If, as John Nance Garner complained, the vice presidency is “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” then the quadrennial vice-presidential debate is usually worth even less.
Oh, sure, the undercard has produced its share of memorable sound bites, such as “You’re no Jack Kennedy,” “Malarkey,” “Who am I? Why am I here?” and “You whipped out that Mexican thing again.” But the debate, like the running mate, rarely makes any measurable difference in the election’s results.
This year’s debate, between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris, might be worthwhile, though. For one thing, the first presidential debate was unwatchably bad, and the next two might be, too—should they even occur. Yet the two running mates seem more likely to have a substantive debate about the future of the country than those at the top of their ticket managed to conduct. What’s more, both Donald Trump, 74, and Joe Biden, 77, are old men, and Trump is sick with COVID-19. The actuarial chance that the next vice president will have to step up is at a historic high.
David A. Graham: Cancel the debates
But either a Pence or a Harris presidency would represent a substantial shift from a Trump or a Biden presidency. Neither Trump nor Biden is an especially clear expression of his party. The president has abandoned many of the anti-entitlement, pro-trade pieties of the GOP; his challenger, meanwhile, sits decidedly toward the center of a Democratic Party moving steadily leftward. Pence and Harris much more cleanly represent those factions. The vice-presidential debate will be, in effect, a debate between the Republican past and the Democratic future.