Pence is an extreme question dodger
Covering the Trump-Pence Campaign Will Be a Nightmare
Indiana journalists discuss the deeply frustrating experience of covering their governor
Both Mike Pence and Donald Trump are notorious question-dodgers. Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty
By Shawn McCreesh
They knew what the rest of the U.S. political press corps is about to learn: that Pence is incapable of answering a question he does not like.
"I cannot emphasize enough how frustrating an experience it has been trying to cover Mike Pence," Brandon Smith, the statehouse bureau chief for Indiana Public Broadcasting who has covered Pence since 2011, tells Rolling Stone. "I can remember vividly a press conference in which the big idea that Mike had put forward was that he wanted to reduce, or eliminate, the business personal property tax. We repeatedly asked about the specifics of what he wanted. Did he want to reduce it by some amount? Did he want to eliminate it entirely? And if so, how would he pay for that?" But even simple questions about Pence’s own policy proved fruitless.
"For a press conference that was 45 minutes long, at least 30 minutes were spent asking the same question over and over again," says Smith.
"He'll get a couple of sentences in his head, and he just repeats those," says Chris Sikich, a government watchdog reporter with The Indianapolis Star who's covered Pence since 2012. "It's almost like he's filibustering."
Sikich had one such experience with Pence just last month, the day after the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Pence "was doing an economic development announcement in Carmel that I was covering the day after the shootings. He said something [like], 'My thoughts and prayers go to the community down there,' and the follow-up question I had to ask was, 'The [Orlando shooting] wouldn't be a hate crime in Indiana. Should it be?'
"He wouldn't answer. He just kept saying, 'My thoughts and prayers.'"
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/covering-the-trump-pence-campaign-will-be-a-nightmare-w429402
