Election Town Hall: Gee Scott, Michael Medved highlight ‘civility’ of VP debate, outlook for WA governor
Oct 13, 2020, 8:34 AM | Updated: 1:49 pm
As we approach Nov. 3, we’re holding a series of virtual election town halls to help you prepare for the upcoming general election.
In the third edition of this series, KIRO Radio’s Gee Scott and AM 770 KTTH’s Michael Medved join Ursula Reutin to discuss the vice presidential and gubernatorial debates that took place last week.
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“Nothing wrong with virtual debates,” Medved started as the three radio hosts greeted each other from their own homes.
Scott and Medved began by talking about their impressions of the vice presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris.
“I think that actually it was such a relief that it wasn’t Trump versus Biden,” Medved said. “I agree with the consensus opinion that the Trump versus Biden debate was the worst televised debate in the history of the medium. … And not by a small margin, I mean by a longshot, it was a disgrace.”
“But the vice presidential debate, I think they both helped themselves,” he added.
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“I’m going to piggyback off what Michael has said — first, let me state that I think everyone in the country that got to watch that debate got to see firsthand what civility is about,” Scott said.
He noted that a debate like that is what our country wants, not a repeat of the Trump and Biden debate.
“I thought that Vice President Pence did the best that he could, and I thought that Senator Harris was in her element,” Scott added.
“It’s one of those things where I think there were a lot of conservatives watching that who think about what this race would be like if it weren’t Donald Trump against Joe Biden, if it were Mike Pence,” Medved said. “And that would be a close race.”
Medved did, however, think there was one thing Pence did that was “rotten” during the debate, which was when Pence said “what failure looked like” was when Biden and Obama were trying to handle swine flu. While it’s true that millions of people were infected with swine flu, as Pence said, what he didn’t say, Medved pointed out, is that 13,000 people died in the course of two years as opposed to 220,000 and counting with COVID-19.
As a conservative, Medved says this presidential cycle has been “heartbreaking.”
“I have voted Republican for president for 32 years, every candidate from Ronald Reagan through Mitt Romney,” he said. “I didn’t vote for Trump last time, I voted third-party. … I’m glad I didn’t vote for Trump last time. And this time, it bothers me a lot, but I honestly believe the only hope for my country is to vote for Biden.”
“Look, last time I said, ‘oh, it doesn’t matter, Washington state is going to go for Biden anyway.’ But it does matter,” Medved said. “I have children and grandchildren. And I don’t want them to think that I was AWOL at a moment where it just seems to me it is unthinkable that the American people say they want four more years of this. This is a disaster. We are more divided, we are more scared, we are less confident, we are less proud of our country than we ever have been.”
In terms of the Washington state governor’s race, Scott expressed that he wishes there had been a more serious challenger to Gov. Inslee than Loren Culp.
“You saw the debate, I saw the debate,” he said. “… Governor Jay Inslee looked like me at the gym, didn’t hardly warm up, just didn’t really take it serious, I’m going to be in and out of here real fast, and I’ve got things to do. That was the vibe.”
“The sad thing is we’ve had some really outstanding Republican candidates recently,” Medved added. “… Look, too many candidates in a primary can lead to all kinds of strange outcomes.”
Loren Culp won the primary with just over 15% of the vote in the primary.
“Which means that 85% of voters in the state of Washington did not support him,” Medved pointed out.
Medved thinks it may take another moderate to lead the state, which has proven to be successful in the past for Washington governors, as well as for leaders of the country.
“The American political tradition is a political tradition of great moderates,” he said. “Every successful president, without exception, has been at his core a moderate. … The idea that you’re all one thing or all the other is a poisonous thing in our politics, and we shouldn’t have it.”
You can watch the full discussion between Gee, Michael, and Ursula above, and make sure to like KIRO Radio’s Facebook page. Stay tuned for the next edition in our series of weekly election town halls.
