Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed Tennessee Star National Correspondent Neil W. McCabe to the newsmakers line to weigh in on how he felt the vice presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence would pan out.
Leahy: We are joined by our good friend Neil W. McCabe. Neil I think you recognize that intro music. Don’t you?
McCabe: Who’s that?
Leahy: That’s John Cahn. Breitbart’s own John Cahn. American Heart. Yeah, I talked to him last night and he gave me the authorization to use that music. You know, you hear it on the Sirius XM show that Alex Marlow hosts. But now we can use it here and that was John wrote it and sand and performed it. Yeah, great guy.
McCabe: I will tell you Mike that most of my interactions with John when I was at Breitbart where I got with my being in trouble or something.
Leahy: Well, you never in trouble with us. (McCabe laughs) So you are our national correspondent Neil. The big news, I guess tonight is the debate between vice president Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris the Democratic nominee for vice president. Give us a preview of what you think is going to happen tonight.
McCabe: I tell you I really feel good about what Pence is going to do. Pence did very very well for years ago against Kaine. I had the pleasure of watching the vice presidential debate four years ago in a theater in Silver Spring, Maryland in the heart of Montgomery County with the Montgomery County Democratic Committee. And they were so geeked up and giddy in the beginning and when they left (Chuckles) when they left you could tell they had bet on the wrong horse. They were very sullen. Pence is solid. Pence was prepared.
Pence worked very hard as a congressman where he had a reputation for knowing the issues. And I think we’re going to be very happy with Pence. It reminds me of sort of the performances that Dick Cheney put in and that number two slot. Especially remember when he dismantled John Edwards in 2004. I feel really good about it. And I think that that we’re going to see that Trump’s ticket really is a Trump-Pence ticket. There are Pence people working in the White House. There are Pence people working for President Trump in the Oval Office. It’s a very nice mix and I just don’t think Kamala Harris showed me anything during the primaries that I would say she can take on Pence.
Leahy: What do you think Kamala Harris is going to try to accomplish tonight in this debate?
McCabe: Well, I think it’s the same playbook as by he Biden. Biden’s strength in the polls is with race relations and with dealing with COVID. And so the media is going to continue to spin up the COVID panic as they’ve been doing for the last few months. And obviously, there’s the racial, but Kamala Harris has to be very careful because of two factors: One, when she brings up race and racism it’s going to remind everybody that she’s the one who called Biden a racist during the primaries.
And the second thing is that you know on race relations Biden is doing very well with Whites who think he’s going to be better dealing with race problems among African-Americans. Especially African-American men. They are breaking for Trump. And that’s going to be the big story of this election. Trump has tremendous support among Hispanic, African-American other minority men who are voting as men, not as ethnics. And Kamala Harris has to be very very careful because she could very well push African American men towards Trump even further if she plays her cards wrong.
Leahy: So what would be an example and by the way, she certainly has the capability to do that if you if you’ve witnessed any of her screechy attacks on Brett Kavanaugh during the 2018 Senate confirmation here, you’ve seen that really mean and nasty side of her argument.
Carmichael: Neil doesn’t she have a pretty terrible track record as a prosecutor and of prosecuting and putting Black men in prison?
McCabe: Vicious. Absolutely vicious. And you know that’s going to come out. In the end, you know, the vice-presidential choice, it isn’t the factor deciding things that we think we always think it’s more important than it is. It is a factor in certainly. But you can make a strong vice presidential candidate or vice president. In the case of Pence, it can help the ticket tremendously. And certainly, Pence is going to you know, it’s going to work like a horse to get Trump reelected and I look for good things for him tonight.
Leahy: So but in this particular cycle, 2020, I would argue see if you agree with this Neil, that the vice presidential debate is more important than it has been really for any time in my memory because, A, Joe Biden is clearly past his prime. He has lost his fastball, you know put in whatever description you want.
McCabe: The back nine.
Leahy: And so the possibility that Kamala Harris could if he were to be elected president could become president in the next four years. I think it’s pretty high. and then, you know, Pence has this sort of stabilizing element in his relationship with President Trump it seems to me so. I think it’s going to be more important than ever before and people going to be paying more attention to this particular one. Would you agree with that?
McCabe: We saw it with Sarah Palin and John McCain. Palin really scared the beJesus out of the Obama campaign and they were able to shame McCain in to stop campaigning with Palin. The McCain-Palin rallies were they were together we’re doing tremendously well. McCain was feeding off of Palin’s energy. And when that team was broken up and they had to campaign separately you saw the energy sort of dying down. You’re seeing with Harris my good friend Jack Posobiec that One American News Network did together there.
He did a tweet that I think it was yesterday where he showed how the Biden campaign is actually having Kamala Harris in the foreground of the pictures. Biden is out of focus and is blurred slightly and Kamala Harris is the focus. Kamala Harris is the real candidate. It’s going to be clear that Kamala Harris and her people are fully expected to be running the White House when this whole thing is over. It’s kind of a dirty secret in its attention that is being downplayed by the media. But I imagine that the fight between Harris and the Biden staff is becoming absolutely horrific.
Leahy: I would imagine.
McCabe: Hillary Clinton did not pick Elizabeth Warren for VP because Warren did so well in from of the crowds. Clinton was afraid of being overshadowed by Elizabeth Warren. So you can imagine the tension going on in the Biden camp when they got to hook this guy up the booster cables every morning. (Leahy laughs)
Carmichael: Well, I think that’s a good point because when Kamala Harris campaigned she can draw at least two dozen people. (McCabe scoffs) More than a dozen more like Biden and 10 of those are the press. One of them is his wife.
Leahy: Hey Neil, so Julie Strauss-Levin wrote a really outstanding commentary yesterday that we published in all our titles and basically said a Harris Administration will be the most radical in American history. and notice and it’s done very well for us in terms of traffic. And notice how she framed that. A Harris administration.
McCabe: The Obama administration set out to transform this country. And if you think about all of the things, think about what it was like before Obama was President, right? Our attitude toward children smoking marijuana. We now have kids is vaping marijuana in school, right? You think about the rules loosening up whether gays should serve in the military openly. To think about women in combat roles and think about all of these different things that were unheard of. Look at all of the freedoms and privileges now granted to people who claim to be transgender. That was absurd 10 years ago.
Leahy: And it’s moved so rapidly.
Listen to the third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.Â
