US Vice-President Mike Pence and Democratic running mate Kamala Harris have clashed fiercely over the coronavirus pandemic in a TV debate.

Ms Harris accused President Donald Trump of “the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country”.

Mr Pence said Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s pandemic plan was “plagiarism” of the current White House’s.

Mr Biden leads Mr Trump with 27 days to go to the vote.

In Wednesday night’s 90-minute debate at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Ms Harris was asked whether she would take an approved Covid-19 vaccine distributed ahead of the election.

The 55-year-old California senator said she would not take a vaccine touted by Mr Trump without the approval of medical professionals.

Mr Pence – a mild mannered former Indiana governor known for his steadfast loyalty to Mr Trump – retorted: “The fact that you continue to undermine public confidence in a vaccine if the vaccine emerges during the Trump administration I think is unconscionable.

“And, senator, I just ask you, stop playing politics with people’s lives.”

The plexiglass barriers separating the two debaters seated 12ft (3.6m) apart was a vivid reminder of the pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans.

The president – who is himself recovering from the virus – returned to the White House on Monday evening after three nights in hospital, with his opinion poll numbers drooping.

On Wednesday he declared that catching the disease was a “blessing from God” that exposed to him to experimental treatments he vowed would become free for all Americans.

Source: BBC

Given the age of the two White House contenders, and President Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis, Wednesday’s debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic challenger Kamala Harris is being billed as a critical test in an increasingly acrimonious election campaign.

The televised clash in Salt Lake City, Utah, comes at a precarious moment for the incumbents, less than a week after the president announced he had contracted Covid-19 amid a White House outbreak that has infected numerous high-profile Republicans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, is ahead of Trump in national polls, enjoying a lead of 12 percentage points in the latest Reuters/Ipsos survey of likely voters, with less than four weeks until the November 3 election.

The traditional view among analysts is that presidential debates are unlikely to dramatically alter the dynamics of a presidential contest – and vice-presidential debates even less so.

Four years ago, only 37 million people tuned in for the debate between Pence and Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine, less than half the number of viewers recorded for the first Trump-Clinton face-off.

Source: France 24

President Donald Trump’s positive coronavirus test has undermined his repeated claims that the US is “rounding the turn” in its handling of the pandemic, with just one month to go before the November 3 election.

Trump announced on Friday that he and his wife, Melania, had tested positive for Covid-19, and were going to quarantine at the White House.

Trump is 74 years old, putting him at higher risk of serious complications from the virus.

His physician has said the president is “well” and will continue to perform his duties “without disruption”.

However, even if the president remains asymptomatic, he will likely have to halt in-person campaigning for an unspecified amount of time while he quarantines at the White House.

“It is unclear exactly what that means for a president of the United States, especially for this one who has spent months not wanting to wear a face mask, not wanting to take physical distancing seriously,”

“The White House published a schedule for tomorrow, with various events that he will presumably not be fulfilling. It does beg the question: will he seat a campaign virtually, as his rival Joe Biden has been doing a lot?” Smith added. “Presumably, if Trump is feeling well enough, he would be able to do that.”

Whatever form Trump’s campaign takes in the coming days and weeks, his diagnosis has seriously undermined his attempts to downplay the pandemic and refocus the race on other issues.

In the past, Trump has wrongfully predicted that the coronavirus “is going to disappear”, and even questioned scientists who contradicted his assertions in public.

‘This could be a really significant blow’

Trump has also largely ignored his own government’s public health guidelines, refusing to wear a mask or observe social distancing.

At the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, earlier this week, Trump even mocked his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, for the size of his mask.

“Every time you see him, he’s got a mask,” Trump said of his opponent. “He could be speaking 200 feet away… And he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

With a number of polls showing that a majority of Americans disapprove Trump’s handling of the pandemic — which has claimed at least 207,000 lives in the United States — his diagnosis will likely only compound this opinion.

“This was a day many people feared, many people saw coming, many people thought may well happen, because he was continuing to hold campaign rallies, a couple of them indoors. He was defying often his own public health guidelines on the coronavirus,” Smith said.

Trump’s positive test result certainly complicates his ability to effectively campaign against Biden, who is currently leading in the polls.

“We’ve seen Trump really thrives off the energy of crowds, of holding big events. It gives him a sense of momentum,” Smith said. “This could be a really significant blow to a presidential campaign that is already struggling with Joe Biden well ahead in the polls.”

It is also unclear how Trump’s positive test will affect arrangements for the second presidential debate, which is scheduled for October 15 in Miami, Florida.

Source: France 24

The presidential debate commission says it will soon adopt changes to its format to avoid a repeat of the disjointed first meeting between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.

The commission said Wednesday the debate “made clear that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues.”

One possibility being discussed is to give the moderator the ability to cut off the microphone of one of the debate participants while his opponent is talking, according to a person familiar with the deliberations who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The next presidential debate is a town hall format scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami.

Moderator Chris Wallace struggled to gain control of the 90-minute debate in Cleveland because of frequent interruptions, primarily by Trump.

Wallace, of Fox News, pleaded for a more orderly debate, at one point looking at Trump and saying, “the country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interruptions. I’m appealing to you, sir, to do that.”

“Ask him, too,” Trump said.

“Well, frankly, you’ve been doing more interrupting than he has,” Wallace said.

 Biden on Wednesday called the debate “a national embarrassment.” But despite some suggestions that the final two presidential encounters be canceled, both campaigns said they expected their candidate to attend.

ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, who moderated one of the three debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, said Wallace was put in nearly an impossible situation. Faced with the same behavior, she said she might have called a full stop to the debate for a moment to recalibrate.

She never had the option, technically, to cut off the microphone of a candidate four years ago, she said. It also wasn’t in the rules that were agreed to in advance by the candidates and commission.

“To say, ‘he’s not going to follow the rules so we aren’t, either?’ It’s an unprecedented situation,” Raddatz said. “That was so out of control.”

Twitter was ablaze with criticism for Wallace early in the debate for losing control of the proceedings. That was illustrated by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who tweeted “what is Chris Wallace doing? He has no control over the debate. He asks a question and let’s Trump continue yelling. This is a disgrace.”

By the time he was on “Morning Joe” the next morning, Scarborough had cooled off. He called on the debate commission to act.

“While it was extraordinarily frustrating, I think all of us need to walk a mile in his shoes before saying the morning after, ‘he could have done this, he could have done that,’” Scarborough said.

Some of the president’s supporters felt that Wallace was too hard on their candidate. Trump himself suggested he was also debating Wallace, “but that’s no surprise.”

Wallace even got some criticism from opinion personalities on his own network. “Trump is debating the moderator and Biden,” prime-time host Laura Ingraham tweeted during the debate.

Another Fox colleague, Geraldo Rivera, expressed more sympathy.

“The guy signed up to moderate a debate and he ended up trying to referee a knife fight,” he said.

Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” was not immediately made available for comment by Fox.

Wallace is the only presidential debate moderator this cycle with prior experience, after receiving praise for handling the final Clinton-Trump debate in 2016. The other two moderators are Steve Scully of C-SPAN and Kristen Welker of NBC News.

Scully moderates the Miami debate, which will be a town hall format where citizens get to ask questions. That format may make interruptions more difficult.

“Having prepared for these, the town hall is a completely different event in the debate Olympics,” tweeted David Plouffe, an adviser to former President Barack Obama. “If Trump brings the same nastiness to Florida, it will be doubly painful to watch but it will be doubly painful for him politically.”

The Nielsen company’s estimate on how many people watched Tuesday’s debate was expected later Wednesday.

(AP)

The first debate between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was an “embarrassment” to the United States, says Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications chief.

Their 90-minute debate, the first of three debates ahead of the 2020 presidential election in November, was held in a venue in Cleveland, Ohio. The other two debates are scheduled on Oct. 15 and Oct. 22. 

During the debate, the two politicians kept interrupting each other and trading insults, with the moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, struggling to maintain control over the debate proceedings.

“I don’t think anybody won. That debate, you know, was a little bit of an embarrassment to the country, frankly,” Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital, told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” on Wednesday.

“I didn’t like it, I think most people didn’t like that debate,” he said, noting that there must be a better system to control how upcoming debates are held.

Although US stock futures fell following the debate, Scaramucci said what the markets thought of the debate will only become clearer the next morning.

“I just think it’s a little fickle right now,” said the former White House communications director fired by Trump in 2017 less than two weeks into the job.

“We all saw the debate, it was a nasty debate, it was an interrupting match if you will,” he added. “I don’t think the polls are going to move that much and if the markets have moved because of the debate, it will settle out over the next open if you will.”

Scaramucci, who has previously thrown his support behind Biden, told CNBC that he still believes the former vice president will win the race for the White House.

He said he did not think that Americans are better off in comparison to four years ago when Trump was first elected due to the health and economic crises that resulted from the coronavirus pandemic.

He went on to say that even though Trump cannot be blamed for the pandemic, “you can blame him for the way he’s handled it.”

Scaramucci also described Biden a more likeable figure compared to Trump. “The vice president has the momentum and he’s less polarizing than Donald Trump,” said Scaramucci. “I think the vice president’s gonna beat him.”

Source: Presstv