Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine came to Tuesday’s vice presidential debate armed with an arsenal of prepared zingers.
Hillary Clinton’s running mate levied a series of canned pithy attack lines against Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on everything from jobs to Trump’s Twitter wars to Vladimir Putin.
It’s a well-worn strategy for these kinds of debates, though none of the lines landed with the kind of punch that past debate zingers have. Pence, by contrast, had fewer prepared lines.
Here are seven of Kaine’s attempts:
Kaine used so many rehearsed lines that he seemed even to be keeping track, at one point acknowledging he’d already used a line six times before saying it again. Pence also called him on the strategy: “Did you work on that one a long time? Because that had a lot of really creative lines in it,” he said after Kaine’s Mount Rushmore critique.
Some other Republicans who weren’t onstage jumped to that same line of attack against Kaine, criticizing him for sounding too “canned”:
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Write to Tessa Berenson Rogers at [email protected]