October 5, 2016 | No Comments
A debate that turned largely on how well the vice presidential nominees defended their running mates hit its peak when Sen. Tim Kaine declared that “six times tonight” he had challenged Gov. Mike Pence to respond to Donald Trump’s statements and “in all six cases he’s refused to defend.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Pence shot back. “I’ll take them one at a time.”
But then, as the audience waited for Pence to go down the list and defend his running mate’s statements, the moderator, CBS’s Elaine Quijano, stepped in, trying to ask a question about Russia.
Kaine persisted, stating that Trump had said he wanted more countries to get nuclear weapons. Pence was starting to push back when Quijano jumped in again.
“Gentlemen, Russia,” she said, demanding “what steps, if any, would your administration take to counter” recent aggressive actions taken by Russian President Vladimir Putin?”
And a rare fiery moment in a sometimes-somnolent debate was stamped out for good.
Last week, at the first presidential debate, NBC’s Lester Holt was criticized by some for letting the the candidates talk over him and allowing Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to engage in too much verbal sparring.
By Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, Holt was looking better in hindsight. Quijano, a former Pentagon and White House correspondent taking her first step onto a major stage, asked a long list of substantive questions that covered a broad range of topics, like a teacher administering an exam.
But the candidates talked right over and through her, trying to get their digs in about each other’s running mates.
“Gentleman, the people at home cannot understand either one of you when you speak over each other. I would please ask you to wait until it is that the other the finished,” Quijano scolded the candidates in the beginning of the debate.
When candidates demanded the right to defend their tickets, she doled out 20 or 30 second responses. But then, when they were seemingly on verge of an illuminating exchange, Quijano would move on to a new subject.
Viewers from both sides of the aisle were annoyed.
“Just when the debate starts getting good, the moderator interrupts continuously & changes topics… let them make their case jeez,” tweeted Sen. Rand Paul’s communications director Sergio Gor.
“@Elaine_Quijano seems intent on running through her questions, even when significant exchanges are happening,” tweeted former senior White House advisor David Axelrod.
Over time, Quijano managed to prod Pence and Kaine to answer her questions more directly, and even stood back and allowed them to have longer backs and forths over foreign policy and abortion rights.
But when it came to how the two vice presidential nominees would defend their running mates, Quijano seemed determined to cut them off.
When the subject turned to the Clinton Foundation — a line of attack that Trump seemed to miss in the first debate — many viewers were primed for a showdown, especially when Kaine fought back with references to Trump’s own troubled foundation. But Quijano kept interjecting reminders that her original question was about how to respond to North Korea’s nuclear threat, as though the candidates were trying to duck a tough issue by talking instead about their running mates’ vulnerabilities.
In fact, those vulnerabilities have become the center of the campaign.
By the end, Quijano had covered more specific policy areas than Holt, touching on Social Security, Syria, and how religion plays into the candidates’ lives. But the expected clashes over Trump’s tax returns and Hillary Clinton’s email server were truncated to sound bites.
“@Elaine_Quijano definitely did a great job moving it along,” New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor wrote.
Others would agree — but at the expense of some memorable exchanges that never quite happened.