As you either saw for yourself or have been told by now, Tim Kaine spent much of Tuesday night’s debate interrupting Mike Pence and moderator Elaine Quijano. By FiveThirtyEight’s count, the Virginia Democrat interjected more than 70 times in the 90-plus minute contest, about 30 times more than his opponent did. Kaine’s aggressive interrupting rubbed many viewers the wrong way and was no doubt a major reason why Pence was deemed to have “won” by a narrow plurality of respondents who took part in post-debate snap polls.
The bigger problem, though, was not that Kaine interjected as much as he did, but rather when he interjected. As Amy Davidson points out in the New Yorker, Kaine’s most counterproductive moment of the entire night was when he inadvertently “sabotaged Quijano’s effort to corner Pence on the contradictions and the blindness in his position on race and law enforcement.”
Elaine Quijano … was pressing Mike Pence on a question he had dodged—what would he, as a supporter of stop-and-frisk tactics, say to Tim Scott, the black Republican senator from South Carolina, who had spoken about being stopped multiple times by the police?—when Tim Kaine interrupted. …
Pence had just condemned Hillary Clinton for expressing concern about implicit biases on the part of the police and in society at large; he also said that he respected Scott and considered him a friend. How did he square that? The audience didn’t get to hear. By the time Kaine had said his interjected piece, which turned out to be a lengthy, prepackaged index of offensive things that Trump has said, Quijano had decided that it was time to move on to immigration.
This overeagerness was evident throughout the night, causing trouble for Kaine almost from the start. In one of the opening segments, Quijano pressed Pence to address the very real possibility that his running mate didn’t pay federal taxes for nearly two decades, a topic that likely had Clinton HQ cheering. “Mr. Trump said he ‘brilliantly’ used the laws to pay as little tax as legally possible,” Quijano said. “Does that seem fair to you?”
Pence was in no rush to answer that one, and thanks to Kaine he didn’t really have to. The Indiana Republican began his “answer” by reliving one of the canned clankers Kaine had offered moments before. (“First, let me say, I appreciated the ‘you’re hired,’ ‘you’re fired’ thing, senator. You use that a whole lot.”) Pence then simply continued off topic as though Trump’s tax returns were never mentioned in the first place. “I mean, the truth of the matter is, the policies of this administration—which Hillary Clinton and Sen. Kaine want to continue—have run this economy into a ditch,” he said.
At that point, Kaine decided he could hold his tongue no longer. The problem, however, was that he jumped in not to point out that Pence was ignoring the question, but instead to litigate an unrelated fight about the economy. “Fifteen million new jobs?” Kaine offered unprompted, a reference to the Obama administration’s rosy reading of the employment data. The two men then went back and forth a dozen or so times in rapid fire, with Kaine offering facts and Pence complaining that Kaine was using facts. (“Honestly, senator, you can roll out the numbers and the sunny side, but I got to tell you, people in Scranton know different.”)
It was only after Pence—with Kaine’s help—had effectively filibustered more than half of the time ostensibly allotted for his response that the Democrat finally remembered there was a conversation he and Team Clinton would much rather be having. “I am interested to hear whether he’ll defend his running mate’s not releasing taxes and not paying taxes,” Kaine said. The moderator jumped in to remind everyone that, yes, that was indeed the question she had asked. Pence then gave his short prepared defense (“His tax returns showed he went through a very difficult time, but he used the tax code just the way it’s supposed to be used and he did it brilliantly”), Kaine responded with his own prepared attack (“It was a fight to avoid paying taxes so that he wouldn’t support the fight against terror”), and everyone moved on.
Later in the night, one of Kaine’s poorly timed interjections had the opposite effect. Instead of changing the topic in a way that helped Pence, Kaine accidentally kept the focus on a conversation that he clearly did not want to be having: Hillary Clinton’s email. Pence had just detoured a discussion of NATO and ISIS to cybersecurity, which he used to get in a quick mention of Clinton’s private email server. The moderator was ready to move on— “I’d like to ask you about Syria, governor”—when Pence got in one more passing email dig. Kaine, again, couldn’t control himself. Via the Washington Post’s transcript:
Quijano: I’d like to ask you about Syria, governor.
Pence: We could put cybersecurity first if we just make sure the next secretary of state doesn’t have a private server.
(CROSSTALK)
Kaine: And all investigations concluded that not one reasonable prosecutor would take any additional step. You don’t get to decide the rights and wrongs of this. We have a justice system that does that. And a Republican FBI director did an investigation and concluded that …
(CROSSTALK)
Quijano: All right, we are moving on now. Two hundred fifty thousand people …
Pence: If your son or my son handled classified information the way Hillary Clinton did …
Quijano: … one hundred thousand of them children—Governor…
Pence: … they’d be court-martialed.
Kaine: That is absolutely false and you know that.
Pence: Absolutely true.
Kaine: And you know that, governor.
Quijano: Governor…
Pence: It’s absolutely true.
Quijano: Gentlemen, please.
Kaine: Because the FBI did an investigation.
Quijano: Gentlemen.
Kaine: And they concluded that there was no reasonable prosecutor who would take it further. Sorry.
Quijano: Sen. Kaine, Gov. Pence, please.
Kaine: Syria.
Quijano: I want to turn now to Syria
The entire exchange would have lasted a fraction of the time if Kaine had simply kept his mouth shut. But he didn’t.
