Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 8, 2020.

I'm John Pudhord, the editor of Commentary Magazine. With me, as always, a very sleepy looking

Noah Rothman, associate editor, Hainoa, somewhat sleepy looking Abe Greenwald, executive

editor. Hey, John. And not you don't look sleepy at all, Christine, senior writer, Christine

Rosen. I don't know why we were all, of course, up late last night watching and then reacting

to the vice presidential debate, which has now been over for, I don't know, 10 or 11 hours

since we watched it and it is already fading into the mists of memory. Christine, you had

a great line last night about the dynamic or, you know, sort of like what we were looking

at as the debate began. Well, a few minutes in, I was trying to figure out what it was about

the lack of charisma that was weirdly appealing about both candidates and I felt like it

was, it suddenly struck me that it was like when two vice principals are addressing an

assembly after a school riot. The school riot was the first debate with Trump and Pence

and so it was both weirdly calming and completely lacking in charisma, but it was also in a strange

way exactly what we needed at that moment to be reminded of what had come before.

Abe, you found, you precisely found this to be the case. Yeah, it's what I realized watching

this last night because I was quite engaged watching it was that sort of chaos and craziness

and unintelligibility has gotten quite boring. It gets boring. It's not, it's not, it's not,

it's, you'd think it would be in some sense, you know, sort of riveting because there's been

nothing like it and because everyone likes conflict, in fact, it gets boring and this, this

by contrast was, was relief. And it's like, it's like a later season of the real housewives.

Like once you've seen the Trump, you know, if you've been watching the Trump show for five years,

you know, you sort of got it, got it down and then maybe there's the Biden show, but of course,

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