October 5, 2016 | No Comments
When Mike Pence and Tim Kaine met for their lone debate Tuesday, the truth couldn’t even emerge unscathed from the introductions.
Pence, seated at Longwood University, thanked “Norwood University” for hosting Tuesday’s event, and truth continued to take a beating from there.
Over the next 90 minutes, both Pence and his Democratic rival Tim Kaine repeatedly misstated and exaggerated their opponent’s records, policy stances and public statements. And while the pair were quick to lock horns with each other, their harshest attacks, and biggest stretches, were leveled at the candidates at the top of the presidential ticket: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Where did Pence miss the mark? Defending Trump’s commitment to release his taxes (He has broken his promise to release them) and sizing up the state of Middle East affairs (Iraq isn’t “overrun by ISIS”).
But Kaine repeatedly overshot the runway as well, erring in how he sized up Trump’s deportation goals and in his characterization of who belongs on the Republican’s “personal Mount Rushmore.”
Here’s who was right, and who was wrong, in five of the biggest disputes of the night.
FOREIGN POLICY
Pence flubbed multiple foreign policy points. He said “Iraq has been overrun by ISIS” when in fact the terrorist group is losing ground, including recent defeats in two major cities: Ramadi, at the end of 2015 and Fallujah, in June. The Republican also was wrong in stating two Syrian refugees were “involved in the attack of Paris” from November 2015. While a Syrian passport was found at the scene, it was determined to be a fake.
Kaine entered the debate prepped with his own polished line on foreign policy when he declared Trump “loves dictators” and has a “personal Mount Rushmore” that includes everyone from Putin to Kim Jong-Un, Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. But while Trump has praised Putin, he’s hardly been positive on the other dictators. On the North Korean leader, for example, Trump called him a “maniac” and while he praised Hussein for killing terrorists, he’s also said the late Iraqi president also was a “really bad guy.”
But the Democrat did hit the mark in asserting Trump thinks “more nations should get nuclear weapons.” While Pence countered that the Republican never said that, Kaine was indeed spot on declaring Trump has called for nuclear proliferation. On a Chris Wallace FOX News interview in April, Trump suggested Japan should defend itself against North Korea “including with nukes, yes, including with nukes.” He also signaled his willingness for Japan to become a nuclear power in a New York Times interview in March.
TAXES
Pence offered a major whopper when he defended Trump’s decision to not release his tax returns by saying that “he hasn’t broken his promise.” But in an interview in 2014, Trump said he would “absolutely” release his tax returns if he ran for president.
So far, though, Trump has not done so.
Kaine was closer to the mark in talking about taxes when he said that Trump “would raise taxes on the middle class.”
Trump’s tax plan has changed many times throughout the presidential campaign, so nailing down a clear set of policies is difficult. But according to a recent analysis from Lily Batchelder, a law professor at NYU and former economic official in the Obama administration, Trump’s tax plan will raise taxes on 7.8 families with dependent children, many of the in the middle class. However, not all scores of Trump’s tax plan reach a similar conclusion: The right-leaning Tax Foundation found that would boost after-tax income for the middle class.
IMMIGRATION
Pence and Kaine both stretched the truth in a spat over immigration.
Pence argued that “Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want to continue the policies of open borders,” which is untrue. Clinton supports a pathway to citizenship but also has said she will enforce the country’s immigration laws. There also is no policy of “open borders” to continue — Obama has deported many undocumented immigrants during his time in office, including raids on Central American mothers and children and a recent change to immigration law for Haitian immigrants, who had been allowed to stay into the U.S. for three years without a visa after the 2010 earthquake Haiti. That policy is no longer in effect.
But Kaine also mixed up his facts when he suggested that the Trump campaign wants to deport 16 million people—11 million undocumented immigrants and 4.5 million citizens who were born to undocumented immigrants and thus received birthright citizenship. However, Trump’s plan would not retroactively strip citizenship from the latter group, so Kaine overstated his numbers.
CLINTON FOUNDATION
The Clinton Foundation landed in Pence’s crosshairs on several occasions, but the Republican wasn’t accurate in his claims.
First, his statement that “less than 10 cents on the dollar…has gone to charitable organizations” was deeply misleading and arguably wrong because the Clinton Foundation is actually a charity. The foundation, which runs programs around the world dealing with everything from climate change to education, doesn’t need to give its own donations to other charitable organizations.
Pence also went after Clinton’s foundation by citing the “good work” of the Associated Press, which he said found “more than half her private meetings when she was secretary of state were given to major donors of the Clinton Foundation.” But here’s the problem: the AP deleted the very tweet that mischaracterized its story the way Pence did. AP has acknowledged its analysis only looked at a small fraction of Clinton meetings publicly reported by the State Department, it didn’t count all of her meetings with government officials and foreign representatives.
Pence did land his attacks on Clinton’s trustworthiness. There are multiple recent polls out showing the Democratic nominee is not seen in a very good light by large majorities of adults, including a Washington Post/ABC News survey from early August that found 59 percent of respondents do not believe that Clinton is trustworthy and a CNN/ORC International poll that put Trump ahead on the question of who is the more “honest and trustworthy” candidate.
OBAMACARE
Pence fudged on the details of Clinton’s health care plan when he said “Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want to build on Obamacare. They want to expand it into a single-payer program.” That isn’t true.
Bernie Sanders supported single payer health care in the Democratic primary, but Clinton did not. Instead, she supports a public option where a public plan would compete with private insurers to offer health coverage.
Isaac Arnsdorf, Alex Byers, Josh Gerstein, Katy O’Donnell, Benjamin Oreskes and Rachana Pradhan contributed to this report.