Pence writes the playbook for Trump

1. Mike Pence gave Donald Trump an instruction manual on how to deliver substantive responses on public policy issues — and how to avoid diversions into topics, particularly ad hominem attacks, that hurt rather than help your cause.

2. Tim Kaine’s Joe Biden strategy, of aggressively interrupting his opponent and trying to drown out and ridicule his responses, didn’t work as well against Mike Pence as it did four years ago against Paul Ryan. Ryan seemed surprised — flabbergasted — that Biden would behave in such a bullying way. Pence seemed unsurprised, and undercut Kaine’s interruptions by noting that he was delivering canned lines. Also, Kaine’s rhetorical trope of saying Hillary Clinton is a “hire” and Donald Trump a “fire” candidate didn’t really work. Just as his and Hillary Clinton’s argument that the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts produced the 2007-08 financial collapse and recession doesn’t really work.

3. Kaine did more for his ticket by contrasting referencing Trump’s comments on Mexicans as “rapists,” on women, on Judge Gonzalo Curiel and John McCain. He could have added Khizr Khan. These are fair shots and hurt the Trump-Pence ticket.

4. On two points, Kaine made preposterous assertions.

One was his absurd claim that it’s unconstitutional to bar immigrants because of their religion or national origin. Malarkey, as Biden might say. The Constitution bans a religious test for public office and of course it’s a fair argument to say banning immigrants of a particular religion is bad public policy — an argument Kaine glancingly made. But the Constitution does not say and is not interpreted to mean that if the U.S. government decides to admit immigrants from country A or who are of religion B, it must accept immigrants from countries C and D or of religion E or F. If Kaine really believes this, he is suffering from a mushy-minded “Lennonism,” as I called it in a column last week. Contrary to what an Ohio Clinton campaign tweeter thinks, no foreigner has a right to immigrate to the United States.

The other preposterous assertion was that Donald Trump, by claiming a business loss on his 1995 tax return, was refusing to support the U.S. military, veterans’ hospitals, etc., etc. Four years ago, when Mitt Romney suggested and some conservatives argued that the 47 percent of American households who don’t pay income tax were takers rather than makers, Democrats responded, correctly, that such individuals were paying FICA and Medicare taxes, state and local sales taxes, gasoline tax, etc., etc. As Judge Learned Hand wrote in an opinion in 1935, no one has an obligation to pay the government more than he owes under the law. I’m not sure his point got across, but Mike Pence pointed out that he and surely also Kaine take legal deductions on their tax returns and with no intention of defunding the government. My experience is that if you fail to take a deduction to which your documentation indicates you are entitled, the Internal Revenue Service will actually take it for you and send you a check. But maybe not now, in the Obama administration, if you’re known to be a conservative.

5. Both candidates spoke movingly on two issues with what I took to be heartfelt sincerity, criminal justice/police and religion. Kaine referenced the Virginia Tech shootings, Pence the Charlotte police shooting. In addition, Pence adroitly and in my view highly appropriately castigated Hillary Clinton for her statement that the police and Americans generally act on the basis of “implicit bias” and made the point that her statement increases and gives legitimacy to disrespect of the police, with tragic results.

On religion, Kaine, rather than launching into a discussion of abortion talked about how as governor of Virginia he let executions proceed despite his religiously-based opposition to the death penalty. Pence made a powerful case against partial-birth abortion and negated Kaine’s absurd argument that he and Trump would prosecute women who have abortions (only doctors, not pregnant women, were prosecuted under the old abortion laws).

6. Pence, who has been governor of Indiana the past four years, showed a stronger command of fact, detail and argument on foreign policy than Kaine, currently a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Pence forcefully made the point that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama failed to get the Status of Force Agreement which would have allowed the stationing of U.S. troops in Iraq which may have prevented or obstructed the rise of the Islamic State there, and after several attempts got in his argument that the Iran nuclear deal, far from preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, allows them to do so after a finite period — and shovels money at them in the meantime. Pence obviously studied up on foreign affairs during the 12 years he was a member of the House, and perhaps before that as a radio talk show host, and has kept current. Kaine tended to rely on (not entirely convincing) Clinton campaign talking points.

7. On immigration, Pence enunciated Trump’s current positions — not barring all Muslim immigrants, but those from countries whose immigrants we can’t vet; not deporting all current illegal immigrants, but waiting to deal with them after border enforcement (The Wall) and workplace enforcement (eVerify) are in place — pretty accurately. Against this, Kaine’s advocacy of “comprehensive immigration reform,” a bipartisan melange that failed of passage despite Executive and Legislative Branch support in 2006, 2007 and 2013, looks kind of retrograde and out of sync with current needs. What Pence didn’t do, and I what I have been advocating, is push a switch from the current system favoring collateral relatives of legal and illegal low-skill immigrants to a Canadian- and Australian-style system favoring high-skill immigrants. It’s part of Trump’s 10-part proposal (number 10, to be exact) in his Phoenix speech, but hasn’t gotten much attention.

8. It will be pointed out that there is some tension, perhaps even some contradiction, between positions taken in the debate by Pence, particularly on Russia, and positions taken by Trump. Pence also adroitly avoided defending some of Trump’s outrageous statements on the grounds that he is “not polished,” just as Kaine avoided defending all Americans against the charge that they are infected by “implicit bias” and one-quarter of Americans against the claim that they are “deplorable.” You can bet that Pence will be skewered for what he did on this, and Kaine won’t be, by mainstream media.