Cable’s wrong, Mike Pence lost the vice presidential debate

Mike Pence lost Tuesday night’s debate. This shouldn’t even be a question.

Since the end of the vice presidential debate, the internet’s political corner has grown bloated with articles about how Indiana Gov. Pence beat Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine — in terms of delivery and confidence — while lying the whole time. But by any reasonable standard, that means Pence lost.

Tuesday night made it clear that the divide between maintaining a narrative and being a good debater has disappeared. How confident someone looked while an opponent spoke or how people at home will “feel” instead of whether a candidate is saying anything should not be the standard for victory. While this has been an issue as long as debates have been on television, the difference now is that modern debates end with a wave of commentary from people behind desks who viewers are supposed to trust.

Ideally, these experts deliver insightful ways to understand the issues discussed, but often, they’re just former insiders now employed by news networks to provide strategy breakdowns.

Take Betsy McCaughey of Fox News, who said, “Pence used fancy footwork to keep the debate from bogging down on the same old issues,” in his “quiet common sense way,” that viewers love so much. One of the “old issues” she highlighted happened to be whether Donald Trump has paid his taxes during the past 20 years.

Pundits like McCaughey set standards of success based on how a performance fit a campaign strategy rather than whether candidates effectively discussed the issues presented, providing analyses which are largely useless when it comes to the voting booth.

Stop telling us campaign psychology, and tell us who is competent.

Someone engaged enough in politics to understand how messaging and political communication work is not looking for the media to tell them who won. They pay attention enough to have an opinion and probably know better than to put faith in those shouting at them. And the people who do draw value from these analysis shows are the ones slightly confused by what they just watched or hoping for something to repeat at work the next day.

And there you are, cable news commentator, saying the person who spent 90 minutes attempting to trick voters did a better job than Kaine, whose biggest error was too eagerly pointing out contradictions. According to Politifact’s live fact-check, Pence had eight false or mostly false claims. Kaine had one.

Kaine listed some of the terrible comments Trump has made during this election — highlights such as calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and applauding Russian President Vladimir Putin for his strong leadership — i.e., authoritarianism. Pence wrote these off as insults and lied about many of them never happening. CNN’s panel of experts framed this as an unwillingness to defend Trump, but it’s really Pence’s willingness to deceive voters.

“Democrats and many journalists argue that Pence succeeded only by throwing Trump under the bus, refusing to defend his boss from repeated attacks,” David Gergen, a CNN talking head and former adviser to Ronald Reagan, said in his debate reaction. “But they miss the point: voters rarely scrutinize debates line-by-line, instead making their judgments on the overall tone and performance of a candidate. Pence will not fare well with fact checkers, but his poise and polish played well with voters.”

Gergen’s assessment of voter priorities is largely accurate, as Trump supporters have time and time again shown a willingness to move past their candidate’s bigotry and hostility to direct quotations. The problem is that Gergen writes off the critics as groups who have, for good reason, been hostile to Trump in the first place. His statement ignores the role his own commentary, and that of his peers, has in reinforcing misperceptions of average voters.

It’s true that voters rarely scrutinize debates line-by-line, but that’s exactly what these experts are there to do. Demands that media be actively attacking Trump are misplaced because the media should avoid as much bias as possible. But the cable news figures in question are not reporters, they’re supposed to be a spoken form of what I am doing right now: parsing through information to clarify its value. Instead, they’re instructing viewers about meta factors such as confident delivery and silly taglines.

Our acceptance of political theatrics in place of substance has reached a head this election. Yet, for all the hand-wringing about the media’s failure to fact-check Trump’s campaign, political analysts continue to feed into the idea that his tactics magically result in victories, when all they truly accomplish is manipulation. Pointing out falsehoods is absolutely worthless if a round of shrugs follows, accompanied by consensus that the lies worked.

Which is why having a show of people there to immediately explain things can be so valuable. It removes the effort of becoming informed, because you don’t even need to switch the channel.

The instant-information platform of post-debate cable news is going to waste when it is most relevant. People are lazy when it comes to learning about politics, so cable news should be using this as a chance to get rid of arguments that it only cares about flash. Having a table of people repeating each other is not constructive.

CNN also continued its streak of holding a focus group of undecided voters, which essentially means shoving some random people into a room, turning on their own channel and taking a headcount of reactions. Tuesday’s bunch was a group of people in Richmond, Virginia, where Kaine was the mayor. He was also Virginia’s governor, where Richmond is the capital, and he currently serves as the state’s junior senator. That doesn’t do much to destroy liberal bias charges, as the group is a random sampling of people and could have included residents of just about anywhere else, regardless of the debate’s actual location.

Frankly, if you think Pence won the debate according to any measure of merit, you don’t care about reality. You are willing to accept a presidential candidate in Trump, who lies to your face about everything from his financial records to the effectiveness of nuclear proliferation. On top of that, you view someone pretending those lies never happened as a potential voice of reason.

Well-delivered lies are still lies, and in an event intended to be decided by competency, they should be knocks instead of benefits. Kaine proved Pence was wrong more times than Pence proved he wasn’t. In debater terms, that’s victory.

Pence is not the savior conservatives are looking for — he’s a better-trained puppet of the man whose name they’re punching at the top of a ballot. Maybe they’d have an easier time realizing that if these so-called experts bothered to point out his strings.

Matt Moret is the Assistant Opinions Editor for The Pitt News. He generally writes about media and politics. Write to Matt at mdm123@pitt.edu.