The contest between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz wasn’t much of a brawl; in fact it was often quite cordial. But the vice presidential debate created a stark, and revealing, contrast between a slick lawyer who pretends to be a hillbilly against a self-admitted “knucklehead” who lacks polish but wants to keep the government out of your bedroom.
The pivotal moment in Tuesday night’s debate came late in the contest, when the questioning shifted to Jan. 6 and Trump’s effort to overthrow the results of the last election. In a rare direct exchange, Walz challenged Vance to contradict Trump: “Did he lose the 2020 election?” Vance did not answer. He visibly could not answer. So he deflected. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance said, lurching instead into an non-sequitur attack on Covid-era censorship.
Walz interjected: “That is a damning non answer.”
The moment underscored that Vance, for his evident debating polish, was tailoring his messaging to an audience of one, a man who can’t handle the truth of 2020. In that moment, Vance was revealed as a callow politician and coward. “America,” Walz warned, looking directly into the camera. “I think you’ve got a really clear choice on this election of who’s going to honor that democracy, and who is going to honor Donald Trump.”
The vice presidential debate may not move the needle on the election — VP debates rarely do. But the debate showcased wildly different men in both style and substance. Walz spoke quickly and sometimes got tongue tied, but he spoke to American values while flashing a pragmatic problem-solving style. He made an effective liberty case for trusting women and their doctors on abortion, and offered substance and a search for common ground on immigration, gun safety, manufacturing, housing, and climate change.
While often cordial with Vance — perhaps erring on the side of being too “Minnesota nice” — Walz was effective in keeping Trump “in the room.” He hit Trump, during a discussion of Hurricane Helene, for enthusing about how global warming will create more beachfront property. He rebuked the former president for saying this week that brain-injured troops at a facility shelled by Iran only suffered “headaches.” He reminded voters that Trump’s vaunted border wall barely got built, and was paid for by American taxpayers rather than Mexico. And he detailed Trump’s long, pyrrhic battle to overturn Obamacare, including its protections for Americans with preexisting conditions.
Vance came off just like who he really is: a man who spent years perfecting public relations in the Marines before graduating from one of America’s most elite law schools. In a word, he came off as slick. Vance’s debating style was far more polished and sophisticated than Walz’s. But Vance also showcased a lack of a moral center. He called climate change “a very important issue,” before quickly dismissing it as just “all these crazy weather patterns,” while nonsensically suggesting it could be solved by onshoring solar panel manufacturing.
Vance dodged questions about whether a new Trump administration would use deportation to re-enact MAGA policies of family separation. He lied about the state bill Walz signed to guarantee abortion rights, casting it as enabling “barbaric” infanticide, even as he misrepresented his own advocacy for a national abortion ban. He rewrote history to falsely tout Trump’s tax cuts as trickling down to the middle class, and, against all fact and reason, cast Trump as a savior of Obamacare.
Vance often returned Walz’s cordial gestures. But his behavior toward the female moderators was more typically problematic. At one point he petulantly complained that the moderators were breaking the rules by trying to fact check him. He also repeatedly talked over the moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, as if they were no more consequential than his reviled “childless cat ladies,” and at one point forced them to cut his mic.
And then there were the times when Vance just got weird, in particular when he suggested that FDA-approved medicines are part of some sinister foreign plot, denouncing the “pharmaceuticals that we put in the bodies of our children” as being “manufactured by nations that hate us.” He also kept making ironic side-eyes at the camera when Walz was speaking — a move destined to be lampooned on SNL.
The Walz-Vance bout is likely the last direct contact sport of the 2024 cycle — in a campaign that has proved debates do matter. The first encounter, between Joe Biden and Trump, knocked Biden out of the race. The second encounter, between Kamala Harris and Trump, knocked Trump on his heels.
This third encounter, by contrast, seemed to ebb and flow, with each candidate having strong moments and strange gaffes. At one point Walz claimed he’d “become friends with mass shooters” (he clearly meant he’d formed friendships with families victimized by mass shootings), but then Vance, also discussing gun violence, spoke of the nation’s challenges with “mental health abuse.”
In more routine election cycles, the vice presidential debate is a sideshow, and even major beatdowns don’t have a substantial effect on the election. In 1988 for example, seasoned Democrat Lloyd Bentsen demolished boyish Republican Dan Quayle, after the latter answered a question about his readiness for the White House by insisting he’d served longer in congress than JFK. “Senator,” Bentsen said, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” While it was amazing to watch Quayle’s soul leave his body in that moment, the Republican’s running mate George H.W. Bush still demolished Bentsen’s running mate Mike Dukakis 426 to 111.
The question of readiness is heightened in 2024 for obvious reasons. The fact that Vice President Harris is at the top of the ticket, instead of the aged Biden, has highlighted how consequential the choice of a running mate is. Trump, meanwhile, has been the object of two assassination attempts this summer. And if he wins re-election he would be the oldest man to ever take the oath of office, being older than both Biden in 2020 and Reagan in 1984.
Walz’s experience is far more credible to lead the country than Vance’s. A career school teacher and a longtime officer in the Army Reserve, Walz entered public service in his early 40s, served a dozen years in Congress, and has been the chief executive of Minnesota, ranked 20th in national GDP, since 2019. Whatever you think of his politics, Walz, 60, has the experience to be president.
Only 40 now, Vance is both young and inexperienced by any historical yardstick. He is an exceptional image-maker, using his memoir Hillbilly Elegy to cast his life as a rags-to-riches tale about transcending his upbringing as a poor kid from Appalachia to obtain an Ivy League dream. In reality, Vance was a middle-class kid from the ‘burbs of Ohio. Vance’s adult life has been gilded by a right-wing billionaire benefactor, Peter Thiel, who launched Vance’s cushy career in venture capital out of law school, and then catapulted him directly into an Senate seat in 2022 with an extravagant $15 million investment. Vance proved Tuesday night that he may be ready for primetime, stylistically. But he left significant doubts about whether he has the integrity to lead the country, or even to challenge his running mate.
“What I’m concerned about is, where is the firewall with Donald Trump?” Walz said in another winning exchange. “Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office,” he asked Vance, “even if the president doesn’t?”
Walz has been an easy retail campaigner, showing up at state fairs and football games and drawing big crowds. He’s also scored several breakthroughs in the rhetorical battle for 2024, branding MAGA candidates as “weird,” and encouraging voters to both love their neighbors and “mind your own damn business.” Walz offers both avuncular likeability and governing ballast for the Harris ticket.
Vance has been tasked as Trump’s attack dog. He’s spent a lot of time going after Walz, including by attacking the governor’s military service and even his family, over a picayune distinction between fertility treatments. Vance has also attacked Harris as a “chameleon.” Which is strange for a guy who has had three last names, and morphed from a never-Trumper — writing in an alternative GOP candidate in 2016 and even musing whether Trump could be “America’s Hitler” — to Trump’s running mate. The terrible transformation is now complete, with Vance leading an ugly, racist attack on legal Haitian immigrants in his own state, baselessly accusing new arrivals to Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbors’ pets.
While Vance has been good on TV, he’s shown no common touch on the campaign trail, leading to excruciating interactions during gimme photo stops at donut and sandwich shops. He’s also been dogged by his extensive record as a right-wing yakker, in which he’s called for taxing those without children, and argued the state should force incest victims to birth their assailants’ babies. When it comes to the duties of the vice president, Vance has also differentiated himself from Trump’s previous pick, Mike Pence, by insisting he would not have certified the electoral college victory by Biden on Jan. 6, 2021.
If the choice of running mate is an important test of executive competence, Harris has bested Trump. Walz has established himself as the most popular member of either ticket, while Vance is mired at an approval rating below 35 percent. Maybe that’s why Trump himself has played pundit, insisting, shortly after his choice of Vance, that: “Historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact… virtually never has it mattered.”
He can only hope so.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
