Election 2020: The Misogynist and the Fly
What we witnessed last night during the debate between Sen. Kamela Harris and Vice-President Mike Pence was a fly, first because the fly on Pence’s crown episode will affix this debate for future recollection and second a blaring example(s) of misogyny, slurped from the sides of the Vice President’s smirks.
Consider that we witnessed in real time Wednesday evening as the “intellectualized” version of Trump’s “pussy-grabbing” blurts from 2016: misogyny delivered to an anxious male audience, which like the earlier episode didn’t “goose” the male vote as much as alienate the female vote.
Another attempt at “pussy-grabbing” America?
Stupidity and insouciance got a second life on Wednesday. The reach-out to the “white suburban college educated woman” was scuttled in place of garnering the “white non-college educated blue collar male” vote.
Both strategic parsings flopped and are flopping. Trump and Pence work the margins of the disaffected polis: offend, expose and goad the underbelly to extract votes, exploiting male rage and its counterpart female weakness.
Pence is not clever despite what his enablers say. His misogyny is not original. His misogyny masquerades as gravitas. It is not compassionate, which perhaps could be explained. Pence’s misogyny is under spoken and snarky, a “you know what I am talking about” brand of innuendo. Little compassion here: rather a passionate-less “do I have to repeat myself again” whine.
Enter the fly.
Let’s reconstruct Pencian misogyny as a play. Call this “Misogyny in four acts.”
Act One: Look at Daddy’s little girl!
The girl’s prosecutor experience wrapped up in a neat bow. A prosecutor, that’s really great. Just like all the myriad of down ballot elected and appointed prosecutors upholding the status quo. Nothing special. Limited political chops. Not realizing that his opponent is the first elected woman of color to the office of Attorney General of the “second largest justice system” in the country.
Act Two: A Coven of witches
Pence repeated Harris’s advocacy of the Green New Deal 5 times during the debate. ‘She’ and AOC too. Inferring that her running mate didn’t embrace it. So ‘you and your kind’ are subversive; you and the GND are going to take away real men’s jobs. Wait! Where’s Markey, where’s Bernie, where’s Inslee? All men. Real men. All advocates of GND.
Act Three: Professional women can have families, too.
Wow. Look at Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney-Barrett, “whose nomination I am enthusiastic about.” Wow. Good for you! Wow. And wait, she has a large family: “We welcome ‘a big family’ to Washington.” Wow. Good for us: large families! See? I support women. I just don’t see you. You are invisible to me. Wow.
Act Four: Real men interrupt. Real men obfuscate.
That Rose Garden “Superspreader”? I am going to change the subject, like all real men do. “The American people know better.” “The American people are smart.” They know what’s right. Democrats are dumb. You and the Democrats are missing the point. We survived the Rose Garden: survival of the fit, the strong: we survived and that’s what’s real. End of story. 210,000 dead from the virus? Yet, we survived. Lucky us. End of story. So why bring up the deceased, the suffering? Why be “negative.” We survived. Why call out our collective ignorance? We are smart. We know better.
Epilogue
MSNBC contributor and former Republican Party Chairman of all things Maryland and national (RNC), Michael Steele cited this COVID-19 dodge as an example of Harris falling into “Pence’s trap”: “Harris ended up answering Pence’s question.”
Asserting accountability is not weakness. It’s answering the question that misogyny reveals: is what you do, how you behave, what you have “accomplished,” of value?
October 8, 2020
