Posts Tagged ‘Vice Presidential Debate
LIVE STREAM: Vice Presidential Debate Between Mike Pence & Tim Kaine, 10/04/16
What: The Vice Presidential Debate between Mike Pence and Tim Kaine
When: 10/04/16 at 7pm CT
Where: RightSideBroadcasting (on the YouTubes via the Internets on your computers) and CSPAN streams
Why: Because we are friends like this, I will watch the whole thing live and take notes as everything happens. But only because we are friends like this. If I didn’t like you so much, I would be watching old episodes of Dynasty on Amazon instead. And loving it.
Tonight, Mike Pence and Tim Kaine — two people who most people forget about — will be debating. I’m going to watch it for you and make live comments as it happens. So, this will be one of those threads that I do not go back and spellcheck or edit. It will just be my stream of consciousness as events unfold later this evening.
I’ve come around to the conclusion that Trump really made a truly strategic move in picking Mike Pence, instead of choosing someone flashy and memorable. By picking Pence, Trump tricked Hillary into picking Tim Kaine, whom she really likes for some reason. I don’t know what the story is there, but I’m starting to believe that she had to pick Kaine as a quid pro quo favor she owed him from when he was head of the DNC. Or else she just really likes him and is loyal to him and he’s her friend. I know people like to say a lot of terrible things about Hillary Clinton — and she has done some rotten stuff lately — but the woman is very loyal to her friends and she keeps people around her who are loyal to her.
Tim Kaine, however, does nothing to excite black people…who only get excited to vote when someone who is their skin color is on the ballot. I still don’t understand why Hillary didn’t want Corey Booker to be her VP: he is black, he’s charming, he’s black, he’s secretly gay, he’s black, he’s a good political attacker when he needs to be, he’s black, etc. Corey Booker is like another helping of Obama, and the Democrat base (especially black people) love them some Obama. Most people who voted for Obama would vote for him for a third term. If Hillary had picked Corey Booker, she’s lock up a lot more black votes because they’d see a picture of him, they’d hold their arms up to the tee-vee screen, they’d check that Corey Booker was around the same skin color as them, and then they’d go vote for “the historic and unprecedented first black Vice President, Corey Booker.”
Maybe Hillary didn’t want Booker stealing any of her thunder. Or, maybe she thought “Hillary/Booker” would look horrendous on campaign materials. Did all of her legal troubles prevent her from selecting Booker as VP because she didn’t want to give people a better slogan than “Hillary for Prison”? She also flirted with those “Castro Brothers” to be her VP. Well, one of them at least. There’s a better looking one and then there’s the one who looks like a lizard. If Trump had picked someone interesting as VP, I think Hillary would have felt pressure to pick someone interesting too. But, when Trump selected the talking jar of Miracle Whip to be his running mate, Hillary reached for the Hellmanns as well.
Strategically, I think it was really smart for Trump to trick her like this, because I don’t think Kaine gets Hillary a single additional vote…but I think that some Establishment Republicans will vote for Pence because they like Pence. A lot of Establishment types hope that Pence will be a very active VP, who will be given the job of running a lot of things behind the scenes, doing whatever Trump doesn’t want to do. The elite feel that they have someone they can work with in Pence and that he will be doing the yeoman’s work in the administration. They like that and are appeased with him.
I’m not sure who Kaine is supposed to appeal to. It sure ain’t black folk. He talks in Spanish sometimes, which is like nails on the chalkboard to me. I wondered if Hispanic people like it when he does that, but a friend of mine said that she thinks it’s like when white people who did a study abroad in Spain or Costa Rico try to talk Spanish when they go to a Mexican restaurant or encounter a Hispanic housekeeper at a hotel or a gardener in their yard. Breaking into Spanish with these people is insulting to them, which I don’t think Kaine realizes: it presumes that these people don’t know English and it says to them that you think they are too stupid to speak English, so you pander to them with the Spanish you remember from years ago. A lot of Hispanics don’t like when white people do this to them.
This has been an interesting election because neither Pence nor Kaine ever make the news. I am not kidding, but I have to stop and think what Pence’s first name is almost every time I think of him. I just call him Pence. I struggle to remember his first name is Mike. With Kaine, I have to remember how he spells his name and that it’s not Kane, which is how I am programmed to spell it, as in Citizen Kane. I have yet to see a headline written riffing on “Citizen Kaine,” because I don’t think anyone has bothered to write a profile on Tim Kaine. Apart from him behaving like a toddler enraptured with balloons on the last night of the DNC convention, there is not much that I know about this man. That would be scary to me if I thought that Hillary was going to win this election…because her health is so bad that it’s doubtful she would make it through a full term and Kaine would end up being the 46th president at some point in the next four years.
I don’t know anything about Pence, either, except that he looks like a more handsome version of John McCain. If they were making a movie about John McCain, they could have Mike Pence play him in the movie. He reminds me of guys who work in the Loop and ride the Metra trains out to their nice homes in the suburbs, where he has a big lawn and an Irish setter named Friday. I don’t think he’s a bad man and trust him to know about investments and taxes and home remodeling, all the things that those guys on the Metra trains are good at.
I’ll pop back onto this thread throughout the day with more musings on the VP picks and the state of the race, up until the debate gets going this evening. Then, I’ll settle in for the live play-by-play for you in real time. I think it’s important to do this because the Media lies so much after these events air. People who don’t watch these things for themselves then start believing whatever narrative the Media concocts. I think it’s interesting to go back and read what I thought was important as it was all really happening and then compare it to what the Media decided was important. I think it always feels like we were watching two different debates…but, really it’s just that they are lying liars who disregard reality and invent the narrative they want to tell instead. Those people are shameless and should never be trusted.
