The Salt Lake City VP Sit-Down Debate: Cracking The Cluster of Carefully-Crafted Questions

Civilized it was. A Smack-Down it wasn't when Moderator Susan Page, print journalist and Washington D.C. Bureau Chief for USA Today, was close to losing time-control of the answers and staying on topic for Loyal-Soldier Mike Pence using more minutes than the debate rules allowed with challenger Kampala Harris consistently asking for equal time.

Readers of this blog can get more details of the back-and-forth for the 9 topics in this second prime time coverage of the 2020 Presidential Election Campaign where voting has already started. If looks are anything - and you know they are - here's an image taken from an article in https://www.axios.com/ with the headline "VP debate brings back normal politics.

 

 

Here's part of what Mike Allen wrote: "

Toward the end, the vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City got personal — about President Trump, a reminder of what this election will ultimately come down to.

Sen. Kamala Harris flashed back to last week's raucous presidential debate, arguing that Trump's "stand back and stand by" answer to a question about white supremacists "is part of a pattern."

• She brought up Trump's response to "Neo-Nazis carrying tiki torches shouting racial epithets" in Charlottesville in 2017.
• "This is who we have as the president of the United States, and America, you deserve better," the California senator said. "Joe Biden will be a president who brings our country together and recognizes the beauty in our diversity."

Vice President Pence responded by sketching a very different worldview.

• Pence told the moderator, USA Today's Susan Page: "I think this is one of the things that makes people dislike the media so much in this country, Susan, is that you selectively edit — just like Sen. Harris did — comments that President Trump and I and others on our side of the aisle make."
• Turning to Harris, he said: "You're concerned that he doesn’t condemn Neo-Nazis? President Trump has Jewish grandchildren."
• Later, Pence said directly to viewers: "Don't assume that what you're seeing on your local news networks is synonymous with the American people."

Harris' advisers studied research about the different ways men and women are judged in public speaking. The former California attorney general repeatedly stood up for herself: