Sure, the vice presidency has a constitutional standing, however in essence the talk was not likely any totally different than a cable phase that includes dueling press secretaries from the opposing campaigns. If folks have been searching for a window into what Pence and Harris can be like as presidents themselves, they’d solely be happy if their hope was for a president who praises the one that chosen her or him, and who solutions questions with rehearsed strains that always are barely or in no way responsive to what’s requested.
It’s laborious to see—Wait, is that fly on our display at house? No, it’s really on Pence’s hair isn’t it? Beg your pardon. As we have been saying, it’s laborious to see how this vice presidential debate may consequentially alter the principle trajectory of the race or the underlying reputations of the working mates. Neither of the candidates claimed to know Jack Kennedy, and neither seems to be like a near-term prospect as being the following Jack Kennedy.
Some of the well-known quotes concerning the vice presidency—not as well-known because the one from Vice President John Nance Garner concerning the job as “not value a bucket of heat piss”—was from the primary individual to carry the job, John Adams: “I’m vice chairman. On this I’m nothing, however I could also be every little thing.”
No vice chairman in trendy occasions has been nothing. The workplace has steadily expanded in employees, and normally in governing affect, though that’s all the time granted or ignored on the discretion of the president. However by way of presence within the public creativeness working mates nonetheless are usually nearer to the nothing finish of the spectrum than the every little thing finish.
Even individuals who arrive within the vice presidency with formidable earlier achievements and public profiles, from Lyndon Johnson to Nelson Rockefeller to Biden himself—are likely to shrivel of their public personas. It’s the nature of the job and the discount that folks settle for to be near energy and to immediately achieve standing as extra probably than anybody else really to grow to be president himself or herself. Pence was beforehand a governor, and Harris is a senator from the nation’s largest state. Each are fluent audio system who had no bother occupying the stage. However neither, within the quantity two function, naturally invited commentary on the strains of, “Why isn’t that individual on the high of the ticket?”
Harris didn’t reply to Pence’s reminders that she had as soon as proposed a ban on pure gasoline “fracking,” and easily repeated that Biden doesn’t help a ban on fracking. That’s in line with what working mates are purported to do, nevertheless it served to underscore a actuality: My unbiased views don’t matter anymore, besides presumably in personal if I don’t get crossways with the president. Pence understands that actuality, and has lived by it, greater than anybody.
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