Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

Tim Kaine is pro-choice, and so is Hillary Clinton. Mike Pence is pro-life, and Donald Trump has come around to that position, too. So when Pence and Kaine discussed abortion during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, they provided a stark but fleeting glimpse of the huge stakes the 2016 election will have for public policy.

Pence said the sanctity of life is one of his core values, and called partial-birth abortion “anathema to me.” Kaine said he’s a devout Catholic, but doesn’t believe in imposing his personal views on others, and instead “trusts American women to make that decision.” It was a straightforward exchange, with Kaine vowing that Clinton would defend the rights of women to make their own reproductive choices, and Pence responding that Trump would defend the rights of babies to be born.


But that yes-versus-no clash over abortion rights was a rare straightforward moment. The running-mate debate, featuring two fairly generic representatives of their respective political parties, was expected to highlight 2016 policy differences that have been overshadowed by the FBI investigation of Clinton’s emails and the daily circus of Trump. It was supposed to show America what the campaign would have sounded like if the parties had nominated more conventional and less controversial partisans. Mostly, though, it didn’t. Kaine tried to steer every discussion towards Trump’s undisclosed tax returns and incendiary insults, while Pence—when he wasn’t trying to change the subject to Clinton’s emails and charitable foundation—offered Republican policy boilerplate that often seemed disconnected from Trump’s actual proposals.

If you listened very closely, you could get a brief sense of some of the major differences between the tickets. Kaine mentioned Clinton’s support for stricter background checks for gun owners, and for comprehensive immigration reforms that Pence derided as “amnesty.” Kaine attacked the idea of banning refugees simply because they’re Muslim or from specific countries, while Pence said Clinton’s willingness to accept Syrian refugees is putting Americans at risk. Kaine pointed out that Trump supports multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts for high earners, in line with typical Republican supply-side philosophies, while Clinton wants to raise taxes on the wealthy. Pence argued that the Clinton tax hikes would throttle the economy while the Trump tax cuts would spur rapid growth, even waving at the supply-side argument that they would actually increase revenues and help save Social Security.

Republicans always hoped to frame 2016 as a contest between change and the status quo, and there were moments when that came through in the debate. Pence claimed that Obama’s policies “have run this economy into a ditch,” even though the economy was losing nearly 800,000 jobs a month in January 2009; when Kaine mentioned that it’s gained 15 million jobs since the end of the Great Recession, Pence scoffed that “you can roll out the numbers” but people know the economy is struggling. Similarly, on foreign policy, Kaine argued that killing Osama bin Laden, bringing 150,000 troops home, and forging a nuclear deal with Iran have made Americans safer, while Pence ridiculed the Iran deal as a giveaway to a terrorist state, and made the case that the world has gotten much more dangerous on Obama’s watch.

The Top 10 Moments From the VP Debate

It hasn't gotten as much attention as his birtherism or his mockery of a former Miss Universe, but Trump has proposed to undo Obama’s health reforms, financial reforms, education reforms, and climate rules—really, to undo the Obama era. And Pence did mention in passing that Trump wants to repeal Obamacare “lock, stock, and barrel”—he didn’t say anything about replacing it—and end Obama’s “war on coal.” But those kind of stark differences were not the focus of the debate. A few insiders probably knew what Pence meant when he said Trump will strike down Obama’s executive orders that are stifling growth—perhaps a reference to new rules assuring that workers can get overtime pay and limiting conflicts of interests by financial advisers. But it’s hard to know for sure, because Pence didn’t elaborate, Kaine didn’t pursue the topics, and the moderator, Elaine Quijano, had her own prearranged ideas about what the candidates ought to discuss.

Instead, the conversation, like so many conversations in 2016, kept drifting toward Trump. Kaine was clearly on a mission to bring up Trump’s taxes—repeatedly pointing out that he might not be paying any, and might be hiding secret dealings with Russia—as well as his description of Mexicans as rapists, his long crusade to debunk Obama’s citizenship, and his demeaning comments about women. Even if he had to interrupt rudely, even if he had to change the subject abruptly from policing or immigration to Trump’s foibles, Kaine wanted to force Pence to defend the indefensible—or, even better, not to defend it.

The VP debate, like so many conversations in 2016, kept drifting toward Trump.

And Pence repeatedly chose the second option. He tried to ignore Kaine’s litany of Trump’s outrageous comments, occasionally suggesting they weren’t real, at one point saying that in any case Clinton’s dismissal of Trump supporters as “deplorables” was far worse. And when Kaine attacked Trump’s policies, Pence often responded by defending orthodox Republican policies that his running mate does not happen to share. The most glaring example was on Russia policy. When Kaine noted that Trump has repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin, and that his last campaign manager left after revelations about his work for pro-Putin forces in Ukraine, Pence trashed Putin as a little bully. He also suggested that Trump would be much tougher than Obama on Russia, even though Trump often says he’ll pursue friendlier relations.

For most of the night, it felt like Kaine was shadowboxing with an opponent who wasn’t in the ring, while Pence was defending a version of that opponent who existed mostly in his imagination—when he bothered to defend him at all. Kaine’s problem was that his frequent interruptions seemed rude, and his constant efforts to bring up Trump’s vulnerabilities reeked of political gamesmanship. Pence's problem--if his real goal is becoming vice president, rather than running for president against Clinton in 2020--was that his refusal to discuss Trump’s vulnerabilities reinforced the vulnerabilities. Kaine may have been rude about bringing them up, but he wasn’t making them up.

Even that straightforward exchange about abortion, which began with both candidates talking eloquently about their Christian faith and their heartfelt policy beliefs, devolved into squabbling about the loose-lipped star of the 2016 political reality show. After making his impassioned case for the right to choose, Kaine slyly mentioned that “we don’t think women should be punished, as Donald Trump said they should, for making the decision to have an abortion,” calling that belief “the fundamental difference between a Clinton-Kaine ticket and a Trump-Pence ticket.” Clearly frustrated, Pence shot back that he and Trump “would never support legislation that punished women who made the heartbreaking choice to end a pregnancy.”

“Then why did Donald Trump say that?” Kaine badgered him. “Why did he say that?”

“Well, look, he’s not a polished politician like you and Hillary Clinton,” a flustered Pence replied. “You know, things don’t always come out exactly the way he means them.”

Kaine gleefully responded with a line from the gospel of Matthew: “From the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks.” And then he returned to his favorite subject for the evening: “When Donald Trump says women should be punished or Mexicans are rapists and criminals or John McCain is not a hero, he’s showing you who he is.”

It was then that Pence blurted out the most memorable line of the debate: “Senator, you’ve whipped out that Mexican thing again.”

He really was whipping out that Mexican thing again, the way he never tried to whip out the Obamacare thing or Wall Street reform thing or climate change thing. Kaine didn’t want a familiar debate about policy, with Democrats defending tax hikes, climate science and Obama while Republicans defend supply-side economics, coal and conservatism. He wanted a debate about Trump and that Mexican thing, because he knew Pence had no answer for his next question:

“Can you defend it?”