| Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana clearly made a decision before last night’s vice-presidential debate. He was going to defend Donald Trump with style rather than substance. |
| Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia entered the debate with one main strategy: He would confront Pence with Trump’s words, actions and proposals – and challenge Pence to defend them. |
| Pence, of course, can’t really defend Trump. He can’t defend Trump’s insults of women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, veterans and the disabled. He can’t defend Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin. He can’t – or at least won’t – defend Trump’s statements in favor of nuclear proliferation and mass deportation. |
| So Pence took a different approach. He used his performance skills, built up over years as a successful television host and politician. |
| When Kaine challenged him, Pence smiled and shook his head wanly. Or looked off toward the audience and shrugged his shoulders. Or flatly denied that Trump has said things that he most definitely said. Or recycled an old Ronald Reagan line (“There you go again”). |
| Pence even tried the jiu jitsu move of turning his own campaign’s weakness into the other side’s problem, by accusing Kaine of being a “loyal soldier” running an “insult-driven campaign.” |
| These maneuvers were no doubt effective with some voters. To someone who doesn’t follow politics closely, they may have seemed based in reality. And as soon as the debate ended, pundits – who often judge debates based on style not substance – generally called the evening for Pence. |
| If there were no such thing as facts, I too would have scored the debate as a narrow Pence win (at least until the last few minutes, when he ducked a thoughtful question about his religious faith and instead attacked Hillary Clinton). Pence was mostly calm and composed, while Kaine often seemed eager to interrupt. |
| But the truth means something, too. If we journalists have any job during a campaign, it’s to ground our work in reality, rather than only dramatic criticism. |
| “There’s a deep tension in the way the media judges presidential debates,” Ezra Klein, Vox’s editor in chief, wrote last week. “We end up asking not whether the candidates made good arguments given what we know to be true but whether they made good arguments given what we imagine voters know to be true.” |
| He added: “And sometimes there’s a very big gap between how good a candidate’s answers sounded and how good his or her answers actually were.” |
| The full Opinion report from The Times follows. It includes this line from Frank Bruni, about Pence: “It’s hard to think of a vice-presidential candidate in modern history who has gone so far against his supposed nature and his proclaimed values in the service of his running mate.” |
David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist |
