October 4, 2016 | No Comments
FARMVILLE, Va. — Democrats are counting on Tim Kaine to help stretch Donald Trump’s bad week into a bad month on Tuesday. But there’s a major difference between Trump and his running mate: Mike Pence knows how to stick to the script.
The Virginia senator’s job is to make the Indiana governor uncomfortable defending Trump, whether it’s the business mogul’s $900 million reported loss in 1995, his feud with a former beauty queen or his proposal to build a wall on the United States’ southern border. Trump is wounded, Democrats say, and the lone vice-presidential debate, to be held in this rural town, is an opportunity for Kaine to go for the jugular.
Yet as Trump was going off-script over the weekend and imitating Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia and arguing that she’s not loyal to Bill Clinton, Kaine was preparing for a much different challenge. Pence will already have his talking points down on Tuesday evening — and getting him to deviate could prove nearly impossible.
“He says the same things over and over again,” said former Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.), who played Pence in 2012 mock debates for the Indiana governor’s race. “It wasn’t very hard to play Mike Pence.”
The showdown in Central Virginia offers a major pivot point in the race. Since becoming his party’s vice-presidential nominee, Kaine has concentrated nearly all of his political attacks on Trump, and Pence must effectively parry the Democrat’s attempts to make him own each of Trump’s controversial proposals and soundbites.
So while Kaine tries to paint the steady, even-keeled Pence as a Trump acolyte, Pence’s job is to steady the ship and remind conservatives what the Republican Party stands for: a pro-growth economic agenda and a break from the left-leaning policies of President Barack Obama.
“Pence obviously spent 12 years on the Hill, four years as governor. He knows the issues as well. That may be [the] most constructive debate this season,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas). “I don’t think you’re going to see the personal back and forth that we’re going to see in the presidential race. It’ll be a welcome relief.”
The difficulty for Pence is getting to his comfort zone on tax cuts and socially conservative policy, showcasing the same qualities that made him a stabilizing effect on the Trump ticket. What’s extraordinary for Pence, however, is just how many individual topics he must be prepared to defend Trump on to get to his more orthodox pitch to Republican voters.
“Is Mike Pence going to aggressively defend his running mate when he hasn’t necessarily been inclined to go on full defense [in the past]?” asked a Kaine aide in an interview on Monday.
In his two months of campaigning on his own around the country, Kaine has concentrated almost exclusively on Trump when on the attack, singling out his mocking of a reporter with a disability, anti-immigrant rhetoric and the GOP nominee’s confrontations with the Gold Star Khan family. But Kaine has largely gone dark for the past week as he prepped for the debate in Raleigh, North Carolina, and his home in Richmond, Virginia. He has not telegraphed how he might hit Trump after a New York Times report suggested the Republican could have avoided paying taxes for years, nor has Kaine much discussed Trump’s war of words with former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.
But whatever the territory, Kaine’s allies are looking for Pence to either assume all of Trump’s rhetoric and positions or to publicly acknowledge disagreements with Trump. Either conclusion would be a win for Kaine and his fellow Democrats. Pence has been quick to laughingly admit he has a different “style” than Trump, but he will work hard to keep any daylight on policy from emerging between he and Trump.
“Tim’s going to make Pence very uncomfortable. Mike Pence has a lot of discomfort talking about Trump’s rhetoric and his policies,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “I hope Tim makes Pence own every bit of Trump’s radical, racist, misogynist agenda.”
“The problem for Mike Pence is his job in this campaign is apologist-in-chief, and he’s the guy who has to keep trying to explain the unexplainable,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).
Pence has had plenty of practice in shrugging off Trump’s penchant for controversy. Was Trump asking to disarm Clinton’s bodyguards a call to violence? “Nonsense,” said Pence in September. Donald Trump Jr.’s likening of Skittles to refugees was just a “metaphor” that drew a “remarkable” amount of misplaced outrage, Pence said a couple of weeks ago. Trump’s assertion that Obama founded ISIL? A “controversy over semantics,” Pence said in August. The liberal American Bridge group released a Web ad on Monday, dubbing Pence Trump’s “clean-up man.”
The vice-presidential nominee’s answers to such controversial lines of questioning are aimed at taking the sting out of Democrats’ attacks and forcing journalists like Tuesday’s moderator, Elaine Quijano, to move on. And if Pence can weather Kaine’s Trump barbs, he’ll have a chance to stabilize the Republican ticket by simply contrasting his conservative bona fides with Clinton’s more liberal agenda.
“It’ll be a substantive debate. They’re both serious policy guys,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who speaks to both Kaine and Pence with some regularity. “The most policy-rich, certainly, debate that we’ll have.”
At least, that’s the hope for Republicans. And though there are fewer things for Kaine to have to defend Clinton on, Pence does have some ammo when it’s his turn to go on offense. First there’s making Kaine defend Clinton’s own controversies: her private email server, her attacks on the “basket of deplorables” that support Trump and her near-collapse at a Sept. 11 event in New York.
Then there are Kaine’s own breaks with Clinton. He personally supports the Hyde Amendment, which bans taxpayer-funded abortions, yet says he will work with Clinton to overturn it as vice president. He praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership the same week he was selected as Clinton’s running mate, then came out against it.
“There’s stuff that Kaine’s had to — in order to kind of get himself in alignment with that ticket — adopt positions that are different than positions he had [while] serving here. It’s all fair game,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.).
The GOP released a Web ad on Monday dinging Kaine for “protecting the worst kinds of people” as a politician and as an attorney. But if Pence wants to do damage to Kaine himself, Republicans suggest taking aim at his centrist persona. Former Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, who debated Kaine in the 2005 governor’s race, chuckled and gave this advice for Pence: “Watch for the raised eyebrow, ’cause that’s when he really goes liberal.”
“In any debate, he tries to be whatever the audience needs him to be,” Kilgore said of Kaine, whose raised eyebrow is a signature look. “He gets away with it because he sounds so believable. And that’s the problem Pence is going to have.”
Both Pence and Kaine have telegraphed they have no intention of going directly at each other, mostly ignoring their vice-presidential opponents on the campaign trail this summer and fall. And the Kaine aide said that though the Virginia senator is a seasoned debater, his challenge is adjusting to the position of being a Clinton defender first, and a Kaine defender second.
An ABC poll released last week found that more than 40 percent of voters don’t know who either Pence or Kaine is, suggesting that each must focus on the top of the ticket to score any points.
“Vice-presidential debates cannot win you the election,” said Brett O’Donnell, the director of messaging for John McCain’s 2008 campaign who assisted then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin ahead of her debate. “But they can certainly do damage.”
Pence might not be able to win the election on his own, but he simply must create some momentum for Trump. The GOP nominee came into last week’s debate riding tightening polls and a buttoned-up message, but left Hempstead, New York, talking about Bill Clinton’s affairs and a “rigged” debate. Now polls are showing a new Trump slump, precariously close to Election Day.
So while Kaine merely needs to push Hillary Clinton’s contrasting vision with Trump’s and link Pence to his running mate, Pence himself has to do more than just stay out of the way. Like a baseball team down in the ninth inning, Pence needs to at least hit a single on Tuesday and give Trump an opportunity to rally later this month.
“It’s a higher bar for Pence than it is for Kaine,” said Mo Elleithee, a former Kaine aide. “He’s in a precarious position. And the campaign is in a precarious position.”
Matthew Nussbaum and Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.