As for Pence, he was such a marvelous debater on Wednesday, when he properly ignored all questions and instead calmly disassembled Harris like a biology student dissecting a frog, that he reminded everyone he used to argue with people for a living, back when he was a talk-radio guy. What might a GOP be like that was led by someone who could thoroughly, rationally articulate all of the party’s positions without rage-tweeting or getting his facts jumbled?

Pence is the answer. And unlike Mitt Romney, he doesn’t carry the baggage of seeming like the consultant who just recommended your boss fire you. When Harris tried to paint Pence as an extremist on abortion, he turned the issue around completely as he placidly explained that Harris is the real extremist because she supports taxpayer funding for abortion up till the moment of birth. Harris shook her head when Pence said this but she didn’t rebut the charge because it’s true. It’s the kind of thing she’d be happy to say if she was speaking to the Democrats’ Hollywood donor class. When Pence pulled a Tulsi Gabbard on her and pointed out how, as San Francisco DA, she had enacted the exact opposite program of the Democratic Party’s vision of justice, she didn’t rebut him on that either, but retreated to a lame series of irrelevant points she’d already made earlier. She wouldn’t answer the question of whether she or Biden would pack the Supreme Court, instead mangling an anecdote about how Abe Lincoln supposedly declined to nominate a Supreme Court justice in an election season. (He didn’t make the nomination because the Senate was out of session at the time.)