Vincent J. Curtis
5 Oct 2016
At last night’s debate, Vice Presidential candidate Mike
Pence proved to be an iron fist in Donald Trump’s velvet glove.
Even Mike Pence might be surprised at that description, but
Pence at the debate last night hammered the Clinton-Kaine ticket as it has
never hammered before. All the
commentary after the debate was about how rude and fast-talking Senator Tim
Kaine was, and that he lost the debate on style points. There is certainly truth to that. Pence’s television performance was strong,
controlled, measured, and unflappable.
He carried the debate on the strength of his presentation, but it would
be a mistake to think that he didn’t have the better of the substance of the
debate also.
Let’s dispose of Kaine’s performance first. Kaine came across as a chatterbox who imparted
no confidence to the viewer in what he said.
He delivered canned answers.
After an hour of it, Kaine grew obnoxious with his interruptions of
Pence. At the very end, when the moderator
put the clear, direct question to Kaine of how Hillary was going to bring the
country together after the election, he couldn’t answer it. Oh, he talked for sure. He gave us the usual baloney of “working across
the aisle;” but cutting a backroom deal in Congress (which Hillary did precious
little of as Senator) is not the same as thing unifying the country and
bringing civil peace.
After the debate, even paid professional Democrat campaign
operatives did not think Kaine carried the debate.
Mike Pence was solid and concise, calm and gentlemanly. Pence silently let the audience know of his
opinion about the demeaning things Kaine was saying; he shrugged off Kaine’s
attacks with a smile and a shake of the head, and this was effective. Pence would occasionally laugh when Kaine was
being his most earnest, and say, “Oh, come on.”
Periodically he would observe that Kaine was delivering a canned answer
and had obviously practiced delivering it.
The substantive things that Pence said in the course of the
debate ripped the guts out of Hillary’s pretentions to reasonableness. He said that good leadership supports the
forces of law and order, and doesn’t demean it and accuse it of “implicit bias.” When the debate turned to the question of
cyber-security, he raised the issue of Hillary’s secret email server, and how
this arrangement exposed America’s most guarded secrets to hacking by foreign
governments. Over Kaine’s interruption,
Pence said that Hillary risked American cyber-security to hide the pay-for-play
scheme with the Clinton Foundation so that she used to enrich herself while in
office. When questioned how President
Trump would deal with Valdimir Putin, Pence replied ‘with strong leadership,’
and then proceeded to talk about the weak and feckless leadership of Barack
Obama when dealing with Russia and Iran.
This capitalized on the prejudices against Trump, who is characterized as
a bull elephant on the loose.
Modernizing America’s nuclear deterrent under Trump suddenly seemed
reasonable because no one casts doubt on Trump’s preparedness to use force if
necessary to back American interests against Iran, Russia, and North Korea.
Although he took a while to get to the substance of it,
Pence answered well the question of how Trump would bring the country together
after the election. His response was
that Making America Great Again was a cause that all Americans could get behind
and would all benefit from. Boom! There it is.
It explains the outreach to the black community, and the outreach to the
legal Hispanic community. This unity
brings a civil peace, which America needs right now, and is disturbed by the
Black Lives Matter movement, and other descendent groups from ACORN and the
Saul D. Alinsky school of community organization.
With his debate performance, Mike Pence stopped the downward
drift that the Trump campaign had been experiencing since the release of the Mexican Times ‘ unproven allegation
about twenty years of paying no taxes.
If enough people watched it, the debate could start casting doubt on the
seriousness of the Clinton campaign. The
Clinton campaign has offered nothing but insults and accusations against Trump
personally, and their policy prescriptions,
between insults and the email scandals, haven’t seen the light of day. More of the same of Obama is what that
platform amounts to, and what Hillary would do differently and why she would remains
unexplored. Kaine did nothing except
offer canned answers and repeat the mantra that Donald Trump is the head
deplorable in America.
Mike Pence upheld his end of the ticket in the debate last
night. As Hillary Clinton’s running
mate, Tim Kaine dealt himself a bad hand to start with, and he played it
poorly.
Tim Kaine is going to be yet another bloodied political
corpse left behind the Clinton bus.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment