On Tuesday night, Tim Kaine was an effective surrogate for Hillary Clinton, and Mike Pence was an effective surrogate for conservatism rather than the defender of Donald Trump..Tim Kaine wore a red tie at the Vice-Presidential debate in Virginia on Tuesday night, and Mike Pence a blue one, and those colors offered a pretty good reading of the emotional temperature of the night: Kaine ran hot, while Pence was cool.
In his opening statement, the Democrat was a chaos of motives: he tried, in a rush, to introduce himself, to make reference to a local civil-rights leader, to praise his running mate, and to signal the instability of Donald Trump, and it all got tangled in an anxious scrum. Pence was polished and clearer, and he quickly assembled a simple case for his and his running mate’s candidacy, arguing that the country was less prosperous and the world less secure than they’d been eight years ago, and that electing Hillary Clinton would mean keeping current policies in place. Kaine tried to push back. “Governor Pence doesn’t think the world’s going so well, and he is going to say it’s everybody’s fault,” Kaine said. Here, Pence cut in sharply. “Do you?” he asked. There was a flicker, at this point, of an alternative debate, one that Republicans had been looking forward to long before Trump got in the race, in which they could run against Clinton by running against the status quo. In the early going, Pence accused Clinton of being behind a “war on coal” four times—possibly with the voters of southern Ohio in mind. But Pence’s interest in this approach was only temporary, and soon that alternative debate faded away.
On the Democratic side, there had been other potential Clinton running mates—for instance, Elizabeth Warren—who might have given a sharper argument than Kaine did for why the world is in fact going pretty well. But the case for Kaine was always that he is a loyalist. In preparation for the debate, he had taken five days off the campaign trail, and sequestered himself with the Washington superlawyer Bob Barnett. (The candidates on the Democratic ticket are nothing if not try-hards.) And while Kaine has told his own story better before, on other nights, in other venues, his was not the story he arrived last night to tell. “I can’t imagine how Governor Pence can defend the insult-driven, selfish, me-first style of Donald Trump,” Kaine said, early on. Kaine explicitly challenged Pence to “defend” Trump nine times during the evening, using sheer force of repetition to move the debate on to questions that Clinton’s campaign preferred. Beneath the tactical sparring there was a deeper probe into how far the Republican Party, with Pence as its avatar, would go to defend the casino billionaire.
Pence was good at pricking liberalism. He mentioned Clinton’s insistence that “implicit bias” was at work in police shootings, and wondered how the African-American police officer who recently shot Keith Scott in Charlotte could possibly be guilty of implicit bias. He was also good at pricking Kaine. Early on, Pence picked up the overpracticed sound of the Democrat’s attacks. “Did you work on that one a long time?” Pence asked, after Kaine had rattled off a long sequence of critiques. (The answer was, obviously, yes.) “Because that one had a lot of good lines in it.” The debate had not been much anticipated, by the press or the public, and the general agreement going into Tuesday night was that it was likely to be a relatively tame affair, full of courtesies, in which two middle-aged Christian men enumerated their differences while seated. But that expectation did not account for how barbed the language of fellowship could be. “I’m going to see if you can defend any of it,” Kaine told Pence, after singling out Trump’s praise for dictators and casual talk about nuclear war.
The truth was that Pence couldn’t defend it—not much of it, anyway. On certain issues, he delivered the standard Party lines. Trump had not avoided paying his fair share of taxes over the years, Pence said; he had simply taken all the deductions available to him. (He made it sound as though claiming your father-in-law as a dependent might earn you a nine-hundred-million-dollar write-off.) But mostly Pence did not try. When Kaine pressed him to defend Trump’s statement that women needed to be “punished” for having abortions, Pence just said, weakly, “Look, he’s not a polished politician like you and Hillary Clinton.” When Pence was asked to explain Trump’s admiring talk about Vladimir Putin, he abandoned his running mate, and argued for his own, very different perspective on Russia instead. “I just have to tell you,” Pence said, “that the provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength.”
After the debate was over, the line on Twitter was that Pence had done a great deal to help the Pence 2020 campaign—that he had been working on his own behalf. But political loyalty is more complicated than that. Pence is the one who has never really been embraced by his running mate. As the debate began Tuesday night, you could not even find a biography of Pence on Trump’s Web site. But if Pence is dispensable to the candidate he is essential to the candidacy. The Trump campaign needs the enthusiasm of Republican Party regulars and the funds of its donors, and to both of these groups Pence’s presence on the ticket functions as a promise that a Trump Administration will be conservative. To see Pence backing away from some of Trump’s darker and weirder declarations, and prosecuting the case against Clinton for failing to strike a deal to keep American forces in Iraq, must have been heartening for many Republicans, because the Indiana governor was making the Party’s case as they had always imagined it would be made. In Pence, they had a loyalist of their own.
The Vice-Presidential debate started with Kaine and Pence arguing against each other, but it ended in a more diffuse dynamic, in which Kaine was an effective surrogate for Clinton and Pence was an effective surrogate for conservatism. One good way to score the debate is to say that everybody won except for Donald Trump himself. What you make of that probably depends on how you think about political loyalty.
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