October 5, 2016 | No Comments
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence won Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Sen. Jeff Sessions said Wednesday, because “he refused to be distracted.”
Just as his running mate did, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine spent much of his time on the debate stage baiting his opponent by laying out for viewers the array of controversial remarks and policy proposals Donald Trump has made at one point or another throughout the campaign. But where Hillary Clinton was successful in luring Trump into trap after trap, Pence was mostly unwilling to get into the mud with Kaine.
“What Pence did and why he won this debate is he refused to be distracted. He stayed on the key issues of the debate,” Sessions said Wednesday morning on CNN’s “New Day.” “And a lot of the ways on some of these things are happening, you have the question from the media or Tim Kaine with 10 different charges in it and there’s no way the respondent can actually address them each one. They take it out of context. They distort the meaning of it. They take something that was 20 years ago and fully not in context and they throw it out and you just can’t go down those roads and try to answer all those charges. Sometimes it would be half a dozen in one line, one question.”
But while Pence seemed to come out ahead Wednesday night stylistically, his refusal to defend some of Trump’s more outrageous comments left him vulnerable to fact checkers. One such issue was immigration and the implementation of a deportation force, something Trump has called for in the past. But when Kaine raised Trump’s support for such a force, Pence said the Virginia senator’s talking point was “nonsense.”
Sessions, one of the staunchest immigration hawks in the Senate, tried to explain the Trump campaign’s ever-evolving stance on the issue Wednesday morning. The Alabama Republican said Trump’s immigration policies will prompt many undocumented immigrants to leave the country of their own volition but did not directly address the issue of a deportation force. He said “we’ll wrestle with” some of the details still left to be ironed out.
“What Trump is thinking about, and I’m not sure how firm he is on the details, but the touchback idea that many people have had when you go back to your home country and reapply to come here if you want to get a legal status of some kind in the United States,” Sessions said. “What he said clearly in his formal speech in Arizona about how we’re going to handle immigration is we’re going to end the illegality, we’re going to assure the American people that the criminals that are in this country will be deported and then we’re going to figure out how to handle the people who have been here a long time, who are good people.”