this country who have come into this country illegally, who are perpetrating violence. >> you want to use a big brush against mexicans. >> he said, and many of them are good people, you keep leaving that out of your quote. if you want me to go there, i'll go there. there is a choice here, it's a choice on life. i couldn't be more proud to be standing with donald trump who's standing for the right to life, it's a principle that senator kaine that you embrace, i've appreciated the fact that you've supported the height amendment. we can come together as a nation, create a culture of life. more and more young people are embracing life, because we know we are better for it. like mother teresa said at that

infamous prayer breakfast. let's welcome children into our world. there are so many families around the world that can't have children. if they can adopt -- >> governor, why don't you trust women to make the choice for themselves? we can encourage people to support life, of course we can why don't you trust women, why doesn't donald twrump trust women to make this choice for themselves. that's what we ought to be doing in public life. convincing each other, dialoguing with each other about important moral issues of the day. >> because we -- >> we should let women make their own decisions. >> a society can be judged by how it deals with its most lnerable, the aged, the informed, the disabled and the unborn. i believe it with all my heart. i can't be more proud to be standing with a prolife

candidate. >> it's been a divisive campaign. if your ticket wins, what specifically are you going to do to unify the country and reassure the people who voted against you? >> that's a really important one. that may be the $64,000 question. because it has been a divisive campaign, and again, hillary's running a campaign about stronger together, and donald trump, and this is not directed at this man, except to the extent he can't defend donald trump, he's run a campaign that's been about one insult after the next. we do have to bring the country together. here's what we'll do, hillary clinton was first lady, then senator for eight years and secretary of state. i serve in the senate. and i'm amazed, elaine, as i talk to republican senators, how well they regard and respect hillary clinton. she was on the armed services committee, other committees, she worked across the aisle when she was first lady to get the chip program passed so 8 million low income kids have insurance in

this country. she worked across the aisle after 9/11 to get health benefits for the first responders who bravely went into the towers and the pentagon. she worked to get benefits for tricare benefits for national guard members including hoosiers and virginia ans in the national guard. she has a track record of working across the aisle to make things happen. you know what, i have the same track record, i was a governor of vermont with two republican houses. in the senate i have good working relationships across the aisle. i think it's fine to be a democrat or republican or independent, after election day, the goal is work together. hillary clinton has a track record of accomplishment across the aisle, that will enable her to do just that when we work with the new congress in january. >> how will you unify the country if you win? >> thank you, elaine, and thank you for a great discussion tonight. >> absolutely. >> thank you, senator. this is a challenging time in the life of our nation.

weakened american's place in in the world after the leadership of barack obama and hillary clinton. stifled by ab avalanche of more taxes, more regulation, obama care, the war on cole, and the trade deals that have put american workers on the back seat. i think the best way we can bring people together is through change in washington, d.c.. you know, i served in washington, d.c., for 12 years in the congress of the united states. and i serve with many republicans and democrats, men and women of good will. the potential is there to really change the direction of this country, but it's going to take leadership to do it. the american people want to see our nation standing tall on the world stage again. they want to see us supporting our military, rebuilding our military, commanding the respect of the world, they want to see

the american economy off to the races again, they want to see an american comeback. donald trump's career has been about building, it's going through hardship like a business person does, and finding a way through smarts and resilience to fight forward and when donald trump becomes president of the united states, we're going to have a stronger america. when you hear him say he wants to make america great again, when we do that, i truly do believe the american people are going to be standing taller, they're going to see that real change can happen after decades of talking about it. and when that happens, the american people are going to stand tall, stand together and we'll have the kind of unity that's been missing for way too long. >> thank you so much. >> this concludes the vice presidential debate. my thanks to the candidates, the commission, and to you for watching. please tune in this sunday for the second presidential debate at washington university in st. louis. and the final debate on october 19th at the university of nevada

las vegas. from farmville, virginia, i'm elaine quijano. good night. >> two men who just met tonight approach each other after this this debate. two versions of the truth on display tonight. pointed, contentious, personal. lots of outrage. elaine will be a heavily googled name tonight. she played quite a role in the conversation. sitting across from these two men so similar and so different. what i thought was a very contentious conversation. >> contentious and at times incomprehensible. onof the things that is going to go down as a feature of this debate, unfortunately, because it doesn't reflect well on any of the people involved. a lot of the time i think those of us watching on television had

no idea what was being said, not only were both men speaking over one another. the moderator was speaking over both of the candidates, and nobody was yielding to anybody else. there were long stretches of time when there were three voices at once, and i don't think you could pick out any intel eligible words from any of them. that was particularly true in the first half of the debate. we went through long stretches where i don't think anyone got an intelligible word in. we saw mike pence do a lot of the clinton attacks that i think the trump campaign had regretted their presidential candidate was not able to bring up. he kept going to the basket of deplorables and hillary clinton's e-mail server. those were things donald trump did not get to in last week's debate. the overall, most pronounced

dynamic that you could discern between the two men was tim kaine, basically the shorter version of this debate is tim kaine saying, hey, you guys are running donald trump for president. here's this crazy thing that he said, and mike pence would respond by saying no way, no way, that's not possible. come on. come on, you know that's not true. tim kaine spent a lot of this debate quoting donald trump directly. and mike pence spent a lot of this debate denying that those quotes have been said. >> our fact checkers have been busy all easy long. they remain at work. more on that after this. but let's go to the site in virginia, heading up our coverage there, chris matthews. chris? >> brian, i thought it was very illuminating, i thought mike pence did all the things right that donald trump did wrong. his body language was excellent, he looked like a grown-up. he was playing with a couple

deuces against a guy with a full house. it was difficult for him. he had to defend donald trump. he came across as a grown-up, strong, very effective at being a conservative. he made himself the front-runner for the republican nomination in 2020. he was el kwen the at the end. he was very good on the policing issue for the conservative side, very strong against illegal immigration. he really didn't work the suburbs for trump, he worked his right wing flank. i thought he was very effective at securing trump's right wing flank. that may be important in the numbers in the next couple days. to stop this hemorrhaging of trump many i thought at times, and i like the guy, kaine was a little desperate there, jumping in all the time, always trying to get his points, he didn't wait his turn. if he had just waited his turn, the back and forth nature of this event he would have had his

opportunity. i don't know why he kept interrupting. with two people debating, the other guy gets the chance to speak. he con the wait for that. he hit all the pointsf e democratic coalition. he hit the minorities, immigrants, illegal immigrants, whatever, he hit everybody, he hit israel a couple times, he went for israel. that's a good one. what he did was hit all the bases of the democratic party coalition, made them feel that someone's looking out for them, overall, i think the winner tonight will end up being -- in terms of the debate and what they were trying to accomplish, pence, because pence was solid, he looked like he had his head screwed on, that's going to look very important for trump who doesn't look like he has his head screwed on. >> can i ask you a question about how this is going to play in days ahead? i was struck by the fact that one of the things donald trump did last week, he said, i didn't say that, i didn't say that, i didn't say that. that let the clinton campaign spend the next three or four

days pointing out all the things he actually did say, keeping the debate going and fact checking him on that easy to fact check stuff. mike pence did his own version of that tonight. saying, trump didn't say that about on a lot of things trump did say. does that mean they're going to be at risk of the next few days not going as well for them as tonight may have? >> you're right, i think in terms of fact checking, that's only the second and third day story, it's not as big, we had -- i bet it's 40,000 people watched tonight, maybe 30,000 up to 40. they're not going to be fact checking like you and i will. i think those that watch television programs like ours and read the paper, you know this campaign is not about particular facts, it's about attitude. i think that mr. kaine was a regular democrat, like hillary clinton, like walter mondale,

dukakis, all the rest of them. he's defended the democratic coalition effectively tonight. he made all the points we like to hear. i don't think he moved anybody. i think the effect of tonight, despite the facts, i know they're important to journalists, despite the facts, i think he gives some suring up of what was definitely a strong shift toward hillary clinton. i think he sured it up tonight and trump is going to be happy with his performance. again i'm going to tell you, he wasn't so much running as a running mate tonight. he was offering himself as a future leader of the conservative party tonight. i think he's now the guy, and you're going to hear this from a lot of conservative blogs tonight and tomorrow, he's their guy on the ticket, he's the conservative that they like. >> chris matthews, thanks, i have a number of all-stars waiting to get into this game, including steve schmidt, eugene robinson, james carville.

your assessment of what you just witnessed? >> i think that pence's objective was to attack hillary, which would endear him to the conservative base. he really did at the end, as i said before, he was very religious guy, i thought he was going to start talking in tongues, he got almost -- meditative when he was talking about abortion at the end. i thought that senator kaine came in and he wanted to keep the tax issue front and center, and he did. we're going to be hearing about nuclear weapons as the campaign goes. that was part of his strategy in the debate. the debate was a little more acrimonious than i thought. kaine was very aggressive, he jumped in a lot. the base of both parties, the democrats saw things they would like, i think the religious people really saw stuff in pence that they liked, that they didn't see in trump. my guess is it's not going to

change very much. it will give the religious people something to be excited about. and the democrats will be excited with senator cane's performance. >> do you think the democrats are going to be anxious to get sunday night here as fast as they can? >> i don't -- i think sunday night is going to come in due course, the democrats feel like they've had a pretty good week. i didn't see anything tonight that's going to change the trajectory that much. it was a pretty hard hitting debate and pence kept coming after secretary clinton. he did a good job defending, he pushed the tax issue hard and the nuclear issue hard, those are two things that democrats feel like is good in their favor. pence gave the religious people something to cling to here.

trump doesn't give them much. >> james carville, thanks, thanks for watching along with us. steve schmidt a lot of people will see the biggest policy difference between pence and trump on syria, a real clear difference between top of the ticket and number two, also, interrupting is new in our lifetime. you can watch 30 years of debates and not see what we witnessed tonight say nothing of the first presidential. >> when we look at this event it will be forgotten and not long remembered. it's not going to have an impact on a single person's vote in this country with the two dominant figures at the top of the ticket. that being said, i think tim kaine was borderline rude, interrupting, and i don't think he came across particularly well to a person who's not following this race every minute of every day by way of introduction. however, in the course of that

interruption, he put mike pence into a difficult box. because the indelible image that will shape this debate in the coverage tomorrow is, mike pence repeatedly shaking his head no, no, no. donald trump didn't say that. almost in every instance, in fact, donald trump did say that. the choice to defend that stuff by pretending it didn't happen. i don't think as a political strategy is particularly effective coming down the home stretch of this race. i think you saw some of the big policy differences, this has been a campaign where the ideological differences we talk about in a typical presidential campaign have really been blunted. we saw some of that tonight that we haven't seen in the presidential debates, but i think what was really telling is the foreshadowing of the attack that is going to be used by secretary clinton to close this out, which is, that donald trump

is temperament ali, psychologically unfit to be the commander in chief, to be the commander of america's nuclear arsenal. it's going to be that direct, that blunt copping down the stretch of this race. and the attack which is essentially going to be, he's nuts, mike pence wasn't able to move the needle on that in any particular way, by denying that fact. trump has said what he said. >> that quote from kaine, talking about ronald reagan. he said something interesting about nuclear proliation in the '80s, the problem is, some foul or maniac could trigger a catastrophic event, i think that's who governor pence's running mate is, exactly who reagan warned us about. effective will i calling trump a maniac. >> 100%. >> eugene? >> well, you know, i found this to be a very frustrating 90 minutes, because the debate was

miles wide, they covered a lot of territory issue after issue after issue. but as soon as they got in depth and got to an interesting place in the discussion, they moved to another topic, so it was actually only at the very end when they were talking about their faith that i thought i saw some of the real mike pence, some of the real tim kaine. the rest was kind of a battle between two very important rrogates for these two candidates whoere not there. and that's -- i think pence was more polished in a way. he actually did -- certainly during the second half of the debate, really probably the second two thirds, probably as much interrupting as tim kaine did, but kaine started it, and pence had that sort of evuncular way, softer way of barging in.

i do agree that just denying things that are on videotape and that will be replayed endlessly again and again and again, in the days leading up to sunday in the long run is not a good strategy. >> it will be interesting to both of your point, it may help you in the room at the podium tonight to say that, he never said that, he never said that, he never said that, it does make it a story going on for the whole rest of the week, to show that those denials. >> it's not as if the american people don't know he didn't say this stuff. everybody followed over the course of the last week the midnight tweets at miss universe. when he went through the greatest hits of trump's comments here, these are all comments that are deeply socialized now into the psyche, into the consciousness of the american people. >> there's a commercial for every one of them. >> let's go to lawrence o'donnell who's been watching along with us here. what's your take on how this went tonight in.

>> normally i'm nonstop note taking all the way through, i took my first note in this debate at 10:05 p.m. a lot of that had to do with how unintelligible the cross talk was. the first note was about the single most important question asked. how would the safe zones work in syria, a question too mike pence, he had absolutely no answer for that. it was just a minute later that tim kaine quoted ronald reagan as you mentioned, these are the exact words that ronald reagan actually spoke, he said he worried, and this is "that some day, some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us." and so tim kaine was accurately quoting ronald reagan there, he was accurately quoting mike

pence and donald trump throat. mike pence denied saying something that we have videotape of him saying. even though mike pence was the smoother debater up there, for the rest of the week, you're going to see mike pence denying on the debate stage that he said something, in fact, these are his words, he said it's inarguable that vladimir putin has been a stronger leader in his country than barack obama has been in this country. mike pence repeatedly denied saying those words tonight on that debate stage, it's going to be shown to the american public that mike pence wasn't telling them the truth about himself. and, you know, the final question there, about religion is always the one that i think is going to be the big softball, that's the easiest one for them to deal with, producing absolutely nothing interesting by way of governing policy, but that turned out to be the most genuine policy exchange between the two of them, because it became the issue of abortion policy. and you saw these very clear

differences, and it was the time when each of them was most comfortable discussing their policy position, because these are policy positions that they hold at their core, that they've thought about a long time, thought about all the various responses to, and it became one of the most satisfying and illuminating sections of the debate. >> i think that's exactly right. part of the reason, to gene's point earlier, they had a little time to explain themselves on that. the segments were very quick, the cross talk and the interruptions were maddening to the point of inkpre henceability. and the series of topics, felt like they were organized alphabetically, there was no through line in terms of what they were being asked about, and sometimes they were being interrupted to supposedly move on to a new topic that they had just covered in an earlier question. there was no relationship between what they were talking about and the way the debate was being controlled.

>> and kaine was talking so quickly at the top and interjecting and interrupting so much, he stepped on what was clearly a designated line of the evening, intended as one when he said, some form of, mike pence is donald trump's apprentice. but it got lost in the fog of the cross talk perhaps forever. one of lawrence's guests from last night's program is with us again tonight, that's gop strategist, mike murphy, who served as chief strategist for jeb bush's super pac. i took you seriously when you said you had opted for elective dental surgery this evening rather than watching this debate. i really did. it looks like you've watched the debate, and i can't wait to get your take on what you saw. >> it was a little more interesting than i thought it would be. i thought governor pence was the stronger and more comfortable television performer, senator cane had had a comeback at the

very end. he had a nervous speed talk problem, too much caffeine, which often happens to people the first time on the big stage. you step back to look at the real impact on this thing, it is a vice presidential debate, i think pence did a better job for mike pence than he did for donald trump. pence is playing the long game here, he has his eye on the nomination, if there was a big loser tonight, it was probably ted cruz, the christian conservative wing of the conservative party i think has a new leader tomorrow morning. i think the other big impact could be hypothetically, if donald trump can learn something from watching mike pence, if it can in anyway affect trump's performance to be stronger on sunday, because that debate is so much more powerful and impactful than this would be. i give it to pence on points, i don't think it was a rate shaking changing debate. >> to echo what some at home, we

can guess what mike pence has chosen to take. there was a name on the front of the iphone when the call came in. as it was being passed to him. let's guess it's the nominee of the republican party. mike murphy, one of the myriad things viewers often hate about people on our roles is when we get in the middle of a withering campaign, four years ahead of ourselves and talk about mike pence for the next presidential election, but did you concur with the chris matthews point that that's part of what was perhaps being disuntilled on stage tonight? >> oh, completely. there's no doubt there are a lot of calculuses being spun in the republican party about what happens after trump. most republicans at the leadership level of the party are looking at their own interests because they think trump's going to lose, pence has always had that aspiration, and in that narrow sense, i think he helped himself tonight. he was eloquent on the issues,

the republican primary voters want to hear about, he did a fairly good job staying on offense about hillary clinton. >> i'm hearing the wrong voices. >> can i ask you about what you thought about the strategic -- trump live tweeting the debate. in that first half hour, when i was starting to get frustrated about them talking over each other, there was donald trump tweeting that he thought that tim kaine was ugly, he thought he looked like a batman villain, kaine looks like an evil crook out of batman movies. is that a trumptastic thing we can't compare to other campaigns? >> yeah, trump is a genius at stepping on his own messaging, i don't think there's a force on earth at least without heavy weaponry that can separate trump from his ability to tweet. i think everybody on that

campaign has tried to pry the smart phone away from him, it will never happen. did it help? no, pence was doing fine and trump got in the way. i just hope -- i'm not a trump supporter, i can't say i hope. if they are hope, they will use pence to knock a little sense into trump about how to perform in in a debate, so they stave off another disaster on sunday. >> chris matthews? >> i think pence did well tonight in terms of his conservative base, and, therefore, bolstering up for donald trump, also to his advantage next time, i do think it wasn't that we were talking about the future tonight, we were watching it. this fella, pence is campaigning not -- he gave up the governorship of indiana to give up a ticket that was probably not going to win. he did so because of a calculation he could leverage this experience and his loyalty to the party when the others were walking away like kasich and the rest were walking away, he's walking toward. he shows he goes to the sound of the guns, he also brings with him that real conservatism

that's genuine, not this napoleonic thing that's going on with trump. he intends to survive this. he's won tonight among religious conservatives, i think in the end he's going to look more like a president than a number of these people, including his running mate. >> what did you make of tonight if. >> i really saw this more the way that lawrence and chris matthews saw it than my friends and former colleague steve schmidt and mike murphy. i didn't -- i couldn't take a note really until about 45 minutes in, it was impossible for them to even talk long enough to take a note. and i -- you know, when you're six points up, which is where hillary clinton stands today, i don't think you go out there and act as annoying as tim kaine did, i think if you're just tuning into this debate, you haven't followed every twist and turn the way we all have. you saw two men, one acting much

more like a states man than the other. >> were the interjections bothering you? >> just the presence. i thought pence's presence was far superior to kaine. she is six points ahead tonight, he had an opportunity to be more elegant than he was. people in the democratic base will find him scrappy, that's not who they're fighting over. they're fighting over people who are still on the fence. i don't think kaine helped clinton. tomorrow night, i doubt you'll be talking about this debate. in terms of what we just watched, pence was a states man, and i thought kaine interrupted the moderator and his opponent far more than he needed to with that much of a lead. >> with one of the things that happened as the night went on for pence, as he started doing a lot of nah-uh.

oh, come on, oh, come on. did that undercut that at all? >> i don't ever like that. >> it changed over the course of the 90 minutes. >> i don't from anyone. i didn't like that from trump last monday and i didn't like that from either man tonight. but the atmosphere, feeling i got from both, is that pence, i like the calmness. i like the -- unless your joe biden, then i love it when you're excited. a presentation like that, if you're mind and the calmer one and seem more like a statesman, i think he add very nice night. i thought pence had a nice night. i think he helped the image of his ticket. did he change anything? no. it changes nothing. >> i think there was a decrescendo to hyper to more calm for caine and opposite for pence. he started calm and by the end was rattled. >> he didn't need t