people who are probably listening to this. The polls, if anything, are, I mean, the outlier polls are more in favor of the Biden campaign than anything else. And all the rest of the polls just seem really sort

of petrified. It's, I don't, I certainly don't think, I mean, yes, Pence might be able to come out, the Trump campaign might be able to come out after this and say that Pence won the debate, you know, on points or something. But it didn't feel like enough. It didn't feel like what he set out to do. And that's just another, you know, symptom of, well, this campaign is in disarray for a lot of reasons right now.

But, but, you know, he needed to do a better, I don't know what he could have. possibly done to swing things, but he didn't do it tonight. Would you say that half of those polls are petrified like a fly in amber? Does that get us around the David Cronenberg joke? He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Grislemaid production magic by Erica Servantes. Back Monday with Robert Costa, the Washington Post,

and more fallout from coronavirus debate, etc., etc. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.