Not As Boring As You Think!

Republican vice presidential candidate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence speaks during a campaign rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Toledo, Ohio. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)
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You may think that tonight’s historic face off between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, two of the more boring politicians in American history, is going to be a snooze. But please, do not be so naive! It will be much cooler than you think. It is true that every Veep debate in this century has included someone who is either crazy (Palin), evil (Cheney) or at least entertaining (Biden). Indeed, in addition to Biden-ness the 2012 Veep debate had significant drama because Democrats were rather desperate for Biden to get them up on their feet after Obama’s deflating showing in 2012’s first presidential debate.

But here’s why Veep debates are still a big deal.

Donald Trump has had one of the worst week’s in modern presidential campaign history. He’s had a number of them. He’ll probably have worse. And it probably won’t even hurt him that much in the polls. But you’ve had his shellacking in the first debate, his spat with Alicia Machado, his glorious overnight Twitter rant, all coming in for a landing with the revelation that he lost almost $1 billion in a year and apparently got out of paying any income taxes for almost twenty years. Calling out Hillary Clinton for stepping out on Bill and making some ambiguous but still destructive comments about PTSD have a hard time even breaking through.

Trump now only speaks to us through Twitter and Fox News. So none of these things has really been seriously addressed by Trump. That’s why the debate is likely to be pretty interesting. A major part of Vice Presidential debates is, not surprisingly, commentary on the presidential candidates and at least part of the time the Veep candidates acting as engaged pundits on their boss’s behalf. Mike Pence is an utterly conventional politician. He may be substantively as out there as Michele Bachmann. But he doesn’t say things that play nutty on TV. He’ll have to explain his boss on many or all of the above controversies. In this case, his normalness may work against him.

On the one hand that’s good for his campaign because he’s really presentable. But unlike Trump he’ll have to answer in complete sentences and at least broadly coherent thoughts. Trump has the advantage of just reacting in a Trumpian way. Not Pence. So I think there’s a good chance that a lot of these controversies will be revisited and inflected in interesting new ways tonight.

What will also work against Pence is that he’s not a terribly smart guy.

Of course there might be some of this for Kaine as well. You’ve got this thing with Bill Clinton going off on how Obamacare is stupid. Thanks, Bill! So that’ll almost certainly come up. But there’s much less on Kaine’s plate to deal with. And he’s smarter. So I think tonight could be quite interesting.

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