Not the Beer thing again

So, it sounds like more Americans would like to have a beer with Mike Pence than Tim Kaine.  As noted bully and interrupter Chris Matthews opined,  Kaine seemed more aggressive and combative than Pence.  Well, the clash of ideas in a public forum can be a messy business and Kaine's agenda was to tie Pence and the republican party to Trump.  Pence refused to defend his putative boss and made many in his party yearn for a Pence candidacy in 2020.  If the debate was judged on points scored by an impartial panel, I have little doubt Kaine was the winner.  However, these encounters are more often judged on style than substance and many pundits judged  Pence was cooler.   He also  lied far more and better than his opponent.  He simply refused to answer or lied about any Trumpism called out by Kaine.  The refusal of the moderator to force him to stay within the parameters of the debate allowed him to throw The Donald under the bus without having to actually defend anything.  As one pundit put it, Kaine is running for vice president in 2016.  Pence is running for president in 2020.  Pence is a nasty piece of work who is not noted for his grasp of foreign or domestic policy, a sort of George W. Bush lite.  But on the limited stage of a VP debate with a mandate to stop the bleeding of his ticket, he accomplished the job, albeit by dropping Trump like the proverbial hot potato.