Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine went after Mike Pence Tuesday for declining to say this week whether he thinks former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke is a deplorable individual.
“If you cannot call out bigotry, if you cannot call out racism, xenophobia,” Kaine said at a campaign stop in Michigan. “If you cannot call out and stand back and be silent about it, then you are enabling it to grow.”
“You are enabling it to become more powerful,” he said.
Though Pence declined to say in an interview Monday evening whether he thinks Duke is “deplorable,” the Indiana governor said in no uncertain terms he and Trump reject the former Klansman’s support.
“I’m not really sure why the media keeps dropping David Duke’s name,” Pence said. “Donald Trump has denounced David Duke repeatedly. We don’t want his support, and we don’t want the support of people who think like him.”
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked, “You would call [Duke] a ‘deplorable’?”
“No, I’m not in the name-calling business,” Pence responded.
The conversation came in reference to when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton said last week that “half of Trump supporters [are in] the basket of deplorables.”
These so-called deplorables include persons who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it,” she said last Friday evening at a fundraiser in New York City.
The Democratic nominee amended her claim Saturday morning, and said she didn’t mean to say half of Trump’s supporters are “deplorables.” She did, however, stick to her claim that the Trump campaign has attracted a who’s who of unsavory bigots, including David Duke.
On Monday, Pence said he didn’t want get involved in the saying whether Duke is deplorable, and he stressed the GOP ticket rejects people like the former KKK chief.
The next day, Kaine said that’s not good enough.
“[Hillary Clinton] advanced the notion that if you’re chumming around with the head of the Ku Klux Klan – people who have that title – that’s deplorable,” Kaine said.
“You got to call that out,” he continued. “If you are attacking immigrants, that’s deplorable. If you are attacking LGBT Americans, that’s deplorable. If you are attacking people because they are Muslim, that’s deplorable.”
