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Vice-presidential debate live: Mike Pence and Tim Kaine to face off
Vice-presidential debate live: Mike Pence and Tim Kaine face off
(35 minutes later)
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Fact check: tax cuts and crisis
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Alan Yuhas
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Kaine claims that the Bush era tax cuts were a direct cause of the financial crisis:
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The tax cuts signed by George W Bush lowered taxes on income, capital gains and dividends, and had several provisions to help married people, parents and the poor. They greatly benefited the wealthy, and unsurprisingly became a symbol of the way inequality in the US has yawned into a chasm between the rich and everyone else. But while inequality may be a destabilizing force in the economy, the tax cuts themselves were not one of the factors that drove the 2008 crisis.
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A lack of regulation on Wall Street, on the other hand, ranks among the more important causes of the crisis, whose causes include rampant, feckless mortgage lending, irresponsible bundling of those mortgages, and carelessness by ratings agencies and central bankers.
Fabulous people attend vice-presidential debate
Kaine: ‘15 million new jobs’ gained in the Obama administration
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Kaine is cherry picking statistics, and the 15 million figure is not correct in context.
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Since Obama took office in January 2009 the US has created 10.8 million private-sector jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Clinton is counting back from the depths of the economic recession, in early 2010, which would erase a full year off of Obama’s presidency.
Welcome to our live debate coverage
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If you’re just joining us – welcome to our live-wire coverage of the first and only vice-presidential debate of the 2016 presidential election. This is one-night-only, folks – and we’re thrilled to be sharing it with you.
02:28
Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine will face Republican nominee Mike Pence onstage at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, starting in just a few moments now, at 9pm ET. Elaine Quijano of CBS News will be moderating.
Social security question. Kaine, his eyes sparkling, says “we will never, ever engage in a risky scheme to privatize social security.”
For neither man is this a first trip to the rodeo. Both Kaine, a senator from Virginia, and Pence, the governor of Indiana, have experience running for elected office going back to the 1990s, and both men have had previous national exposure.
Kaine notes that Pence was a “chief cheerleader for the privatization of social security” and Trump likes the idea too.
Pence was a member of the Republican congressional leadership from 2009-2011 and Kaine, the governor of Virginia during the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, campaigned widely for Barack Obama in 2008 and was on a short-short list to be Obama’s running mate.
Pence replies: “There they go again.” Wait that sounds familiar from somewhere. Sorta.
Vice-presidential debates have a reputation for not mattering much when it comes to election outcomes, with voters focused on the top of the ticket. To which we say: bosh. There’s no telling what will happen once the lights go up, and even if it turns out not to be a decisive night, none can attest that vice-presidential debates aren’t bound to be fun – just ask Dan Quayle.
Pence says that “this is the old scare tactic.”
The most famous question in vice presidential debate history ---> https://t.co/gFI7U7Mh63
Kaine: “But you have voting record, governor. I can’t believe that you won’t defend your own voting record.”
If the candidates decide to turn on each other, instead of the tops-of-ticket, Kaine might attack Pence for a history of benighted statements and legislation on women’s equality, homosexuality and same-sex marriage, while Pence might echo a Republican ad attacking Kaine for legal defense work on behalf of violent criminals.
Kaine’s getting the better of him on this? Pence is getting a bit Rubio-repetitive.
Or, they might just fight about good old Donald and Hillary. Either way, we’re glad you joined us, thanks for reading – and please join us in the comments.
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Kaine: Trump 'must show Americans his tax returns'
Trump spokesman Jason Miller says that Trump’s campaign CEO, his spokeswoman, a key campaign surrogate and the digital media director will all be present as the candidate live tweets.
Pence gets the taxes question again.
Aides present tonight as Trump live tweets, per Jason Miller:Steve BannonHope HicksStephen MillerDan Scavino
The returns “show that he faced some pretty tough times 20 years ago... we have a tax code that actually is designed to encourage entrepreneurship... he went through a very difficult time, but he used the tax code just the way it’s supposed to be used,” Pence says.
How are they going to do this, a tweet occurs to Trump, he writes it and then passes it around for everyone to edit? Hope he got a suite!
Kaine interrupts: “How do you know that?”
I will be live-tweeting the V.P. Debate. Very exciting! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Pence says Trump created lots of jobs and a great business.
Kaine: “How do you know that?”
Kaine hits Trump hard on not paying his taxes. Pence lamely interrupts, “Senator, you don’t take all the deductions you’re entitled to?”
Donald Trump must show Americans his tax returns to show that he’s qualified to be president.
The candidates talk over one another and Quijano tells them, basically, to shut up. Which they do!
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Donald Trump is watching the debate, his tracking pool of reporters says, from inside the Trump hotel in the Las Vegas strip.
Fact check: Iraq and donations
Judging from his Twitter feed, the Republican presidential nominee is in position. Did he order room service? He’s been torturing himself with CNN, by the sounds of it. Change the channel already!
Alan Yuhas
Wow, @CNN is so negative. Their panel is a joke, biased and very dumb. I'm turning to @FoxNews where we get a fair shake! Mike will do great
Pence: the Obama administration has ‘stifled the economy’
Wonder if we have a picture of that hotel in our system? Let’s see – yes.
Obama took office in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis, and the economy has crawled back into recovery over his two terms, with employment nearly down to pre-crisis levels. It’s arguable that his policies have restricted some growth, but the economy has held to a steadily upward track.
Turns out it’s a gaudy gold middle finger directed at laborers and culinary workers, according to a protest outside the hotel two weeks ago.
Pence: ‘The Clinton Foundation accepted foreign donations while she was secretary of state … she kept that pay to play process in’
Here’s a picture of Laborers’ International Union of North America members and Culinary Union members protesting what they say is an anti-union stance by the hotel, on 21 September:
Pence is correct that the foundation took donations from foreign governments, and that the charity did not disclose every contribution – in violation of an agreement to identify donors that it made with the Obama administration. But no one has yet produced evidence of a quid pro quo exchange between the Clinton Foundation and its donors.
You know you could always just watch the baseball game . . . https://t.co/zTyG93aYiB
Pence: ‘It was a failure of the secretary of state’ to acquire a status of forces agreement with Iraq
The argument that Hillary Clinton’s failure to secure an agreement with Baghdad over keeping American troops in Iraq ignores several key facts, including that the Bush administration similarly failed. It also ignores that Isis’s first segments formed out of the post-invasion civil war in Iraq, while George W Bush was president; that the group took root in Syria’s civil war, where the US did not intervene until the airstrike campaign began in 2014; that Obama withdrew American forces in 2011 under the timeline agreed on by Bush and Baghdad. Pence also voted for the Iraq war, and unlike Clinton has not expressed regret for the vote.
Trump supported the destabilizing invasion of Iraq in 2002 and supported “surgical” intervention to remove Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi in 2011, though he now claims otherwise. He also supported withdrawal from Iraq in 2007 and 2008.
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Mike Pence hosted a conservative talk show for five years in the 1990s after two failed congressional bids. (He went on to become a six-term congressman and a member of the Republican leadership.)
Pence hits Kaine for 'rolling out the numbers' on jobs
On YouTube you can find footage of the final three minutes of Pence’s show. Trigger warning: it’s nuclear-grade patriotic and pretty sappy: “When those planes fly over speedway Indiana, there’ll be a little bit of mist in this American’s eyes, cause you got the job done.”
Pence takes a question about Trump’s taxes. Trump said he used the laws to pay as little tax as possible.
When Tim Kaine gets around a microphone, meanwhile, a different kind of patriotism spills forth – the kind you blow through a harmonica on the Robert Johnson tune Travelling Riverside Blues:
Pence returns to Kaine’s “you’re hired you’re fired thing”. Pence says that Clinton-Kaine would introduce $2tn in more spending, debt, more government.
Let’s have an audience quiz: Who played it better? Tim Kaine – or Led Zeppelin?
He says that Obama-Clinton have run the country into a ditch.
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Kaine: “Fifteen million new jobs?”Pence: “Honestly, senator, you can roll out the numbers, but people in Scranton know different.. this economy is struggling.”
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Clinton: ‘Go get ’em, Tim’
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.@TimKaine's spent his whole life fighting for working families, so I have no doubt he'll do the same tonight. Go get 'em, Tim. -H
Kaine asks, do you want a “you’re hired president under Hillary Clinton, or a you’re fired president with Donald Trump”?
And you know what, frankly? If he screws up, the Democrats can just...
Then he goes into a riff on pre-K education, tax relief for the middle classes, small business tax relief and support.
(NB: this is not just a gratuitous Elvis Costello song embed in the blog. Kaine’s former body man told Politico in July that whenever Kaine was getting beat up in politics he would joke that Blame it on Cain was his favorite song, and then he’d play the song.)
In contrast, Kaine says, Trump wants to eliminate the federal minimum wage. Kaine notes that in congress Pence voted against minimum wage increases. The GOP plan also has “trillions of dollars in tax breaks just like Donald Trump.”
Kaine says Trump-Pence wants to take the country back to the bad old days.
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Quijano, rather gently, gets control back.
This is kind of punchy. Who’s swinging better?
The question is about debt. Pence gets to talk about it. He says under Obama the national debt almost doubled. Fact-check please. Unleash the Yuhas. Hello?
Pence is still talking. He says that Kaine tried to raise taxes as governor of Virginia, and that Kaine “wants more of the same” – “a trillion dollars in tax increases.”
“Even former president Bill Clinton calls Obamacare a crazy plan,” Pence says. Then he asserts that he and Trump have a plan “to get the economy moving again.” We’d note that growth is higher and unemployment is lower than any Republican candidate promised years ago, and that household incomes are climbing at a record pace.
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Kaine cuts off Pence, who’s now on to the Clinton foundation, which Pence says accepted foreign contributions in exchange for foreign influence.
Kaine gets the mic. When Hillary CLinton became Secretary of state, Kaine says, bin Laden was alive, many troops were in Afghanistan and Iran had an active nuclear program.
Kaine says that Clinton worked to reduce Russian’s nuclear weapons stockpile, to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program and reduce troop employments.
Pence says that Iraq is overrun by Isis because CLinton failed to negotiate a status-of forces disagreement.
Kaine drops some history on Pence, telling him that George W Bush negotiated the agreement.
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Fact check: Norwood v Longwood
Alan Yuhas
Mike Pence: ‘Norwood University’
In his opening statement, Pence misstated the name of the university hosting the debate. It is Longwood University, not Norwood.
He also said that Barack Obama has raised more taxes to extraordinary levels – this isn’t quite right.
There were two major changes to the tax code in Obama’s two terms: the 2012 expiration of tax cuts created by George W Bush (with extensions for people making less than $400,000 a year), and levies to fund the Affordable Care Act, (including a penalty for not having health insurance, a 10% tax on tanning services and a 3.8% tax on investment income for top earners).
Obama also enacted temporary cuts meant to spur investment and help Americans in the depths of the financial crisis, but all in all tax rates for most American have not changed much since George W Bush’s presidency, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
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GOP announces Pence won debate
Pence: Clinton campaign 'has been an avalanche of insults'
While you’re shooting pool, the national Republican party is playing three-dimensional chess.
Pence takes the same question. Voters don’t like your guy. Why?
For example, tonight they have already released statements declaring Mike Pence the winner of the debate and Hillary Clinton the loser.
Pence picks a fight with Kaine:
(The debate hasn’t happened yet.)
Senator you and Hillary Clinton would know a lot about insult... she is the architect of the Obama administration’s foreign policy... Syria today is the result of a failed foreign policy.
This seems a smidge premature. (v @becket) pic.twitter.com/wWGpawNyb0
Kaine interrupts. “These guys have praised Vladimir Putin as a great leader.”
Update:
Pence says the campaign of Kaine and Clinton “has been an avalanche of insults.”
The GOP has replaced its premature "Mike Pence won and Tim Kaine is lame!" post with this error message: pic.twitter.com/G3BFJCudFb
That’s a loser thing to say. Sad!
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Now for Kaine. He’s praised Clinton’s character. Why do 60% of voters not trust Hillary Clinton? Quijano mentions “emails and her foundation.”
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Kaine says he trusts Clinton because “Hillary Clinton has that passion” to serve others with a special focus on civil rights. “It’s always been about putting others first, and that’s a sharp contrast with Donald Trump. Donald Trump puts himself first.”
Clinton camp: we're preparing for a better prepared Trump
Kaine digs into Trump a bit. HE notes that Trump started his political career by calling Mexican rapists and that Trump promoted “birtherism” for years.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook tells reporters before tonight’s debate that the campaign expects Trump to be better prepared next time around (even without, apparently, Nigel Farage’s help).
Mook refers to two hours of videos of a Trump deposition in a lawsuit against a restaurateur that was released last week. In the deposition Trump is indeed poised.
Clinton manager Robby Mook, before VP debate: 'We are expecting [Donald Trump] to be better prepared for the next debate.'
Mook: 'We all saw those deposition tapes. We know that there is a calm, cool & collected Donald Trump that can show up, and we expect that.'
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Meet the moderator: Elaine Quijano
A veteran of the White House, Pentagon and supreme court beats and a former CNN talent, Elaine Quijano anchors politics coverage on CBSN, the live-streaming digital version of CBS News.
She grew up in a Chicago suburb, majored in engineering and “lucked into a broadcast journalism career”, she tells an interviewer in the Filipinas Magazine clip below:
If Quijano can’t make it, there’s a backup: CSPAN’s Steve Scully, who has been hailed by comedian John Oliver as the most patient man on television:
Politico’s Hadas Gold has spoken with Scully about his preparations for the big night:
While covering the debates like the hundreds of other journalists who descend upon the four universities hosting the debates, Scully has also done the work to prepare his own separate sets of questions for every debate, as though he will be the moderator. That’s because he could end up being one.
“I have the file with me,” Scully said ahead of the debate at Hofstra University last week. “If they call me at 8:59 p.m. I’m ready to go, and if they do in the next three debates I’m ready to go as well.”
Read the full piece here. (thx @bencjacobs)
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Bill Clinton: 'don't lock him up. Vote'
The potential future first gentleman modifies a Barack Obama line – “don’t boo. Vote!” – to stop a crowd in Ohio from chanting “Lock Him Up” – a line in turn borrowed from Trump supporters who enjoy saying “Lock Her Up” about Hillary Clinton.
Not calling for the imprisonment of one’s patently criminal opponent: this qualifies as high-level political discourse:
Bill Clinton admonished audience member who says Trump should be "locked up""We don't do that," says WJC. "Don't lock him up. Vote."
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Trump say's he'll live-tweet the debate
Trump, having just spoken in Arizona, is flying to Las Vegas to stay at a hotel and watch the debate, the pool of reporters covering his campaign says.
Trump has promised to live-tweet the debate:
I will be watching the great Governor @Mike_Pence and live tweeting the VP debate tonight starting at 8:30pm est! Enjoy!
HOWEVER, we’d remind our readers that the last time Trump promised to live-tweet a debate, it was a kind of lame six-tweet dribble.
On the eve of a five-way Democratic debate on 13 October 2015, Trump tweeted:
At the request of many, and even though I expect it to be a very boring two hours, I will be covering the Democrat Debate live on twitter!
Here was Trump’s electrifying commentary:
Should be interesting but too bad the three guys at《1% will be taking up so much time - but who knows, maybe a star will be born (unlikely)
"@StreckerJosh: The Hillary love fest on CNN is ridiculous. I feel bad for the other candidates...especially the non-criminal ones."
We will all have fun and hopefully learn something tonight. I will shoot straight and call it as I see it, both the good and the bad. Enjoy!
Can anyone imagine Chafee as president? No way.
O'Malley, as former Mayor of Baltimore, has very little chance.
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From Lloyd Bentsen’s “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” to Geraldine Ferraro’s “I almost resent, vice president Bush, your patronizing attitude” to Sarah Palin’s “Say it ain’t so, Joe” – USA Today has a medley of top moments from previous vice presidential debates (click through if video player below is not working for you):
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Michelle Obama: 'Clinton is tough'
Michelle Obama campaigned for Clinton in Charlotte, North Carolina, today.
There’s a striking moment when the first lady is talking about Clinton’s resilience and taps her microphone in apparent reference to Trump’s blaming his lost debate Monday on a microphone malfunction:
Hillary Clinton is tough. I watched her. When she gets knocked down, she doesn’t complain. She doesn’t cry foul. No, she gets right back up, comes back stronger.
