October 4, 2016 | No Comments
Let’s get the bland back together.
Face it, America’s a tired nation. Just as seven human years are packed into each dog year, a week’s worth of news cycles are now being crammed into every Trump Day. On Monday, the day before the big (LOL) vice-presidential debate, Donald Trump found itself on the New York attorney general’s no-fly list, managed to piss off disabled war veterans, threatened to sue the New York Times for revealing he was a tax dodger, defended against charges he made salacious comments about Apprentice contestants and bled red in a bunch of purple state polls. All the while incessantly doing that little thing where he forms his thumb and forefinger into the shape of an onion ring.
Enough, right? In Trump-talk: Give us a break! So bless you, Mike Pence and Tim Kaine for what you are about to do — which is to remind us that candidates can be boring and likable in that vague politician-y way, without scaring half the divided nation half to death.
In years past, veep debates have actually been consequential, substantive and entertaining: Sarah Palin was the biggest draw ever, and she acquitted pretty well against a smug Joe Biden; Dan Quayle guffawed when Lloyd Bentsen compared him unfavorably to JFK; Geraldine Ferraro bristled when George H. W. Bush (not exactly a Trump-style meanie) suggested she didn’t know much about history or geography.
Who knows what to expect from Pence-Kaine, and who cares? As one of my POLITICO colleagues said earlier this week, “Both of these guys could set themselves on fire and nobody would notice.”
So sure, laugh it up. But the reality is that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are old people, and (if their respective opponents are to be believed) uncommonly vulnerable to impeachment, imprisonment or a health calamity so dire that either one of these parochial-middle-school-principal-looking dudes could end up leader of the free world.
So maybe the vice-presidential debate at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. is, in the paraphrased words of the sitting vice-president, a big deal. Here are five things to watch:
1. It’s all about Trump’s tax returns. There is always dissonance between presidential and vice presidential candidates. John McCain, we now know, thought Sarah Palin was not necessarily fit for her place on the ticket, Joe Lieberman was way more socially conservative than Al Gore, JFK hated LBJ’s guts, and was not nearly as committed to civil rights, and so on.
But Pence opened up a damaging rift last month through the humble act of playing by the rules his boss flouts: He released 10 years of tax returns, an action (though he vociferously denies it) that made Trump, who refuses to release his, look bad.
Trump’s taxes are the single most effective attack line Clinton’s campaign has against him in the homestretch, a slow-motion scandal akin to her slow-drip email nightmare. His refusal to release the returns — and his ill-considered blurt that he was “smart” to avoid paying at the first debate was followed by a bombshell of sorts: The New York Times was leaked portions of his 1995 tax return showing that he lost nearly a billion bucks on his lousy casino and real estate deals. From this they (somewhat tenuously) extrapolated Trump had dodged the taxman for decades, and he — amazingly — endorsed this conjecture, which undermines 1) his assertion that he’s a business “genius” 2) the idea that a billionaire with gold-plated bathroom fixtures is honestly fighting for the little guy.
Pence will be asked about Trump’s taxes, and Kaine will surely press the case. There’s a fair chance Kaine will mention (in a complimentary way) some details of the Indiana governor’s endearingly modest finances: Pence made just $113,000 last year, owes between $100,000 and $250,000 in student loans for his children, and his wife declared a $3,500 grand total for her artisan textile business, That’s My Towel Charm, Inc. — not quite enough to claim a Trump-sized tax break.
2. Mistakes matter. It’s in the interest of both candidates to put on a lively show, to rouse their respective bases, to up their profiles and please the demanding Type-As at their tops of their tickets. Yet interesting, and awful, things tend to happen when understudies are given their time in the limelight. If ever there were an event set up for a gaffe — or a “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy moment” — it’s this one. Expectations are low, especially given the 80-million-viewer spectacle of the first Trump-Clinton debate, and the national media will be trawling for a story, any story. Foot might find mouth in Virginia tonight.
3. Can Pence really help Trump? Probably not — but anything helps at this point. Pence has been a rare, dignified (dare one say “normalizing?”) presence in a Trump campaign whose top surrogates (Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie) are essentially less restrained doppelgangers of their walking-id nominee. Americans don’t really know who he is (both Pence and Kaine have voter recognition numbers in the 30s) but being an anti-celebrity on a Trump ticket is a political asset — and Pence has an endearing way of dismissing his candidate’s excesses as bouts of excessive enthusiasm from an otherwise “good man.”
Let’s see if it works. Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, an occasional debate moderator who has interviewed Pence on numerous occasions, is bullish, predicting Pence needs to make a “very direct appeal” to the party’s nervous base, in effect telling them, “You may not like Donald Trump, but…”
Pence, the conservative governor of Indiana, hasn’t admitted as much yet. He has defended Trump throughout the campaign, but from a discreet distance and in the couched language of a politician peering past 2016 at a still-promising political future. He has kept himself largely out of the firing line when it comes to some of Trump’s more offensive statements — and when he’s engaged, has done so in surgical fashion, deflecting the flare-ups as distractions. Trump’s feckless press shop would do well to follow the lead of Pence’s talking-press-release approach.
A couple of weeks back, when Trump blithely suggested Hillary Clinton should shed her Secret Service detail and see what happens, Pence shrugged it off as the misfired joke it was. “Donald Trump believes in the safety and security of every American, and any suggestion otherwise regarding Secretary Clinton is just nonsense,” he told ABC, even though that was exactly what Trump suggested. He was a key voice in calming the furor over Trump’s head-fake “softening” on immigration — and he’s put the best possible face on his candidate’s man-crush on Vladimir Putin.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — that don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-him 2016 hopeful — has been prepping Pence, and he offered this bit of tactical insight to a New York radio host a couple of days back: “Pence’s job is to come in and quickly dismiss these attacks and quickly pivot to the problems of Hillary Clinton.”
4. Kaine attacks! It’s pretty sweet being Tim Kaine these days. No member of the quarter of major-party office seekers has a better gig and the genial, cerebral Virginia senator has the most clear-cut mission of any candidate entering any debate this year: Hang a huge orange albatross around Mike Pence’s neck.
It’s not been an entirely turbulence-free campaign for Kaine. He was Clinton’s top choice for months and months, but the former secretary of state, several Democratic sources told me, thought Kaine was a little too laid back and staid in his test-run TV appearances on her behalf. She only became satisfied he was sufficiently alpha during a rousing joint appearance together a few days before she picked him.
If there’s any pressure on Kaine, it’s that he has a reputation as a very good debater, a point my colleague Anna Palmer made recently, evidenced by his cool dismantling of opponent George Allen in the 2012 Virginia Senate race.
Despite his nice-guy rep, Kaine has a mean(ish) streak, and has no problem going negative. His somewhat awkward convention speech featured a game, if not quite Alec-Baldwin-quality imitation of Trump, and his stump speech is peppered with attack lines. From a strategery perspective, Kaine’s approach to the first debate is pretty straight-line: Go get ‘em. “It really is more about Donald Trump than it is about Governor Pence,” Kaine told a reporter recently about his debate strategy.
But, as Clinton’s chances of getting herself elected improve, Kaine — a former Democratic National Committee chairman — is also embarking on a bigger mission intended to damage GOP incumbents (talkin’ about you, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz and Kelly Ayotte) who have held their noses to endorse — or just endure — Trump at the top of the ticket. Pence, one senior Democratic official involved in debate prep told me, “is a stand-in for all the Republicans who don’t have the guts to say Trump is unacceptable.”
5. Biden: You’re gonna miss him when he’s gone. Joe Biden has been a fixture at these things for eight years — and if he wasn’t necessarily the most consistent debater, his brio and sheer love of forensics as a sport creates something of an emotional vacuum.
More importantly, either man on stage tonight would be inheriting a refurbished, newly empowered vice-presidency hand-crafted by Biden, who made himself a critical (if not always appreciated) player in President Obama’s administration. And that was no small achievement given his predecessor Dick Cheney’s catastrophic overreach on Iraq under George W. Bush.