Yes or No?

Why won't the moderators of these debates make the candidates answer their questions?

Conventional wisdom holds that vice-presidential debates don’t matter, and conventional wisdom is probably right. But they should matter. If the president dies or is otherwise incapacitated, the vice-president instantly becomes the most powerful man or woman in the world. This isn’t such a rare event that we can afford to be cavalier about the second-in-command. This is true under the best of circumstances. It’s especially true when one of the candidates is Donald Trump.

Trump would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. Even if you think he sounds fine now—God knows why you’d think that, but let’s assume it, for the sake of argument—remember that Biden seemed coherent enough when he was elected. Within three years, he did not. The presidency is not known for being rejuvenating.

And Trump does not sound fine. His cognitive decline is as visible as Biden’s. He’s obese, he has heart disease, he has a family history of dementia, and he just survived two assassination attempts. Would you underwrite his life insurance policy?

So actually, this vice-presidential debate mattered very much.

I keep reading that I should be afraid that Vance will be so loyal to Trump that he’ll help him subvert the Constitution in the ways Mike Pence wasn’t willing to do—this, after all, is why Trump chose him. It’s possible. But I reckon it’s much more likely that Vance will put a knife in his back at the first available opportunity. Vance wrote these words in 2016: