VP Encounter Shows You Can't Have a Real Debate When One Party Refuses to Follow Rules

Julie Hollar

Wednesday's vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris may have lacked the bullying and blustering by Trump that characterized the first presidential debate (FAIR.org, 10/2/20), but it still managed to reinforce the overall problem with the 2020 debates: You can't have a real debate if one party refuses to follow the rules.

Sure, Pence's interruptions didn't come close to matching his boss's the week before—though he did repeatedly talk over moderator Susan Page's meek attempts to keep him to his allotted time—but Pence managed to avoid answering nearly every question asked of him, and USA Today's Page did virtually nothing to steer him back on topic.

As FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Facebook, 10/7/20) pointed out, most of the evening felt less like a debate than alternating stump speeches. It's a problem rooted in the running of the debates, under the sponsorship of the bipartisan (not, as Page called it, "nonpartisan") Commission on Presidential Debates, which grabbed control over the debates from the League of Women Voters back in the late '80s (FAIR.org, 8/29/00). Under the CPD, the parties, not an independent organization with the public's interest at heart, make the rules and vet the moderators.

Photos of the White House superspreader event show Mike Pence sitting directly in front of Sen. Mike Lee, who later tested positive (CNN, 10/3/20).

In fact, if the debates were run by a truly independent organization, it's hard to imagine this week's debate would have even taken place in person. Given CDC guidelines that asymptomatic individuals with negative Covid tests should isolate for 14 days if they have been within six feet of an infected person for more than 15 minutes—a category into which Pence almost certainly falls, given the widespread nature of the White House outbreak—the CPD had no business approving the in-person debate to go forward.

Some in the press, meanwhile, unhelpfully framed the question of debate safety as merely a "he said, she said" issue (PressWatchers, 10/7/20). "Pence, Harris Teams at Odds Over Plexiglass at Debate," read a Washington Post headline (10/6/20); to the New York Times (10/6/20), "the complaint [about plexiglass dividers] from Mr. Pence’s staff—which was quickly brushed aside by Ms. Harris’s team—was another salvo in the fraught negotiations over the debate."

Trump's tantrum in response to the CPD's recent move to take the second presidential debate virtual reveals the partisan pressures that render impossible debates that are both safe and edifying.

As I wrote last week (FAIR.org, 10/2/20), when you've got one side whose strategy derives from reality TV and depends primarily upon falsehoods, personal attacks and breaking all the rules, no amount of rule-changing will solve the problem. And so, I repeat: The only reasonable thing for journalists to do at this point is to not just call for an end to these debates, but to call for an end to the Trump presidency.