Vice presidential debate: Tim Kaine vs. Mike Pence

If Hillary Clinton wins in November, Tim Kaine will be the first male subordinate of the first woman US president. He will be, in a way, the female-authority-respecter-in-chief.

He did not acquit himself well on that count during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate.

Sen. Tim Kaine made a point during the vice presidential debate of reminding the American public of that time Donald Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers.

“He started his campaign with a speech where he called Mexicans rapists and criminals,” Kaine said, listing Trump’s most controversial campaign statements. “I cannot imagine how Gov. Pence can defend Donald Trump.”

Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential running mate, took a page out of Donald Trump’s debate strategy Tuesday night, interrupting his rival Gov. Mike Pence often throughout the first and only vice presidential debate.

“People at home cannot understand either one of you when you speak over each other,” debate moderator Elaine Quijano was forced to say early — and repeat often throughout the 90-minute debate, held at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia.

Mike Pence wasn’t always particularly interested in leaping to the defense of Donald Trump during the vice presidential debate Tuesday. He was busy doing something else: offering a defense of the key themes of Trump’s campaign.

Tim Kaine, like Hillary Clinton before him, treated the debate as a referendum on the fitness of Donald Trump, as a human being, for office. That’s certainly a legitimate question, and there’s a lot of material there.

One of the best moments in Tuesday’s first and only vice presidential debate was the trap Mike Pence thought he was laying for Tim Kaine on the topic of abortion. While most conversations about the importance of being pro-choice often deviate from religion, Tim Kaine doubled-down on it to defend his own pro-choice position.

When asked about his faith by moderator Elaine Quijano, Gov. Pence quickly pivoted to the issue of abortion by saying, “I tried to stand for the ancient principle of the sanctity of life.”

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Republican Mike Pence challenged Democrat Tim Kaine on how Kaine, as a Catholic, can be pro-choice and support Hillary Clinton’s agenda.

Kaine responded that we should “trust women” to make their own moral choices, and added that the Trump-Pence ticket “wants to punish women” who have abortions.

Here’s a question you wouldn’t normally have to ask after a vice presidential candidate turned in a widely praised debate performance: Will the presidential nominee completely fly off the handle tomorrow?

But this isn’t a normal year.

The big question going into the vice presidential debate was how Mike Pence, who is essentially a standard-issue Republican politician, would defend Donald Trump’s various insults, untruths, and bizarre moments.

It turns out he just wouldn’t.

Late in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, Democrat Tim Kaine accused Republican Mike Pence of praising Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader. Pence denied it.

Turns out, though, it was entirely accurate. In a September 8 CNN appearance, Pence said that Putin was a stronger leader than Obama — in nearly the exact language Kaine said he used.

Vice presidential debates are somewhat curious occasions. They pit against each other two contenders who have not been selected through any electoral process, and whose debate performance probably won’t swing many, if any, votes. Indeed, it’s unlikely anything about them will swing a significant number of votes. Who the hell votes based on the second person on the ticket?

But the debate is still a useful event, despite its lack of obvious electoral consequences. It’s a chance for viewers to gauge the preparedness for the presidency of two people who stand a surprisingly high chance of assuming the office should they become VP. Fourteen of the 47 people to have served as vice president have gone on to be president, either due to the death or resignation of the president or because they won election after their president’s term.

If you need a quick summary of the vice presidential debate between Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, this from Marc Duvoisin at the Los Angeles Times is really all you need:

Matt Yglesias captured this well, writing for Vox:

Republican Party elected officials in contested races around the country have been grappling with a basic but profound issue all year — how do you stand up for the GOP and conservative principles and against Hillary Clinton without getting sucked into defending every crazy, offensive, or weird thing Donald Trump has said? It can be a tough line to walk, as New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte learned this week.

Debating Tim Kaine Tuesday night, Mike Pence taught a master class in how it’s done. Every time Kaine attacked, Pence parried and deftly shifted the conversation to something else entirely.

Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate, used the words “implicit bias” in the vice presidential debate on Tuesday — but he completely bungled what the words actually mean.

Pence took offense with Hillary Clinton’s suggestion in the first presidential debate that everyone has implicit biases — subconscious thoughts that shape how we view people based on their race, age, gender, and so on.

At the vice presidential debate, both running mates were asked to address their candidates’ tax plans — both of which would add to the national debt.

That is true, according to nonpartisan analysts, but here’s a key point that was never brought up: Hillary Clinton’s plan would add about $200 billion to the debt over 10 years. Donald Trump’s plan would add $5.3 trillion — and this is the revised, more responsible version of the plan.

Six minutes after the vice presidential debate’s official start time, Donald Trump had already tweeted something truly bizarre.

The tweet came after Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly said that Trump won’t be able to tweet unless he gets approval from Trump staffer Kellyanne Conway. Trump found the claim factually inaccurate, since Conway is at the debate in Virginia and he’s in Nevada.

When it comes to asking Tim Kaine and Mike Pence the tough questions during the only vice presidential debate, taking place on Tuesday at Longwood University, look no further than debate moderator Elaine Quijano of CBS News.

Quijano is well-positioned to steer various angles of the conversation. Over the past 15 years, Quijano has been a key voice on some of America’s most important stories, ranging from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Newtown shooting in 2012, and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate, is often seen as a generic, establishment, inoffensive conservative who balances Trump’s chaos. Unlike Trump, Pence doesn’t think name-calling has any place in our national politics. Unlike Trump, Pence’s conservative bona fides have never been in question.

Yet Pence is anything but generic or inoffensive when it comes to right-wing “culture war” issues, like women’s health, LGBTQ rights, immigration, and basic trust in science. In some cases, Pence has actually led the way on making regressive social policy part of the GOP “establishment.”

From their very first joint interview, it was clear Donald Trump and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence — a deeply conservative and now establishment figure in American politics — were going to have some awkward moments on the campaign trail.

In past months, Pence has played the loyal running mate, keeping out of the way and attempting to explain Trump’s bombast to more skeptical onlookers.

I have never been quite so confused as to how to interpret a vice presidential debate. Let’s say Mike Pence shows up and crushes Tim Kaine. Unambiguously. Totally.

Then what? What are we supposed to think about that?

What’s the point of the vice presidential debate? They’re a strange format if you think about it: Two people who aren’t directly running for president (at least this year) talk about political issues for an hour and a half.

There are a handful of memorable moments from recent debates — Sarah Palin asking if she could call her opponent “Joe”; Biden and Paul Ryan getting into an emotional discussion about abortion in 2012. Reaching further back, there’s the classic exchange in 1988 in which Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.“

Tales of powerless, miserable, humiliated vice presidents of the United States are legion. John Adams, the office’s first occupant, once proclaimed the job is “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” FDR’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, later said the job was “the worst thing that ever happened to me.” And even Lyndon B. Johnson, who many pundits believe had wizard-like political powers, couldn’t make anything of the office, and once said that “being vice president is like being a cut dog.”

So you could be forgiven for not being too excited about Tuesday’s Mike Pence/Tim Kaine VP debate.