Truth And A Nation In Contempt: Missed Opportunities In The Latest Vice Presidential Debate
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Are you exasperated yet? We are nearing the elections, and it seems like the nation is becoming more and more in contempt. The skill and communication on both sides of the aisle are not effective and cause more division. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom catch us up on the current state of the nation and where truth gets lost in using a divisive language that is doing more harm than good, especially at a time where we need more unity than ever. They discuss the latest Vice Presidential debate between Sen. Kamala Harris and Mike Pence and the missed opportunities that could have given people assurance. Tune in as Bill and Tom share their insights and more.
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Bill, I have one question for you. Are you exasperated yet?
I am exasperated because the skill and communication on both sides of the aisles are not effective. It’s causing more division, and for people to promise to be the healer of the great divide and saying, “We’re going to bring back together,” and then doing things and using language that is divisive is exasperating and tiresome. The need for awareness, care and effective communication isn’t being met. If a person has a conservative value then it’s not that mindset that gets people to collaborate with you. It’s not that mindset to cause the level of healing that needs to take place. It’s not available. It’s very challenging.
I bet a lot of our readers might be surprised that after the vice-presidential debate, both of us are exasperated because it was a decidedly toned down more civil affair or event. After the first five minutes, a lot of us are breathing a sigh of relief, “Thank goodness this isn’t going to be another bully argument for 90-plus minutes.” I was in that camp of people that was relieved at that point. Having said that, it was unfortunate to see the lack of skill that these professional politicians have.
You could see Senator Kamala Harris was the prosecutor. That came across pretty quickly. She was being the prosecutor. You can see Mike Pence was doing his darndest to hold up the Donald Trump torch, “I’m with Donald Trump. I signed up for this. I’m going to try to make him look as good as I can.” Each of them independently could have been so much more effective. It would be helpful to understand, Bill, what you saw in that regard and maybe some things you might have said differently.
I appreciate that, Tom, because the skill of mastery in language has to do with you’ve got to stay close to the certain need that you’re trying to make the point on. If it’s about fiscal responsibility, which is a primary Republican talking point, we want to be fiscally conservative. What does fiscal conservative looks like? What it looks like is not adding a $2 trillion debt with a tax cut. That is not fiscally conservative. That is a choice that you’re making to not have money come into the federal government because you don’t like the way the federal government is spending money. You’re not telling truth about that because you wouldn’t make such a commitment for future generations to clean up the debt. That’s actually what took place through the tax cut.
What it did was it starved a lot of programs because now all of a sudden that there’s this debt, where are you going to take the money from now? That’s the thing that’s disheartening because the need for honesty isn’t being met. The things I would have chosen to say would be, “As the moderator, we’re going to be talking about taxing and spending money, what we value as a society.” Do we want to spend on the military only? Do we want to increase our military might? That was one of the primary things that took place when the tax break was taken place. Are we going to pay for some social services or entrepreneurial support? What are our other choices? All of a sudden, it’s a discussion about a budget line item called, what is the value of the military towards us?
Do we need that much?
If you're going to create little digestible soundbites that land and are memorable, you need to prepare them.
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The military contractors will be like, “Do you want to write me a blank check? I’ll figure out a way to spend it. I’ll do this with it. I’ll take the cash and I’ll be glad to spend it. Do you want it on this kind of plane? We’ll figure out where to spend it because no one’s going to vote against that.” No one is going to vote against the military. The exasperations I have is that there’s not a value-driven question that’s asked. How are we going to care for our people? It looks like it’s a simple sentence, but the value is caring for Americans. Is caring going to be equal or not or is caring going to be, who has the most money gets the best care? That’s what we’re doing.
See how this one works. Healthcare is not the issue, it’s caring for our citizens. The moderator with their question can say, “Is America going to care for its citizens fully or is caring going to be conditional on how much money that the person has or how much insurance does the person has? Is that what caring looks like?” All of a sudden, caring for things is going to look like caring for all of our citizens then is not the twenty million not having insurance because that’s not demonstrating that you’re caring for every citizen.
Bill, let’s take an example from the debate. There was a point at which they were talking about the Coronavirus. Vice President Mike Pence was saying what a wonderful job the administration had done because of their swift action, they’d saved all these lives. Kamala Harris as she’s talking about it says that they had people over in China that were there to help look out for us and protect us, and the administration pulled them out.
Here’s my point, they were each trying to make statements of facts. The fact-checkers can pour over all of it and decide what was truthful and what was not. That is not going to be effective at that moment. They’re each making statements. They’re saying, “No, what happened is this. That’s not true. This is true.” Nobody watching necessarily knows what to believe or you’re probably going to believe what your biases are lined up with. How would Kamala Harris, for example, be able to be more effective talking about some of those things with the virus?
You can start with a fact, but you’ve got to go to empathy right away. You start with the fact and it sounds like this, “On such and such date, this is when the virus was being brought up because we had people on the ground at this date in China and it gave us the opportunity to see that this was going to be a big thing. Our military warned because they saw what China was doing by building an emergency hospital the size of things. In a month, they built an entire hospital and deal with the contagion as it showed up there. They got way ahead of it. They build it. Feel free to go on YouTube and watch how quickly they built that hotel. It’s well-documented. It would be interesting if American leadership would have done the same thing in order to prevent Americans from getting sick in the same way that China did. China prevented their virus from spreading throughout their country. We didn’t choose to do that. Under your taskforce on such and such date, you pulled these people out of China, which then didn’t allow us to know the extent of the virus and find out how bad it was going to be.”
That’s where the empathy would come in. “What care and protection for the citizens of the United States would have looked like is this would have taken place in this city and this city. Instead what the President said on these dates is that these Democratic people weren’t doing their job. Meanwhile, that’s not a state thing. It’s a government protection thing. As in charge of the task force, where was your voice, Mike Pence? Why were you not fighting hard enough for the American people? You should have stood up for us and you didn’t stand up for us.” Notice she’s taken the fight to him. “You did not protect us.” All of a sudden, it’s like, “What you did is you followed your leader in a very loyal way, but you didn’t fight for the Americans. You are not a responsible person, Mike Pence.”
That was the missed opportunity because he is the head of the Coronavirus Task Force. It could have pivoted to him. Let me be Mike Pence here for a moment and say, “The President did a fantastic job addressing this virus from the beginning. If he hadn’t taken decisive action, two million people would have died.”
Yes. I remember that press conference when he came out and said that there was nobody going to die. All of a sudden, there might be 250,000 people that are going to die. There might be two million people that are going to die. What wound up happening is that there wasn’t any action that followed that press conference. We’re going to look at north of 400,000 or almost 500,000 people that are going to die somewhere between now and in June 2020 if your administration stays in power.
You wouldn’t be able to hear a pin drop after that one.
If you guys stay in charge, we’re already at 250,000 and he did promise us 250,000 would die. I’m going to hold them to that because there’s a press conference that showed 250,000 people. It’s not going to get up to two million because the American public is now getting a sense that even President Donald Trump can get sick with the Coronavirus, with all the protection that he doesn’t use. There’s a certain number of his followers who are going to follow him and not use protection the way he’s not using protection. The Americans are getting wise. The NFL is all wearing masks. The NBA is not letting anybody in. The sports team gets that they need to protect their most valuable assets. The President doesn’t protect his most valuable asset and his team that is now 15, 17, 19 people sick up to this point. By the way, Tom, I’m just doing this off the top of my head. With a little bit of research, I would have those numbers very clear.
Kamala Harris, the prosecutor, she knows her numbers. You saw that she was writing things down as he was saying things. She could come back with points.
It’s too late. All that stuff can be done ahead of time. You don’t need to know what he’s going to say next. All you’ve got to do is watch what he debated last time. You know what he’s going to say next or look at the talking points. They’re going to go and use the swine flu example? Do you want to use that example? Why is she not ready for that example? It’s my curious sentence. If I want to coach Mike Pence now and this just goes to say, I can coach Mike Pence on the other side, it would be something like this. “With this leadership, we are doing the best we can with the decisions we’ve made by trying to make this a states’ rights thing and allow the states to take initiative. Our belief is that the federal government isn’t responsible. The states need to take more leadership on this.” They didn’t tell the states that ahead of time. The states can’t negotiate an international contract to get PPE.
In the political world, people promise things that they can't deliver a hundred percent.
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It’s a little bit of a losing battle on their side because they’re advocating for something state’s rights. That means states need to make their international decision-making. Guess what California did? They made their international contracts. They won’t screw it. “You aren’t going to do it. We’re going to make our agreements over on this side to get our PPE this way. We’re going to be stuffed up.” That’s why on a scale of 1 to 10, California is like a level five right now of danger, where all the other states that do not have the financial acumen or value that California has. Alabama is number one. Wisconsin is number one. On a scale of 1 to 10, they are the number one danger.
Number one and not at a level that they can do much to help themselves. California is bigger than a lot of countries on earth.
They’re the sixth-largest economy. You’re taking the economy of another country, which California manifests. You want to call California liberal. Look at what the liberal economy has done for itself. It’s made itself into the sixth biggest economy because it knows how to play both sides of the socialist capitalist narrative and knows how to do both narratives.
I thought there was a missed opportunity for Kamala Harris at the debate too because Goldman Sachs that day or the day before had changed their guidance on the economic outlook. This is a nonpartisan organization. All they care about is finance and how the economy and the numbers are going to be better or worse. This is apolitical. They came out and said, “If the Democrats sweep, meaning get Joe Biden elected in the White House and take over the Senate, the economy will recover faster. There will be 7.5 million more jobs created than will be created in another Donald Trump administration.” They knew that it’s likely that the Joe Biden administration will increase taxes. They said, “Even if they do increase taxes on corporations and wealthy people, the reality is there will be so many more people of the masses contributing to the economy because they have jobs. Those companies will do better than if these people don’t have jobs and the companies have lower taxes. It was very black and white.
I feel disheartened that she didn’t prep on those things to get them into smaller soundbites. A classic mistake that’s made is “I need to explain to get understanding.” You do not have to get an explanation to get an understanding. Empathy creates a greater understanding of the depth of experience. Here’s what growth looks like. Growth looks like the business is to have empowerment that’s balanced with taxes. Not fewer taxes create more growth. That’s not true. If you’re going to create these little digestible soundbites that land and are memorable, you need to prepare them.
When you know what the other person’s talking point is, then we’re going to more trickle down. “It sounds like, Mike Pence, you’re advocating some more trickle-down economics. If we come in, the tax and spend, you think that that trickle down is going to continue to work. Americans, does trickle down work for you over the last few years if you’re a voter right now? Has trickle down got down to you? Some of you folks might have got a tax break. What did you again say that they got, $2,000 tax relief a month for a family of four? It’s an interesting talking point. Regrettably, that talking point does not reach the levels of society that we needed to. It’s a great talking point, but no help.”
Look at how quickly I dismissed it, but it’s like you’re calling it for what it is instead of trying to explain that it’s not true. You and I both know and we’ve been down a three-year journey of being together or more. I’ve got to think about that, but three solid at least.
We’ve been down this journey. It’s like in the middle of a sale, you don’t want to explain too much. You don’t need to explain too much. You’ve got to talk about what their needs are.
If you explain too much, you lose the sale. You address their needs and get out of way. In sales, they’re going to just, “Can you take my credit card, please?”
As a business guy with integrity, you deliver for whatever the price point you’re delivering at a high-value product that’s efficient and effective to get people’s word out into the world. You’re delivering because you’re in integrity piece. The only problem is in the political world, people promise things that they can’t deliver to 100%. They know they can’t deliver 100%. The only problem is that they’re delivering it only to get the vote. They are not delivering it to make a difference. That’s where politics needs a communication upgrade. We can use that as a Twitter quote right there. Politics needs a communication upgrade so that trust and mutual respect start to be restored.
We’ve got to get mutual respect to be restored. Otherwise, what will happen is what happened at the end of the Civil War, which is the Whigs split and the Democrats over here. It was the death of the Whig Party. Any of you historians out there know what I’m talking about. I’m not going to go into an explanation of the good reason why the Democrats and the Republicans need to clean up their narratives. The pressure right now on the Republicans is there are people from the Republican Party that have had it because you promised us fiscal responsibility, then you gave money to the corporations and to the rich. You balloon the deficit and now who’s going to clean it up? The next fiscally responsible Democrat is going to show up because right now you’re demonstrating that there’s not a fiscally responsible Republican because all of them are retiring.
It’s amazing how that has flipped in the last several years. It’s completely flipped.
Who’s the last president that balanced the budget. Do you know?
Politics needs a communication upgrade so that trust and mutual respect start to be restored.
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Bill Clinton, isn’t it?
That’s right, zero. He came on there and says, “The budget, the thing, the deficit is zero. You wanted it and you Republicans voted for it. The Democrats worked with you to get it. We got to zero. Our economy’s doing pretty damn good. We still have social issues. We haven’t done anything about racism. The crime stuff is there, but we compromised and we got to the middle somehow.”
There was a budget surplus when Bill Clinton left office, and 9/11 happens and we get into deficit spending like crazy over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fast forward here we are now many years later after two economic depression level collapses. It’s out of control. All of that spending that occurred has occurred with every administration since Republican and Democrat, Obama included because of 2008, 2009 hole that we have to dig out of and save the auto industry among others.
Save the banking industry and also save the insurance industry that was backing the banking industry. I’m thinking of AIG. AIG insured all those folks and collapsed. There’s one of their buildings down the street that they had to take their sign off. Three years later, their sign went back up on the building because they got bailed out and they didn’t have to lose all of those jobs.
This was the Too Big to Fail?
The Too Big to Fail energy that’s showing up. Money is important to us because it’s our illusionary instrument of value. It’s not the thing that’s most valuable because we’re not going to trade money for our kids. Many people trade their money for their wellbeing. There are some things that I’m not going to pay for that, but some people do pay for that.
This exasperation is coming from a place of contempt, is it not?
It is. Contempt and looking at what does the contempt stands for? That thing is to cut into and create a divisive language where I’m the morally superior person. You can see it in the debate. Both people were contemptuous to each other. Mike Pence as the moral authority, he has people that believe that he is the moral authority for that party. They’re going to give Donald Trump a push. He’s not the moral authority. Mike Pence is the moral authority. He looks down on like, “You Democrats, you will this,” and Kamala Harris does the same on her side, which is, “You guys do this.” They’re in that space of contempt, which is contempt is the thing that leads you to a divorce.
You don’t want to divide one nation under God. You don’t want that indivisible peace with liberty and justice, which is also not taking place. We’ve got one party advocating for liberty, which is I get to choose to wear my mask or not wear my mask. Divisible is being split with the contempt narrative. It’s not healthy for us. That’s the thing that we’ve got to watch as a nation is that we can’t keep doing the adversarial, “No, my side is better than your side.” You’ve got to have demonstratable actions.
Here’s a good example. Donald Trump said, “I’m not doing the stimulus package until after the election.” That’s called a deal or a bribe. He says, “He’s the best deal maker.” This is a bribe. This is not a deal. I’ve seen many people on Twitter or one or two people write down, “That’s because the Democrats put pork in it.” In other words, they put extra spending on things in it. That’s what a collaborative democracy does. They say, “We need to give some things to these other areas, not just to this one area called this voter and you can’t bribe them into it. It’s, “I am buying your vote. If you vote for me, you’re going to get these things.” By the way, to let all those voters know, it’s like, “That looks like a bribe.” You’re just going to bribe the voters.
Kamala Harris could have said that, “That’s a bribe. Bribes don’t work well in deals. Deals aren’t one-sided that you get to stick it to one group of people, then the other group of people is left hanging out. That’s not a democracy, is it? Is that what you’re advocating for? That one side or only the people that vote for it. By the way, we’ve done this already. You’ve already tried to bribe us a couple of different times. Your administration shut down the government three times. You shut down the government the longest in our nation’s history. Is that the way you’re going to do this? Are we going to get more of that instability? Are you going to create more unpredictability for government workers and other people that depend on the government? Is that what we’re doing next?
There are a lot of entrepreneurs that depend on the government to be stable so they can have an entrepreneurial contract with the government. Is that what we’re doing again? For four more years, we’re going to do that.” Scary honesty is not adversarial. It’s like, “This is the honesty.” Tax and spend as a winning narrative is something that the Republicans have run on. The only problem is that they’re the ones that are spending tax money on big corporations and they’re not including that as a spend. They’re saying, “No, it’s not a spend.” It’s giving us the opportunity to defund things we don’t like. I feel exasperated, Tom. Thanks very much for bringing this up. When communication isn’t doing scary honesty, then you can’t work on the problem. You can’t promise a plan you don’t have because you don’t have a plan.
NThat was one of the exasperating things of Mike Pence saying, “We’re going to replace Obamacare.” Where’s the plan. There was no plan provided. I don’t think that he saw enough consequences of that statement in the debate. Kamala Harris didn’t have the skills to pivot.
It’s like, “Great. I’m so glad I brought up your plan. Like his taxes, it doesn’t seem like it’s materializing. Was that the plan that everybody voted down, that John McCain voted down with the thumbs down? That was the plan. That was your plan. He decided he wasn’t going to go with that. I’m glad one person had integrity in the Republican Party in order to do thumbs down on that.”
Bringing up John McCain, Donald Trump would have hated that.
He would have gone like, “At least I saved twenty million people off the insurance rolls and they couldn’t get it done then from that on. The blue wave came in 2018.” This has been an exciting conversation.
We probably made a lot of readers even more exasperated, but we all need to recover.
There’s a way out, Tom. Everybody that’s reading, please know there’s a way out. There is an off ramp on this. I know we can get back to restoration. I know that we can get back to honest dialogue and facilitation. I know we can. I’ve got stories of people that would say, “Bill, that was impossible. How did you do that?” I said, “There was a way out. There’s a way back. There’s a way through to restoration.”
I look forward to that, Bill. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Tom.
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