A clear win for the man with the harder job
If viewers of Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate were expecting fireworks, they were sorely disappointed.
Unlike in the debate clashes earlier in this campaign, there were no car crash moments, undignified spats or vicious name-calling.
In fact, both JD Vance and Tim Walz approached the debate with remarkable restraint, referring to each other politely and graciously acknowledging when they had found a point of agreement.
“I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting,” said Mr Vance, turning to his opponent during an exchange on gun crime. “I’m sorry about that. Christ have mercy.”
“I appreciate that,” Mr Walz replied. Later, he told Mr Vance: “I’ve enjoyed this debate.”
The only moment of real heat, when the moderators muted both men’s microphones, came during a debate over migrants in Springfield, Ohio.
When the same topic came up in the presidential debate last month, Trump provoked days of headlines with his claim that migrants were “eating cats and dogs”.
This time, there was an arcane disagreement about the specific legal status of Haitian migrants, and the forms they use to obtain Temporary Protected Status.
As the candidates squabbled, the host Margaret Brennan interjected: “Gentlemen, the audience can’t hear you because your mics are cut.”
Mr Vance, who has made a name for himself with bizarre pronouncements about “childless cat ladies” and his awkward manner on the campaign trail, managed to come across as warm and human. He was not, in the words of Mr Walz in an earlier rally, “weird”.
His answers on policy issues were detailed, and he spoke repeatedly about children and families in a way that was designed to appeal to the female voters who are driving Ms Harris’s poll lead.
It was Mr Walz, the man picked by Ms Harris for his folksy Midwestern charm, who came unstuck in front of the cameras.
Stuttering over his words, getting agitated and failing to pick up on some of the most obvious attack lines to use against Mr Vance, he looked out of his depth on the stage.
At one point, he mistakenly said he had become “friends with school shooters”, while apparently referring to their parents.
Perhaps the worst moment of his night came when he was challenged about his claim that he was in China at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Acknowledging he can be a “knucklehead”, he admitted that he “misspoke” and that he actually travelled to Hong Kong months later. “I will get caught up in the rhetoric,” he said.
His pre-scripted attack lines on “Project 2025” and the claim that Trump and Mr Vance would impose a nationwide pregnancy register came unstuck when his opponent gave a surprisingly moderate answer on abortion.
“We’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust,” Mr Vance replied. “Donald Trump and I are committed to pursuing pro family policies.”
There is an obvious reason for the friendliness of the exchange on the debate stage.
Both candidates, in truth, were debating each other’s bosses. As Mr Vance put it at the start of the event: “A lot of Americans don’t know who either one of us are”.
On some issues, including border control, climate change, and the economy, there were interesting points of difference between the two men.
But the harshest criticism was instead reserved for Trump and Ms Harris, who were not in the room.
“A nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment,” said Mr Walz, in response to a question about the crisis in the Middle East.
Mr Vance hit back: “When did Iran and Hamas and their proxies attack Israel? It was during the administration of Kamala Harris.”
Tuesday’s debate is unlikely to have a major impact on the polls ahead of next month’s election.
In a presidential race, the only two people who truly matter are the two candidates for the top job, who will not face each other again before polling day.
In a debate where the prize was for each man to charm the audience on behalf of his boss, Mr Vance had a much harder job. Nonetheless, he was the clear winner.
This dud performance could make all the difference
Why was JD Vance, a hardcore MAGA convert with apparently limited electoral ability, selected as VP over Marco Rubio or Tim Scott? Tonight showed us why. Putting his Yale-honed debate skills to the test, the senator from Ohio launched a series of forensically devastating attacks on the Biden administration, and called into question the judgement of the VP’s pick for VP.
Vance’s obvious advantages were made clear in the first few minutes of the debate, with a clear response to the unfolding tensions in the Middle East after Iran’s massive rocket barrage of Israel, he presented a powerful rhetorical defense of a vital ally while craftily reminding voters that no new wars were started under Donald Trump’s premiership. It’s hard to believe this was the same man who notoriously struggles to engage one-on-one with voters, and there were no sign of his occasional awkward vocal tics and stilted delivery. This was pure Ivy-league gloss.
There would be no repeat of Kamala Harris’ bait-and-switch strategy that worked so well in drawing out her Republican rival in the presidential debate. Indeed, Walz struggled to keep up with the young senator, ignoring his direct provocations in favour of railing against Donald Trump — the man he would clearly have preferred to take on.
Walz’s failure to hold Vance to account on his unpopular positions on contentious issues like abortion left the CBS moderators to fill in the gaps. Well-prepared, Vance was able to fight back without falling into the trap of appearing petulant. He called out the selective fact-checking of the CBS moderator, before launching his own version against his opponent.
Immigration was always going to produce a powerful soundbite for the MAGA faithful, but JD Vance’s masterful linkage of the crisis at the border to the fentanyl crisis will resonate particularly with working-class swing state voters. Thumbing his nose at the loaded terminology of the CBS moderator, Vance argued that “the real family-separation policy in this country is Kamala’s open border”. Walz’s “dehumanisation” rejoinder felt like a Clinton-era moralistic finger-wagging exercise. From his panicked expression, he knew that too.
And what about Hong Kong? Walz’s face contorted into a Bidenesque confused grimace. Hadn’t he once claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the brutal crackdown at Tiananmen Square, despite actually residing in Nebraska? Walz awkwardly tried to dodge the question, before conceding that he “misspoke”.
Looking like a distracted student called upon by a teacher to answer a tricky math question, Walz’s performance hardly improved in the second half of the debate. In one particularly brutal episode, Vance systemically rattled off the material policy wins of the Trump administration like lowered inflation and higher take-home pay. Vance empathised with the “tough job” of “whackamole” Walz would have to play to avoid giving the former president credit. Gulping, his eyes started to widen.
If presidential debates don’t matter, VP debates are so unimportant as to hardly warrant a second thought. Normally. But this is no normal election cycle. A bizarre debate performance exposed Biden’s mental infirmity, setting in motion a brutally quick defenestration of a sitting president and queen-making of his lowly regarded deputy.
The Harris campaign has since sought to sustain itself purely on good vibes and high energy, a strategy that has failed to move the all-important independent voters in a nail-biter of an election. Make no mistake, Walz’s folksy gee-shucks routine was a purposeful attempt to bring those voters on board. But like his boss, Walz has proved that a compelling media narrative does not make a leader. In a nail-biter election, this dud performance could make all the difference. The real mistaken VP pick revealed himself on Tuesday night — and he wasn’t the man from Ohio.
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