Covid-19 takes centre stage for US vice-presidential debate

Salt Lake City

US VICE-President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris clashed over the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic on Wednesday night, with Mr Pence defending the White House's record without addressing its fundamental failures, while Ms Harris accused him and President Donald Trump of presiding over a catastrophic failure in public-health policy.

Ms Harris, the California Democrat who is Joe Biden's running mate, delivered a comprehensive denunciation of the Trump administration's policies, ranging from the economy and climate change to healthcare regulation and taxes.

As she attacked Mr Trump, the vice-president sought to recast Mr Trump's record on the pandemic and other issues in conventional and inoffensive terms, often in plain defiance of the facts.

Mr Pence made misleading or plainly false claims about White House policies on a range of subjects weighing down Mr Trump in the presidential race.

He claimed that the president had a plan to protect people with preexisting medical conditions though he does not, and repeatedly claimed that Mr Trump would always "follow the science" on climate change, though the president has spent his term denying the scientific consensus on global warming and dismantling environmental regulations.

Ms Harris used the debate to pursue two goals: to reassure voters that she and Mr Biden are not as liberal as Republicans claim, and to carry out a persistent set of attacks against the Trump administration.

With a firm and careful performance aimed at keeping pressure on the Republican ticket rather than transforming the race, she appeared to avoid any misstep that would have given Mr Pence and his boss the chance to shift voters' attention away from the public-health issues that have dominated the campaign.

She opened the debate by calling the White House's response to the disease "the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country", and saying Mr Pence and Mr Trump had "forfeited their right to re-election".

She charged them with dissembling about the cost of the disease as it was first hitting the country. "They knew, and they covered it up," she said. "The president said it was a hoax. They minimised the seriousness of it."

In a pattern that would endure throughout the debate, Mr Pence sought to rebut Ms Harris' criticism by picking and choosing components of the administration's response that he could cast in a relatively favourable light, including Mr Trump's imposition of a travel ban on China, while talking around the fundamental issue - that the disease has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and shattered the country's economy.

He credited Mr Trump with leading "the greatest national mobilisation since World War II" and attempted to minimise the differences between the two presidential tickets going forward where the coronavirus was concerned.

Towards the end of the debate, the moderator, Susan Page of USA Today, directed the discussion towards election legitimacy, asking Mr Pence if Mr Trump would concede the election should Mr Biden be declared the winner. He did not answer the question at hand, but did express confidence that the country would have "a free and fair election". NYTIMES

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