PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE:  This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

The other day journalist James Fallows warned against the media trend these days that translates all political issues into what he called “horse-racism.”

The question always is, “Who’s ahead.”  Rather, it should be than what policy issues are being discussed and what solutions are proposed, however flawed the discussion may be.

Great point.

And, thus, I say, we should not fall victim to “horsed-racism” in rating the now-several-days-old debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris.

The question is not who won.  It is what did each say about issues that should affect our vote in just a few days and how did their expressions of their character affect our perception about who would be best as VP (though, of course, we vote essentially for the top of the ticket). 

The vice president debate was far removed from the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  While there were interruptions between the VP candidates, it was possible to glean a few nuggets from the encounter, not possible when Trump yelled throughout his contest.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the VP debate:

• Harris has a better answer on the pandemic.  Listen to scientists.  Don’t make things worse by violating every norm, as Trump has done, with nary a word of warning from Pence.

James Fallows in the Atlantic Magazine put it this way:  “With the first words of her first response, Kamala Harris presented what was essentially a prosecutor’s opening argument about mismanagement of the pandemic.  ‘’he American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country,’ she began, looking not at Page (the moderator) or Pence, but directly at the camera. ‘Hundreds of thousands of people dead; millions infected; one in five American businesses closed; “frontline workers treated like sacrificial workers … They knew what was happening, and they didn’t tell you.’”

As an aside, there was an interesting time when a fly landed on Pence’s snow-white hair—and the vice president did not react at all.  Which prompted some analysts to suggest that the fly was a symbol — through all of the scandals and the crimes and the disasters of the past four years, Pence was the man who pretended not to notice just as he pretended not to notice the fly on his head. 

• Harris has a better answer on the economy.  Create taxes on the rich to prod the country out from under the pandemic, not to mention reducing the ever-growing federal deficit.  And, in response to Pence, Harris said the Biden-Harris Administration would not tax families if their income was under $400,000 annually.

• Harris has a better answer on racism.  It exists and it is past time to do something about it, a comment which resonates given her own status as a Black woman.

So, make a voting decision on the merits of the candidates, not on a notion of who’s ahead.

This footnote:

A recent, unprecedented editorial from the New England Journal of Medicine puts the case against the Trump administration clearly: “The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. . . . Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government, causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.”