How Tim Walz failed to reveal the real JD Vance during the vice presidential debate

How Tim Walz failed to reveal the real JD Vance during the vice presidential debate

The first and only vice presidential debate made one thing clear: Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz is a nice guy. But sometimes nice guys have to pull out the knives – and Walz couldn’t do that.

Walz’s Republican vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, is a dangerous man. He lies through his teeth. During the debate he repeatedly evaded, evaded and fabricated completely wrong answers. For example, he refused to acknowledge that he refused to certify the 2020 election, that he supported a nationwide abortion ban, and that he knowingly spread a false story about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in an Ohio town. He wouldn’t even admit that Trump lost in 2020.

Vance changes his stated positions depending on the political winds; He is a man so desperate for power that he is willing to endorse the candidacy of a candidate he once compared to Hitler. If Trump loses a second time, Vance may simply refuse to admit it and may well be willing to drag American democracy down with him.

He also outperformed Walz on Tuesday evening.

For better or worse, television debates are performances, and performances are as much about style as they are about content. Both Walz and Vance are men with solid political skills who clearly care about the details of government, a fact that distinguishes this debate from that between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

But Walz and Vance are also men with two very different personalities and styles. Walz is affable, a Midwestern father who does well at campaign stops, donut shops and diners. Vance portrays himself as a nice Rust Belt boy, but comes across as exactly what he is: a Yale-educated lawyer turned venture capitalist who learned under the tutelage of some of America’s most predatory and destructive reactionary right-wing minds. Vances American Psycho Persona doesn’t usually play well on location, but it worked well on camera on Tuesday.

The Harris campaign may have hoped that Walz’s kindness would contrast sharply with Vance, who often comes across as a jerk. But Walz’s jovial dad thing just meant that he didn’t hit Vance hard enough when Vance repeatedly lied or made comments that suggested truly repugnant policies.

For example, Vance answered a question about child care policy by talking about how difficult it is for his wife Usha to be a working mother – although Vance is a working father of the same children, but apparently has not taken on the burden of juggling work and family hat, and instead expects his wife (and her mother) to do the women’s work and look after the children.

Walz could have highlighted this blatant sexism, or Vance’s previous comments about childless cat ladies, or his comments after the Supreme Court was overturned Roe v. Wade that: “If your worldview tells you that it is bad for women to become mothers, but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle.” The New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” while his own wife worked as a corporate lawyer until recently.

Instead, Walz repeatedly tried to find common ground with Vance, saying he agreed with him on a number of issues.

In reality, Walz and Vance don’t really see eye to eye. Many of Vance’s positions are unpopular, including his general refusal to support even very sensible gun safety laws. During the debate, he suggested that the answer to school shootings was better locks on schoolhouse doors, rather than the solution that has actually worked around the world: fewer guns in people’s hands. While Walz emphasized that the guns were the problem, he also repeatedly gave up the moral high ground on a number of issues, saying that both he and Vance agreed that there was a serious problem and that both were determined be to solve it.

Vance’s positions on reproductive rights are similarly unpopular. At the debate, he claimed he never supported a national abortion ban, just a national standard – which is another way of saying a ban. He claimed to support access to IVF, but when he had the opportunity (twice) to vote for a bill that would have protected IVF, he first voted to block the bill and then skipped the vote (and the rest his party largely voted against). ); He also supported a Heritage Foundation report that suggested restricting IVF in the name of “pro-life” and “pro-family” values. But he was not pressured into this harmful attitude.

Is Vance or anyone else really committed to solving the problem of gun violence in America if they refuse to do anything about the guns that cause the problem? Does Vance really support access to IVF if, given the opportunity to guarantee that access for all Americans, he votes against it? Viewers didn’t get answers to these questions because Walz didn’t put Vance on the defensive. Instead, he kept giving him the benefit of the doubt.

No one wanted to see two grown men in a televised slap game. But Vance is a smart and articulate man whose greatest weaknesses lie in his thin skin, his defensiveness and his bizarre politics. He is smart enough to lie about his bizarre policies because it is quite clear that his actual positions are largely unpopular. And at the debate, his thin skin simply wasn’t pierced – because his opponent didn’t try to pierce it. As a result, he came across as a polished politician ready for the national stage, rather than the petulant, self-indulgent man-child we’ve seen when spoken to. And until Walz finally found his footing at the very end of the debate, he seemed like an overwhelmed small-state governor.

Both men are smart. Both appear to have serious ideological commitments, although Vance is quite willing to bow to them if it brings him closer to power. Both have not only general ideas about how to make America great, but also concrete plans for how to get there. But that’s where the similarities end. Vance’s plans are generally cruel and ruthless. Vance the man is dishonest and dangerous.

And unfortunately, that reality simply wasn’t brought to light Tuesday night, for the same reason that Walz will be a very good vice president when he takes office: He’s reflexively generous, genuinely gracious and sometimes just damn nice.