I am guessing that both Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris were guided by a general strategy of doing no harm to their respective candidacies last night, but it ended up being a better night for the Biden campaign than for the GOP ticket. Although Pence avoided any disastrous moments, and in fact stuck stubbornly to a script that made use of his ability to lie with an appearance of sincerity and dispassion, his steadfast dedication to going past his allotted time and interrupting Harris added to the Republican ticket’s approaching wipeout with women voters. He wasn’t nearly as aggressive as Trump was with Biden, but his willingness to disrespect the Democrats’ VP candidate was a losing move.

Two issues in particular struck me last night; both involve areas where Democrats are playing defense when they should be on offense. The first was Harris’ evasion of how closely the Biden climate plan hews to the Green New Deal, mirroring Biden’s denial that he supported the Green New Deal last week. Where the environment and climate change are concerned, Democrats should never, and I mean never, be on the defensive. For four years, the Trump administration has not only neglected climate issues, it has actively sought to exacerbate them by ignoring facts and coddling fossil fuel companies. Mike Pence’s bland and baldly false statements that “climate change is happening” while declining to accept human causation, while saying the administration follows the science, was a good reminder that while Trump may be uniquely awful, the standard GOP party line that Pence parroted on climate change is monstrous and unacceptable.

My other moment of illumination came when Pence referred to himself as “pro-life.” As with many politicians, Pence deploys the term as a badge of probity and morality; uttered in the context of his administration’s failure to save hundreds of thousands of American lives, the phrase rang more hollow than ever. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was triggered as well, tweeting, “Just to be clear: there is nothing “pro-life” about denying people comprehensive sexual education, making birth control harder to access, forcing others to give birth against their will, and stripping them of healthcare and food assistance afterwards.” Such direct attacks on the GOP mantle of false godliness and hypocrisy are needed to expose their truly irreligious attitudes on matter of life and death.