Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana clearly made a decision before last night’s vice-presidential debate. He was going to defend Donald Trump with style rather than substance.
.. So Pence took a different approach. He used his performance skills, built up over years as a successful television host and politician.
.. Pence even tried the jiu jitsu move of turning his own campaign’s weakness into the other side’s problem, by accusing Kaine of being a “loyal soldier” running an “insult-driven campaign.”
.. “We end up asking not whether the candidates made good arguments given what we know to be true but whether they made good arguments given what we imagine voters know to be true.”
He added: “And sometimes there’s a very big gap between how good a candidate’s answers sounded and how good his or her answers actually were.”