The Daily Beast reports that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) will attempt to attack Vice President Mike Pence in Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate as a homophobe, in keeping with a false caricature Democrats have painted over the years.
One former Harris staffer told the Beast that “pointing out that the vice president is a homophobic Waylon Smithers is clearly a winning line.” Smithers is a character on The Simpsons who serves the evil Mr. Burns and represses his own sexuality.
Pence is an evangelical Christian who supports traditional family values but has no record of homophobia. Yet many on the left have cast him as a hateful, intoelrant person — most notably former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who used the vice president as a rhetorical foil on the campaign trail. At the Winter Olympics in 2018, figure skater Adam Rippon, who is gay, taunted Pence and refused to meet with him, despite the fact that the vice president was leading the U.S. delegation.
The Daily Beast also predicted that Harris would attack the Trump administration’s performance on coronavirus. Pence has led the president’s task force in tackling the disease. She will cast that effort as a failure, given the president’s own diagnosis.
Moreover, just as Joe Biden cast Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as a liar in their 2012 meeting — for no particular reason — Harris intends to attack Pence as a liar, the Beast suggests.
The debate will take place at 9:00 ET in at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Both sides have agreed — after the Pence team relented — to use plexiglass dividers to minimize the risk of transmitting coronavirus, though both candidates have tested negative for the virus for several days and will be 12 feet apart.
Story cited here.
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