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Kaine, Pence Clash in V.P. Debate; Pence Repeatedly Denies Trump's Past Statements; Hurricane Matthew Bearing Down on East Coast. Aired 6-6:30a ET
Aired October 05, 2016 - 06:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GOV. MIKE PENCE (R), VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The campaign of Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine has been an avalanche of insults.
[05:58:29] SEN. TIM KAINE (D), VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Donald Trump says women should be punished, Mexicans are rapists.
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: You better hope Trump wins.
KAINE: Governor Pence said, inarguably, Vladimir Putin is a better leader than President Obama.
PENCE: That is absolutely inaccurate.
HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: He doesn't even know how wrong he is.
PENCE: Because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama failed, we are back at war.
KAINE: I'd love to hear Governor Pence tell me what's so enjoyable or comical about nuclear war?
PENCE: Did you work on that one a long time?
KAINE: He is asking everybody to vote for somebody that he cannot defend.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota.
ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to your NEW DAY. It is Wednesday, October 5, 6 a.m. in the east. Did you watch the debate last night? Tim Kaine and Mike Pence on the attack, sparring over issues, interruptions and insults. Kaine repeatedly raising some of Trump's most inflammatory statements with Pence trying, sometimes failing to defend his running mate.
CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Pence was very strong in trying to turn attacks on Trump back onto Hillary Clinton, questioning her record, the missing e-mails, trustworthiness. So much at stake. Just four days until the next presidential debate, 34 days until election day. We have all the news covered. Let's begin with CNN's Phil Mattingly,
live in Virginia -- Phil.
PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Chris.
There's some sense coming into this debate that it would be kind of a calm state affair between two federal politicians, dull versus duller, some called it. Well, it took less than 20 minutes to dissuade any voter who turned in -- tuned in of that notion, as both candidates desperately tried to land blows in favor of their running mate.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KAINE: You are a Donald Trump -- Trump supremacist (ph).
PENCE: I must have hit a nerve here.
MATTINGLY (voice-over): Hotly contentious from the start...
PENCE: I can't imagine how Governor Pence can defend the insult- driven selfish me-first style of Donald Trump.
MATTINGLY: The vice-presidential debate becoming a night of whose candidate is more insulting.
PENCE: Senator, you and Hillary Clinton would know a lot about an insult-driven campaign.
MATTINGLY: Tim Kaine repeatedly putting Mike Pence on the defensive, using Donald Trump's own words.
KAINE: He's called women's slobs, pigs, disgusting. He went after John McCain, a POW, and said he wasn't a hero.
MATTINGLY: Words Pence, in many cases, didn't directly defend.
KAINE: When Donald Trump says women should be punished, or Mexicans are rapists and criminals, or John McCain's not a hero, he is showing you who he is.
PENCE: Senator, you whipped out that Mexican thing, again. He...
KAINE: Look, can you defend it?
PENCE: There are criminal aliens in this country, Tim.
MATTINGLY: Instead, trying to take a similar tack against Hillary Clinton.
PENCE: He still wouldn't have a fraction of the insults that Hillary Clinton leveled when she said that half of our supporters were a basket of deplorables.
MATTINGLY: Trump's running mate at times flat-out denying statements the billionaire has made in the past.
KAINE: Donald Trump and Mike Pence have said he's a great leader. And Donald Trump has business.
PENCE: No, we haven't.
TRUMP: I respect Putin. He's a strong leader.
KAINE: Donald Trump's claim that he wants -- that NATO is obsolete and that we need to get rid of NATO is so dangerous.
PENCE: That's not his plan.
TRUMP: NATO is obsolete. NATO has to either be rejiggered, rechanged or changed for the better.
MATTINGLY: Kaine frequently interrupting Pence.
KAINE: Let me talk about this.
PENCE: Senator, I think I'm still on my time.
KAINE: These were Donald...
PENCE: He says -- he says...
KAINE: Hold on a second, Governor.
PENCE: It's my time, Senator.
MATTINGLY: Attempting to prove Trump's unfit for office by quoting Ronald Reagan.
KAINE: He said the problem with nuclear proliferation is that some fool or maniac could trigger a catastrophic event. And I think that's who Governor Pence's running mate is, exactly what President Reagan warned us about.
PENCE: Senator -- Senator, that was even beneath you and Hillary Clinton, and that -- that's pretty low.
MATTINGLY: Kaine hammering Pence on Donald Trump's refusal to release his taxes.
KAINE: And he said, "If I run for president, I will absolutely release my taxes." He's broken his...
PENCE: And he will.
KAINE: He's broken his first promise. Second, he stood on the stage...
PENCE: He hasn't broken his promise. He said...
KAINE: He stood on the stage last week, and when Hillary said you haven't been paying taxes, he said, "That makes me smart." So it's smart not to pay for our military. It's smart not to pay for veterans. It's smart not to pay for teachers. PENCE: His tax returns, that showed he went through a very difficult
time, but he used the tax code just the way it's supposed to be used, and he did it brilliantly.
MATTINGLY: As Pence touted the message Trump advisors desperately want their own candidate to make, that they represent change.
PENCE: What you all just heard out there is more taxes, $2 trillion in more spending, more deficits, more debt, more government. And if you think that's all working, then you look at the other side of the table.
MATTINGLY: Both candidates asking Americans to trust their candidate and distrust their opponent.
KAINE: We trust Hillary Clinton, my wife and I. We trust her with the most important thing in our life. We have a son deployed overseas in the Marine Corps right now. We trust Hillary Clinton as president and commander in chief. But the thought of Donald Trump as commander in chief scares us to death.
PENCE: There's a reason why people question the trustworthiness of Hillary Clinton, and that's because they're paying attention.
MATTINGLY: The fiery debate ending with a testy exchange on abortion and faith.
PENCE: I sought to stand with great compassion for the sanctity of life. We can create a culture of life.
KAINE: Why don't you trust women to make this choice for themselves?
We can encourage people to support life. Of course we can. But on fundamental issues of morality...
PENCE: Because Senator...
KAINE: ... we should let women make their own decisions.
PENCE: Because there is...
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MATTINGLY: And, Alisyn, flawless, that was how one Trump adviser spun Mike Pence's performance last night, a performance that he's going to try to carry over onto the campaign trail here in Harrisonburg in just a couple hours. And there's no question about it: he was the calm and steady hand of that the campaign desperately needed him to be. But that -- that was never actually really in question. The real question, can Donald Trump do the same?
CAMEROTA: OK, Phil.
Let's see what viewers thought of the debate. CNN's instant poll after the debate gave the edge to Governor Mike Pence. Forty-eight percent of debate watchers saw -- say that Pence won the debate, compared to 42 percent for Senator Tim Kaine.
About two-thirds of viewers also said Trump's running mate exceeded expectations. Only 14 percent thought that he did worse. And then 20 -- 18 percent, or let me as -- let me read this instead of just reading it off the screen. More than half say the debate did not sway their vote. Twenty-nine percent said it did not make them -- it did make them more likely to back Trump. Only 18 percent said the same for Clinton.
[06:05:07] I've got to get math down at this hour, Errol. We should note, our poll sample skews more Democratic than an average CNN poll of all Americans.
CUOMO: And boy, was there a lot of drama born of ignorance about that after the first debate. This time, because the Republican came out on top, nobody will say a thing. Great poll.
So, style often trumps substance. But substance can come back to haunt you in a debate. So let's take a look at what's going to come out of last night's big fracas. We have our panel: CNN political commentator and political anchor of Time Warner Cable News, Errol Louis; CNN political analyst David Gregory; and CNN political analyst and Washington bureau chief for "The Daily Beast," Jackie Kucinich.
Errol Louis, if you've got to pick a headline, what is it?
ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: The headline is Pence wins by putting daylight between himself and his running mate.
The reality is I thought what he did best in terms of style was great. But really beyond that, he said a number of things that are quite different from what Donald Trump has said. And so if he can get away with it, and Donald Trump is going to praise his performance, if the Republican Party is going to say, "OK, full steam ahead with Trump/Pence," it's added some nuance, and it's given the Clinton team something that they're going to have to really be a little bit worried about.
CAMEROTA: David Gregory, what's your take away?
DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I disagree a little bit. I think there's no question that Pence had an ease about him, had a very nice style. I thought he was highly relatable. I've interviewed him many times. I thought he came off very well.
I thought Tim Kaine was a bit too high-octane, a little bit too in love with his brief, but I do think that he had a job to do and that was to continue to drive enthusiasm among Democratic voters who may be unsure about Hillary Clinton. And so, she [SIC] took that fight -- rather, Kaine took that fight to Donald Trump through Mike Pence. And I thought that there was a lot of blood drawn and that Pence didn't wipe up, that he didn't respond to.
I will say on a point of style, first of all, I thought it was -- while it was sober and substantive, I thought it was disjointed. I thought there wasn't enough control of the discussion. And I thought it was a really missed opportunity by Tim Kaine, who wanted to be the prosecutor on the attack, who didn't look to his opponent enough and put him on the defensive. He kept looking at the moderator.
Now, these are just kind of style TV points. But for a politician who wants to make -- get in this guy's face and make a point, he didn't look to him. And say, "What about that, Governor Pence? How do you answer that?"
CUOMO: Right. And Pence did a great job...
GREGORY: "How do you -- this is not you."
CUOMO: Pence did a great job of those stylistic cues of looking to the camera, of deciding what to answer and keeping his measure all the time. And again, style often winds up being your headline.
Jackie, one of the interesting dynamics was Pence was definitely not wanting to answer for a lot of what Donald Trump has said, no question.
JACKIE KUCINICH, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right.
CUOMO: But because of all the -- "Well, Trump said, Trump said," he got away with not having to answer for his own position on LGBTQ rights...
GREGORY: Yes.
CUOMO: ... in his own state. He got away with kind of just momentarily discussing his feeling about Syrian refugees and the spanking he just got from a court in his own state.
KUCINICH: Yes, he really did. But I would -- I want to go back to this for just a second.
I just feel (ph) a little bit, Errol, that the Clinton campaign would have to be worried about this. I was talking to them yesterday. There was kind of a lightness about them, because what they said that Tim Kaine was able to do was to make his running mate step away from Donald Trump, saying even his running mate can't defend what this guy is saying. So that's one of the things they're taking from this and are going to push in the coming days.
But you're right in that Mike Pence didn't have to defend his record in Indiana on Syrian refugees or on LGBTQ issues. And -- but you have to -- you have to imagine, we can do a lot of that. We can call them out for that in the press. But you would expect it at a debate at that scale to get to know these candidates a little bit better and their records and even having the moderator draw it out, if they weren't willing to weigh in on their own -- on their own records.
CAMEROTA: So, some people hit Tim Kaine on having what seemed like some canned lines. Some canned zingers.
GREGORY: Yes.
CAMEROTA: Let's listen to those.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAINE: You are a Donald Trump -- Trump supremacist (ph). Do you want a "you're hired president" in Hillary Clinton, or do you want a "you're fired" president in Donald Trump?
Donald Trump can't start a Twitter war with Miss Universe without shooting himself in the foot.
Sir, he loves dictators. He's got kind of a personal Mt. Rushmore. Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un...
PENCE: Please.
KAINE: ... Moammar Gadhafi...
PENCE: Oh, come on.
KAINE: ... and Saddam Hussein. If you don't know the difference between dictatorship and leadership, then you've got to go back to a fifth grade civics class.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CAMEROTA: How did those go over, Errol?
LOUIS: I liked the Mt. Rushmore, in particular. It got its own hashtag and some folks were, like, creating their own little personal Mt. Rushmores.
Look, it was sort of too clever by half, in part because of the way that Mike Pence, who spent five years doing talk radio and sort of knows how to do these things, really just sort of said, "Look, that's just silly for the kind of conversation that we're having."
[06:10:06] And the reality is those zingers only work when they're in contrast to the rest of the conversation. Now, the rest of the conversation hadn't been, you know, sort of a solid policy discussion that you can throw a zinger into the middle of.
So, here, again, on style points, Kaine was kind of playing the wrong game.
I think -- I think Pence, though, was, you know, he did -- it's a little bit of a radio trick. As you just say, "Hey, you know what? That's nonsense. Hey, I can defend the guy," and then he doesn't defend him. He just kind of moves on.
GREGORY: But -- and he didn't defend him. That's the point, is he really didn't go out of his way to defend him. You know, he tried, sometimes inartfully, saying, "There you go, whipping out the Mexican thing again." You know, where he's talking about calling -- Trump calling Mexicans rapists who are coming across the border. He tried to put that in some context.
He tried to put Russia in some context.
But you know, there's other aspects of this that were just flat wrong, where a moderator or the opponent has to really bring the debate home for viewers. You know, you're talking about Russia. Well, only -- you know, Russia took advantage of the Obama years. Really? Well, actually, Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia while George Bush was president. Or that, you know, that Obama's responsible for ISIS.
Yes, is there culpability there for how we got out of Iraq and now continuing to have a residual force there? Yes. But I love how the Republican Party, who was for the Iraq War, just willfully ignores the fact that, in fact, the insurgency and the civil war and the roots of ISIS and Zarqawi were planted because of the invasion of Iraq, where they just kind of cast that aside.
CUOMO: But that's part of the art of the debate. You only know what you show. You take the opportunities or you don't, and then the rest of us talk about it the whole next day.
And we're going to continue that right now. Stay with us, guys.
Tim Kaine repeatedly was pressing Mike Pence, as you hear, to defend what Donald Trump has said, to defend what Donald Trump has done. And a big part of the struggle for Pence was to not do that last night.
Now, did he go too far? How effective was Pence? We'll show you, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[06:16:01] CUOMO: A delicate dance for Governor Mike Pence last night. He was hit over the head a lot by Tim Kaine with what Donald Trump has said. And the task for him was to defend what he could and stay away from what he couldn't; and he chose the latter most of the time.
Now, we have Trump's own words. So here's what Senator Kaine alleged and here's what Mike Pence did in response, and here's what Donald Trump actually said. Let's play it.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KAINE: Let's start with not praising Vladimir Putin as a great leader. Donald Trump and Mike Pence have said he's a great leader. And Donald Trump has business...
PENCE: No, we haven't.
KAINE: ... has business dealings...
TRUMP: Certainly, in that system, he's been a leader far more than our president has been a leader.
KAINE: We don't think that women should be punished, as Donald Trump said they should, for making the decision to have an abortion.
PENCE: Donald Trump and I would never support legislation that punished women who made the heartbreaking choice to end a pregnancy.
CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC ANCHOR: And do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no? As a principle.
TRUMP: The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.
KAINE: Donald Trump believes in deportation nation. They want to go house to house, school to school, business to business, and kick out 16 million people. And I cannot believe...
PENCE: That's not true.
TRUMP: They came over illegally. Some are wonderful people and they've been here for a while. They've got to go out.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CUOMO: All right. Let's bring back the panel. Errol Louis, David Gregory, Jackie Kucinich.
So Errol, how do you define the task for Mike Pence last night? You know, you want to put some daylight, as you said, between what you think and what Donald Trump thinks, preserve yourself. But you do have to defend him. You're his running mate. How did it go?
LOUIS: Well, that's right. I mean, look, he did what I think was sort of a useful strategy from his point of view, which is to sort of say, "Look, we're a package deal. You might like the policy, or you might not like the policy, but you can take the harsh version with Donald Trump, and I'll give you sort of the easy version. Hey, it's going to be OK. We're not going to be so harsh."
He also did some of that reality adjustment that has frustrated people about the Trump campaign over the months, which is that you get one outrageous statement. You call them on it, and then they start saying, "Oh, no, I didn't say that. What I meant was" -- and then you get the explanation.
CAMEROTA: Right.
LOUIS: Pence tried to do a little bit of that last night. I think it drives the opponents crazy, because there are a lot of people who, you know, when Trump says, "I saw, you know, there were thousands of Muslims cheering on 9/11."
You say, "Well, who are they?" There's no -- there's no explanation for it.
Then they adjust it a little bit: "Well, here's a clip from one article that says that there was an unconfirmed report that there might have been two or three."
And so, you know, this I what Pence is doing, this kind of reality adjustment. It's a debating trick. It's a political trick. It doesn't necessarily sort of work. But for a lot of people, it really does. CAMEROTA: That's the problem.
LOUIS: Especially if the opponent doesn't.
CAMEROTA: That's the thing. I mean, you're calling it a reality adjustment, which is basically a denial of the videotape.
CUOMO: My kids do that. They get punished for lying, by the way.
CAMEROTA: I mean -- I mean, this is -- Jackie, do you think he was effective? You know, you heard him denying these things happened: "No, we didn't say deportation force. No, we didn't say punishment for abortion." And then there's the videotape that yes, they did. So was it effective?
KUCINICH: I think Mike Pence was effective for Mike Pence yesterday.
Let's not forget, this is a very ambitious politician, and he knows if this doesn't work out, he needs to have a future. I think Mike Pence may be looking a little bit at 20/20 last night and not wanting to own some of these things or defend some of these things that Donald Trump said.
And let's not forget the week that he had coming into this. Donald Trump got in a fight with a beauty queen. He was -- after his -- you know, the aftermath of his not-that-great debate with Hillary Clinton.
So, Mike Pence had stiff head winds going into this debate and, as a result, and whether it helps Donald Trump or not, I don't know. But it certainly -- I think Mike Pence certainly looked good coming out of that to the folks who were watching.
CUOMO: So David, could it be a net-net that Trump wound -- Pence wound up looking good for him because, in deflecting off of what Trump has said, he didn't have to deal with some of his own problems with LGBTQ positions, his Syrian refugee struggles within his own state, but it also may have made people feel like, "Wow, this guy might be better than the guy at the top of the ticket."
[06:20:12] GREGORY: Yes, almost. I mean, it was like watching a debate from 2004. I mean, we were all of a sudden back in what politics used to be like before 2016. And these are two pretty seasoned politicians who are smooth politicians.
Obviously, Kaine was much more enamored of his, you know, one through five points and four debate points and, you know, multi-facetted plans.
I think -- I thought going in that Pence was going to be twisted in knots trying to define -- defend Trump, as we've been talking about. He didn't go out of his way to do that, and he tried to say, "Look, this is not a professional politician. He's an unvarnished guy. Kind of let him be him." I think there is an effectiveness to that to, you know, really speaking to what drives a lot of support for Donald Trump. Again, I just kind of focus on foreign policy. I think there's areas
that are very thin that should give people pause. You know, if the answer is, well, how are we going to deal with Russia, "Oh, well, we'll be strong. That will be it." You know, we've got two administrations who have tried to be tough with Russia, and it hasn't worked.
And I don't think Kaine's answers were very good in that -- in that regard, as well.
You know, the Syrian refugees. You know, the Clinton administration wants to bring in more. And here you've got Pence talking about we need extreme vetting as if there's not tough vetting going on right now. And that we have the potential for displaced people from Syria and elsewhere who, if they're not treated well, if they're not assimilated well in other parts of the world, could be prone to indoctrination by others.
So there's some real serious threads that I don't think were dealt with as seriously as they could have been last night.
CAMEROTA: Errol, there was some fact checking on the other side, as well. Fact checkers were not as busy, frankly, with Tim Kaine as they were with Mike Pence. But Tim Kaine did go too far when he said -- he claimed that Donald Trump said that all Mexicans are bad. May we have that moment to play for you, versus what Donald Trump really says. Listen to this.
OK. Here's what -- basically, he said, you know, your running mate says that all Mexicans are bad. That's not true. So Donald Trump never said "all Mexicans are bad." He said, "You're sending over your illegal aliens, some of whom who are rapists and murderers."
LOUIS: "And some, I assume, are good people."
CAMEROTA: Are good people.
LOUIS: I was sitting right here when he said that. And you know, I don't know if the point is lost, to tell you the truth. I mean, it's a bit of a paraphrase, but Donald Trump at his announcement of his presidency -- you know, his presidential campaign, did he call them rapists? Yes, he did. Did he say, "Some, I assume, are good people" in a way that was unbelievably offensive? Yes, he did. Does Mike Pence want to defend that? Well, he said he would, and of course, he did not.
GREGORY: You know, they were a couple of various -- Kaine talking about tax cuts under Bush leading to the -- leading to the financial collapse. Simply not true.
And I thought there was a lot of innuendo around ties to Russia that will cloud Trump's judgment that got a bit over the top in the way that they accuse their critics of doing. But again, if Trump is not going to clear this up, it leaves plenty of room for them to raise these issues. CUOMO: Also, Jackie, not a muscular defense for Tim Kaine of what
Hillary Clinton achieved as secretary of state. He just kept repeating, "Well, we got Osama bin Laden." And "Hey, we got nukes away from the -- from Iran."
And Pence just kept pouncing on that and saying, "No, you didn't." So I guess, either way.
CAMEROTA: Yes. Panel, thank you very much. We have to leave it there. Thanks for all of your insight.
All right. We do have to tell you about Hurricane Matthew, what's happening, because it is making a beeline for the East Coast. After tearing through Haiti and Cuba, more than a million people have been told to leave their homes in the U.S. Where is the storm scheduled to hit? Chad Myers has the latest track next on NEW DAY.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[06:27:45] CUOMO: Hurricane Matthew packing a deadly punch in the Caribbean. Pummeling Haiti, Cuba, taking heavy flooding, damaging winds. A trail of destruction in its path. CNN meteorologist Chad Myers joins us now with the latest forecast track.
You told us, Chad, you know, once this thing gets over land, it will weaken a little bit, but then it's going to strengthen again and we have to look at its path. So what do we see?
CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Well, that water in the Bahamas is so warm, Chris. And so there's very little shear. This storm will regain its old strength. Maybe not 145, but certainly, it will regain significant strength. So here's where we are right now.
We're at about 125 miles per hour, gusts of 155. So yes, it lost a lot of strength when it hit Cuba last night. It's still moving north at 10 in the very warm water, and it is still now, just to the north of Cuba, that northern tip, a Category 3 storm. It doesn't look very good on satellite, but it is still going to be a very impressive storm, gaining more strength as it runs up the East Coast ask then makes a quick beeline to Florida.
So where am I most concerned? I am most concerned from about West Palm all the way up to, let's say, Sebastian inlet, that little cape that sticks out right there. Category 4 storm on Friday morning. This is Thursday at midnight, really. Right there, very off the East Coast.
Now, every single model that I've looked at this morning continues to take the model slightly offshore, maybe 20 miles. But, Chris, Alisyn, you know 20 miles is nothing when it comes to forecast error. There is a significant chance that this storm runs right up the East coast and scours the entire beach area. That is also a similar chance of it stays off shore, making all the rainfall off shore, and we only get winds of 50.
So we have to prepare for 120 and hope for 50. Those are the differences by just a 20-mile deviation one way or the other. Because the eye is where the power is. The rest is where the flooding, and we could see mudslides and things like that as we get up into the Carolinas, if the rain is that big up into Piedmont, in the high country there of South Carolina. Right now that's not the forecast. It's still possible, but not the forecast.
CAMEROTA: OK, Chad. We will supplement your information next hour when we talk to the director of the Hurricane Center. And I know you'll join for that conversation. So everyone stay tuned for that.
Meanwhile, Mike Pence was tasked with defending Donald Trump during last night's V.P. debate. Did he help or hurt his boss? Senator Sessions, a Trump supporter, gives us his take, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
