Pence: There’s Not One Moderate on the Democratic Debate Stage

In a speech at the Young America’s Foundation Conference this week, Vice President Mike Pence said it was absurd for the media to characterize CNN’s Democratic primary debates as a contest between moderates and liberals.

To his reckoning, he said, there were no moderates on the debate stage, and there are no moderate choices for Democratic Party voters. He contended that the party had swung so far to the left that those who would have been termed radicals not that long ago were now enjoying “moderate” status in the media spotlight. The others, he said, were nothing short of socialists.

“As we saw in last night’s debate before the first hour was over, leading Democrats advocated a government takeover of health care, open borders, free health care to illegal immigrants, and raising taxes on the middle class to pay for it,” Pence said of Tuesday night’s debate. “And before the night was over, all the leading Democrats argued for decriminalizing illegal immigration, the Green New Deal, gun control and abortion, but today, headlines across the country say that the story last night was that moderates in the Democratic Party were pushing back in the debate.”

Pence shook his head.

“You know it’s pretty amazing what the media calls moderates these days. Last night’s Democratic debate wasn’t between moderates and liberals. It was between liberals and socialists, and that’s the Democratic Party today,” Pence said.

Pence went on to tell the young crowd that it defied logic for Democrats to campaign against American capitalism, which had given the world so many advances over the last century that it was difficult to imagine where the planet would be without it. Instead, he said, Democrats were putting all of their eggs in an economic system that had robbed millions of their lives.

“It really is remarkable to see leading Democrats openly advocating an economic system that has impoverished millions around the world and robbed the liberties of generations. That system is socialism, but it was freedom not socialism that gave us the strongest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world,” he said.

“It was freedom, not socialism that’s moving us beyond the prejudices of the past to create a more perfect union and extend the blessings of liberty to every American regardless of race or creed or color,” he continued. “I want to say to this rising generation, the moment America becomes a socialist country is the moment America ceases to be America, so we must say in this movement with one voice as President Trump said in his State of the Union address: America will never be a socialist country.”

So it was said, so let it be done.