October 5, 2016 | No Comments
Donald Trump’s campaign is celebrating Mike Pence’s calm, cool and collected candidate’s widely-perceived win in the one and only head-to-head matchup between the running mates. But it’s Hillary Clinton’s campaign that is declaring victory on substance.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) was feisty on his home turf at Virginia’s Longwood University, interjecting regularly as he tried to force Pence into a defense of Trump’s most controversial policies and remarks. But where Kaine was eager, at times overly so, Pence was happy to parry the senator’s attacks and allow him to come off as frenetic in the process.
But Pence’s refusal to engage with Kaine and offer a more full-throated defense of his running mate may have cost him in the post-debate spin. While Kaine’s attacks against Pence’s unwillingness to defend Trump seemed not to land on the debate stage, Clinton’s team was quick to highlight the multiple instances where the Indiana governor had no answer for the Manhattan billionaire’s past statements.
“Governor Pence was smooth. He seemed sort of likable. But he didn’t get the job done. The vice president’s job is to go in and try to defend the top of the ticket. Mike Pence looked more like he was looking at 2020 than 2016,” Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta said Wednesday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “He kind of walked away. He did backflips on Russia. He didn’t sound at all like what Donald Trump has been saying out on the campaign trail.”
But asked specifically who won the debate, Podesta wouldn’t say, suggesting instead that “Donald Trump lost and that was fairly clear.” He praised Kaine for repeatedly putting Trump’s past statements before Pence, even as the Indiana governor successfully avoided such traps.
“Time after time he just kept shaking his head. It was sort of surprising,” Podesta said. “You couldn’t tell whether he was shaking his head because he didn’t believe Donald Trump could say such things or he was trying to suggest he hadn’t. But of course we know he had.”
Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway had no such reservations about declaring a winner from Tuesday night’s debate as she made her own rounds on the TV news circuit. She said it was obvious to anyone who had watched the debate that Pence had won, and said that the media and pundits have provided further proof by declaring that vice presidential debates don’t end up mattering much.
Both camps are trying to get the wind at their backs going into Sunday’s critical rematch between Clinton and Trump, which this time features a townhall format. Trump’s performance last week was panned as erratic, and he followed up the shaky showing with a self-destructive spree, accusing a former beauty queen of having a sex tape during a pre-dawn tweet spree and the revelation that he reported a $916 million loss that could have allowed him to avoid paying taxes for up to 18 years.
Republicans have been pushing Trump to prepare better for Sunday’s debate, with some suggesting that the Republican nominee should have Pence closely involved in the crash courses.
On Wednesday, though, Trump’s camp was playing offense. Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s senior communications adviser, borrowed a page from the Clinton campaign playbook by labeling the Democratic ticket “completely unhinged” in an interview on CNN’s “New Day.” Miller said the more-than-70 interruptions from Kaine were evidence that the Virginia senator struggled under the debate spotlight and “had a very tough time standing up and defending their ideas.”
Conway was even tougher on Kaine, calling his debate performance “terrible” and suggesting that his repeated interruptions of moderator Elaine Quijano was indicative of a sexist debate strategy – a charge Democrats leveled at Trump after he persistently jumped in on Clinton’s answers last week.
“The interruption and frankly the ignoring of the female moderator was really a low point throughout the debate,” she told Fox News’s “Fox and Friends.”
“It’s the word that the left and the Democrats and Hillary Clinton folks love to employ against everyone who doesn’t support her. If you don’t support Hillary Clinton, you’re a sexist,” she continued. “So why in the world was her running mate interrupting and ignoring the female moderator, Asian-American female moderator by the way, completely? It was almost like it was a strategy. It was almost like he didn’t hear her.”
The Trump campaign manager also pushed back against reports Tuesday night that the GOP nominee felt upstaged by his running mate’s smooth, polished performance at the debate. The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein wrote on Twitter Tuesday night that “CNN’s John King, reporting from a source close to Trump, that the reviews that Pence did better [than] he did won’t go over well with Trump,” and CNBC’s John Harwood chimed in minutes later to write “Trump adviser on debate after Pence passed up opportunities to defend him: ‘Pence won overall, but lost with Trump.’”
Those reports are “just not true,” Conway said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“His last tweet last night was how excited he was, how proud of him he was. They talked last night. I talked to Mr. Trump during the debate several times,” Conway said of Trump’s response to Pence’s debate performance. “I think the one thing to remember is that, as Ronald Reagan always said, personnel is policy. And Donald Trump has promised as president to surround himself with the best people. You saw last night who the best people are.”
Playing off of Podesta’s point earlier in the morning that Pence had spent much of the debate shaking his head as Kaine listed off an array of Trump’s outlandish statements, the Clinton campaign released a video highlighting Pence’s refusal to even admit that the Manhattan billionaire had made such statements.
“At the VP debate, Mike Pence seemed to discover he was Donald Trump’s running mate,” the video declares as it begins. “He had a hard time with the news.” It goes on to highlight Trump’s past statements on Russian President Vladimir Putin, punishing women who receive an abortion and the proliferation of nuclear weapons to nations that do not currently have them. On stage, Pence refused to admit that Trump had ever made such statements, denials that the Clinton video paired with footage of Trump making them.
The video wraps with a quote from Kaine, who said that Pence is “asking everybody to vote for somebody that he cannot defend.”
“It’s okay Mike,” words across the screen read as an image of Pence shaking his head plays. “We’d have a hard time defending him, too.”