To the dismay of many, Tim Kaines eyebrows did not win last nights vice presidential debates.
To the dismay of many, Tim Kaine's eyebrows did not win last night's vice presidential debates. George Sheldon / Shutterstock.com

If you're checking recaps because you didn't watch last night's debate between Gov. Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Kaine, then rest in the comfort of knowing you did the right thing.

You can hardly be blamed in the first place for skipping a debate between two church dads who were brought onto their respective tickets expressly BECAUSE they are boring. And if you were trolling the GOP's website a couple hours before the debates, you would have known that the GOP had already declared Pence the winner of the night's competition. So why bother?

Because VP debates are amazing. They're politics for politics sake. Contestants can really let loose. (I mean, do you remember when Joe Biden verbally pants’d Paul Ryan during the last election cycle? For that whole debate Biden was one can of Genesee away from claiming he was “in the room” when they invented the keg stand.)

Anyhow, they can also be strangely edifying. In this case, Pence's performance gave us a glimpse of how the GOP will operate in a post-Trump world.

On the day Clinton regained her 75% chance of victory over at 538, Mike Pence was charged to resuscitate Donald Trump’s foundering campaign after the candidate’s worst week so far. He did so largely by pretending that Donald Trump hasn't said the things he has said.

Things Pence Said Trump Didn't Say But That Trump Definitely Said

• Trump wants a deportation force.
• Trump wants more nukes.
• Putin is a better leader than Obama.
• Women should be punished for having an abortion.

Pence carried these inaccuracies (or misunderstandings, or lies) commandingly, with the taut-faced smile and the permanent head shake of a man who just can't believe the ref is going to keep calling that a foul all night.

Throughout the debate, Pence and Kaine would accuse one another of running an "insult-driven" campaign, except Kaine's "insults" were merely just quotes of Donald Trump insults. The main moment:

Kaine: ...Donald Trump during his campaign has called Mexicans rapists and criminals. He’s called women slobs, pigs, dogs, disgusting. I don’t like saying that in front of my wife and my mother. He attacked an Indiana-born federal judge and said he was unqualified to hear a federal lawsuit because his parents were Mexican. He went after John McCain, a POW, and said he wasn’t hero because he’d been captured. He said African-Americans are living in Hell. And he perpetrated this outrageous and bigoted lie that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen.

Pence's reply, after a lot crosstalk: "I mean, to be honest with you, if Donald Trump had said all of the things that you’ve said he said in the way you said he said them, he still wouldn’t have a fraction of the insults that Hillary Clinton leveled when she said that half of our supporters were a basket of deplorables."

This "in the way you said he said them" idea, this constant creation of an alternate reality where Trump is only what people say he is, was Pence's out the whole night. Though Trump said Russia isn't going into Ukraine, he didn't mean it like that. "Donald Trump knew that happened," Pence said. "He basically was saying it’s not going to happen again."

This logic gives us a peek at post-Trump GOP strategy: deny, and if denial doesn't work, rephrase. "Trump didn't mean what he said, Trump meant what I'm saying now" is all GOP politicians have to say to keep Trump supporters on their side and put Trump behind them at the same time. It's a horrific bastardization of postmodern meaning-making and it's kind of brilliant and I hate it.

For his part, Kaine came out the gate swinging with all the faux machismo he could muster. He interrupted Pence. He talked over Pence. He challenged Pence. He brought up Trump's taxes whenever he could, suggesting that Trump doesn't support the troops because he doesn't pay taxes.

All of this looked tryhard and disingenuous. Pence seemed calm under the pressure, and often used Kaine's attacks as a reason for him to not answer moderator Elaine Quijano's questions. Kaine did the same thing, though. In fact, the underlying narrative of the whole debate was basically Two White Men Do Not Respond to Good Questions Asked By Woman of Color.

Not a good look for either candidate, and especially not for Kaine. Though he did double down on a woman's right to choose, said "we should trust women" a handful of times, and right off the bat said he was proud to be running with a "strong, history-making woman," he didn't enact that level of respect with the woman sitting right across from him for an hour and a half.

It might surprise you to know that Kaine also employed a number of sick dad joke burns last night. Here's a small selection:

“You are Donald Trump’s apprentice.”

"Do you want a 'You’re hired' president in Hillary Clinton or a 'You’re fired' president in Donald Trump?"

"If you don’t know the difference between dictatorship and leadership, you need to go back to a 5th grade civics class." (Kaine almost repeated this one twice, but Pence called him on it mid sentence and he switched the last clause to “you don’t deserve to be commander in chief.”)

These lines were camera-ready, but they made Kaine seem even more pre-packaged than he already is. But Quijano had the line of the night:

"Gentlemen, please!"


Kaine did end up winning more arguments than Pence did, so if THAT'S your measure of success in debate then you might say he won. If you watched with the sound off you'd say Pence won. If you didn't watch at all, you won.