IMHO: I doubt it. Nobody bases their vote on the qualities of the VP, and especially of the VP debate. You all remember how Vice President Bentsen wiped the floor with that pipsqueak Dan Quayle, right?
Plus: I haven’t seen the numbers but I doubt the debate got half the viewers of the first presidential debate. Tempest in a teapot, relatively.
Yeah, I’ll take that “loss”. The Clinton campaign is playing Trump/Pence like a fiddle.
I would have thought the same but it looks like it’s going to be a little over a half. 40 to 50 million viewers compared to the 84 million the first debate got.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1251MK
Because it is a much better thing to brought up directly to Trump in the next debate.
I didn’t watch the debate, but from what I’ve read that’s the impression that I got. It might not move the polls any, but this was a chance for the Trump campaign to recover at least a little from their terrible week last week, but the only campaign that was helped was Pence’s 2020 campaign.
I’m sure that Kaine was coached to go on the offensive, and that while debate performance was important that it was equally important to get sound bites for ads, since those will be playing long after we’ve stopped thinking about the VP debate.
What I really want to know is if Pence was coached, and if so was he coached to deny things Trump said? We know Trump didn’t prepare, but I’m guessing Pence did, but maybe not with Trump campaign people.
It may be that the best way to defend Trump’s remarks is to suggest they never occurred.
I mean, really, what is Pence going to actually say on the substance of the Machado thing? Or Trump’s comments on Judge Curiel? Surely, it’s better to just try to insulate the base from damage from them by suggesting they never happened. They may not have happened in the Fox bubble.
The New York Times finally whips out that Mexican thing:
I think most traditional news sites were slow to acknowledge it because it sounds sleazy.
Missed the debate; glad to read about it here. Did Pence’s gay rights, guns, abortion or tobacco views come up? Do you think Kaine attacked him effectively on them, if so?
The only thing they really discussed on Pence’s hit list was Syrian refugees and abortion.
I thought Kaine was effective on abortion, but he didn’t go after the crazy Pence stuff like requiring funerals for aborted fetuses. He just attacked the general idea of imposing religious morals on women, and Trump’s call for punishment of women.
The refugee conversation was rushed and a wash, I think. Pence claimed that the court only ruled against him because there hadn’t been an attack by refugees yet, but that there will be. :rolleyes:
It felt to me that each candidate was there entirely as a surrogate for their running mate. The only time their personal views were expressed was on the question regarding conflicts between their faith and their job.
Which, by the way, Kaine answered; Pence deflected (he talked about his faith but not about any conflict).
And which also, by the way, was the only exchange where they didn’t talk over each other.
It could matter if there’s enough talk–enough to get to Trump–about how many Republicans wish the ticket could be “Pence/Trump” and about how much better Trump’s next debate performance could be if he’d study tapes of Pence’s debate and about how Pence is a lock for the 2020 GOP nomination.
Trump will be bothered by all of this. Bothered a lot.
It could provoke him to do…something interesting.
¡ES HORA DE GOLPEAR!
I still can’t wait to see how Trump screws up the town hall debate, but this should tide me over nicely.
I turned off the debate about 40 minutes in. Also, I don’t do the Twitter thing.
So, tell me – did the Big League Truth Team actually come out with some fact “checks”? I’m assuming the whole point of the BLTT is to retweet pearls of wisdom from Don the Con or his campaign staff – just wondering if there was a lot of that.
Also, it didn’t occur to me until today – is the name of this faux fact-checking team supposed to be evidence that Trump does not say “bigly,” but says “big league”?
(I didn’t think of that before because I was too busy thinking that “Big League Truth Team” sounds like something a fourth-grade teacher would come up with when trying to get her students to research stuff.)
That did come up later that night on The Daily Show.
<And somewhere a rooster crowed.>
I think “that Mexican thing” is a completely manufactured soundbite that doesn’t actually make sense and it’s kinda cringey to me. He wasn’t referring to a Mexican person or being disparaging or insensitive by saying it. Imagine if there was a repeated issue of an incident with Russia or ISIS brought up, and he said “you’re bringing up that Russian thing again” or “you’re bringing up that ISIS thing again” - not offensive, right? So then why is “that Mexican thing”?
If he was referring to a person as “that Mexican” maybe it would be more offensive, but this sounds like manufactured out-of-context soundbite forcing similar to what Republicans do all the time. And Democrats should be above that.
My reaction to “you’ve whipped out that Mexican thing again” is that it’s offensive because it’s dismissive of the many people appalled by Trump’s ‘announcement/rapists’ and "Judge Curiel’ remarks. The phrase conveys contempt for the concept that Trump was out of line, and implicitly, for the people who believe he was out of line. Such contempt is, at best, insensitive.
He appeared to be dismissing Mexicans and the things that Trump has said about them as insignificant.
One of the first comments in this very thread was: “Over/under on when Kaine bursts into Spanish, just because he can? I say less than five minutes.”
I think Pence prepared “that Mexican thing” as a chide to Kaine using Spanish as his only gimmick, though the place Pence found to stick it in was not-the-right-context cringey.
