In a wise strategic decision for both campaigns, Governor Walz focused almost exclusively on former President Trump’s unfitness for office and Senator Vance presented a calm, compelling, and rational case for President Trump without the usual bombast.
Much has been made of the fact that Tuesday’s Vice Presidential debate between Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz was quite civil, featuring two candidates who went out of their way to note points of agreement and even when they disagreed, didn’t resort to flamethrowing, name calling, or personal attacks. In fact, the word “normal” was applied to the proceedings with no small amount of surprise. As CNN described it, “The vice presidential debate between Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was something that’s become increasingly rare in modern American politics: normal. In an event that is unlikely to change the trajectory of the presidential race, the two running mates were cordial with each other, training their attacks instead on the tops of the opposing tickets and focusing largely on policy differences.” Conservative commentator Ed Morrisey of HotAir.com took this thinking a step further, writing “During last night’s live blog, I received the same basic message from multiple people: Why couldn’t these two be running at the top of their tickets? That reaction came less from a desire to see either be president, but more from an appreciation of the return of the traditional debate, comity, and at several times, mutual graciousness.” One friend on Facebook noted that he was so impressed, he told his son this is what debates are supposed to be like. There is some truth to these observations and similar ones, but at the same time, they appear to miss a much larger strategic point. People don’t vote for Vice President. They vote for the top of the ticket, meaning the stakes are much lower than a direct contest between two Presidential candidates, offering a lot more room for comity and politeness especially when the most disastrous outcome for either would be to turn the story in the aftermath into a referendum on some unforced error or disastrous gaffe. This doesn’t mean the VP pick has no influence on the outcome or VP debates don’t matter, but it does mean the strategy to succeed in one forum is radically different than another. From this perspective, it seems to me at least, that both Senator Vance and Governor Walz made a wise strategic decision to make the debate about their prospective bosses rather than each other. Thus, there were no jokes about “cat ladies” or “stolen valor,” nothing about eating pets, and no personal attacks about how each has handled some aspect of their record because, to a large extent, their own records are irrelevant. Instead, they were there to advance the objectives of their respective campaigns, prompting Governor Walz to focus almost exclusively on former President Trump’s unfitness for office and Senator Vance to present a calm, compelling, and rational case for President Trump without the usual bombast while ensuring everyone remains aware that Vice President Kamala Harris is in the incumbent administration.
In this, I think it’s fair to say that both Senator Vance and Governor Walz succeeded to a large degree, though whose success will have a larger impact on the outcome of the contest remains to be seen, more on that in a moment. For his part, the Governor began a sustained assault on President Trump in the very first response, refusing to answer whether he supports a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear program to claim the former President is the wrong man no matter what. “A nearly 80 year old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment. But it’s not just that. It’s those that were closest to Donald Trump that understand how dangerous he is when the world is this dangerous.” He continued on this very next response, noting “Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than they were before because of Donald Trump’s fickle leadership. And when Iran shot down an American aircraft in international airspace, Donald Trump tweeted, because that’s the standard diplomacy of Donald Trump. And when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches. Look, our allies understand that Donald Trump is fickle. He will go to whoever has the most flattery or where it makes sense to him.” In contrast, “Steady leadership like you witnessed today, like you witnessed in April. Both Iranian attacks were repelled. Our coalition is strong, and we need the steady leadership that Kamala Harris is providing.” The pattern repeated throughout most of the evening, oddly without any fact checks whatsoever considering some of the claims given the Middle East has literally exploded on Vice President Harris’ watch. On the economy, “Now, this is a philosophical difference between us. Donald Trump made a promise, and I’ll give you this. He kept it. He took folks to Mar-a-Lago. He said, “You’re rich as hell. I’m going to give you a tax cut.” He gave the tax cuts that predominantly went to the top caste. What happened there was an $8 trillion increase in the national debt, the largest ever.” Vice President Harris, meanwhile, “has said to do the things she wants to do. We’ll just ask the wealthiest to pay their fair share. When you do that, our system works best. More people are participating in it, and folks have the things that they need.” Perhaps, he was most effective on January 6th. “Donald Trump refused to acknowledge this. And the fact is, is that I don’t think we can be the frog in the pot and let the boiling water go up. He was very clear. I mean, he lost this election, and he said he didn’t…[for] the first time in American history…a President or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power. And here we are four years later in the same boat.” He proceeded to question Senator Vance directly, and link it back to his running mate. “Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office even if the President doesn’t? And I think Kamala Harris would agree. She wouldn’t have picked me if she didn’t think I would do that because, of course, that’s what we would do. So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on this election of who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.” While some have said Governor Walz was halting at times or even over-prepared, I think it’s fair to say that he made the points he wanted to make, even if some of the language could’ve been sharper. The question is whether or not any of it will be effective given the law of diminishing returns when everyone has heard the same things over and over again for almost a decade at this point.
Senator Vance had an entirely different task, having to both reframe President Trump’s agenda in a way more palatable to Trump-resistant voters, specifically women and suburbanites, and help end the fiction that Vice President Harris is some new star on the political scene. From his very first response, he proceeded to make what we might consider a sensible defense of President Trump. As “much as Governor Walz just accused Donald Trump of being an agent of chaos, Donald Trump actually delivered stability in the world, and he did it by establishing effective deterrence. People were afraid of stepping out of line. Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration. What do they use that money for? They use it to buy weapons that they’re now launching against our allies and, God forbid, potentially launching against the United States as well. Donald Trump recognized that for people to fear the United States, you needed peace through strength. They needed to recognize that if they got out of line, the United States’ global leadership would put stability and peace back in the world.” The Senator’s next response pivoted from his would-be boss to Vice President Harris’ current role, in an inverted repeat of Governor Walz’s approach. “Governor Walz, you blame Donald Trump, who has been the Vice President for the last three and a half years, and the answer is your running mate, not mine. Donald Trump consistently made the world more secure. Now, we talk about the sequence of events that led us to where we are right now, and you can’t ignore October the 7th, which I appreciate Governor Walz bringing up. But when did Iran and Hamas and their proxies attack Israel? It was during the administration of Kamala Harris. So Governor Walz can criticize Donald Trump’s tweets, but effective, smart diplomacy and peace through strength is how you bring stability back to a very broken world. Donald Trump has already done it once before. Ask yourself at home, when, when was the last time? I’m 40 years old. When was the last time that an American President didn’t have a major conflict, breakout? The only answer is during the four years that Donald Trump was President.”
This pattern was likewise repeated, in another echo of his opponent. On immigration, “We have a historic immigration crisis because Kamala Harris started and said that she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s border policies. Ninety-four executive orders suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, massively increasing the asylum fraud that exists in our system, that has opened the floodgates. And what it’s meant is that a lot of fentanyl is coming into our country. I had a mother who struggled with opioid addiction and has gotten clean. I don’t want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels. So you’ve got to stop the bleeding. You’ve got to re-implement Donald Trump’s border policies, build the wall, re-implement deportations.” On the economy, he even managed to combine both approaches into a single answer, “Well, first of all, you’re going to hear a lot from Tim Walz this evening, and you just heard it in the answer, a lot of what Kamala Harris proposes to do. And some of it, I’ll be honest with you, it even sounds pretty good. Here’s what you won’t hear, is that Kamala Harris has already done it. Because she’s been the Vice President for three and a half years, she had the opportunity to enact all of these great policies. And what she’s actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%, open the American southern border and make middle class life unaffordable for a large number of Americans. If Kamala Harris has such great plans for how to address middle class problems, then she ought to do them now, not when asking for a promotion, but in the job the American people gave her three and a half years ago. And the fact that she isn’t, tells you a lot about how much you can trust her actual plans. Now, Donald Trump’s economic plan is not just a plan, but it’s also a record. A lot of those same economists attack Donald Trump’s plans, and they have PhDs, but they don’t have common sense and they don’t have wisdom, because Donald Trump’s economic policies delivered the highest take home pay in a generation in this country, 1.5% inflation, and to boot, peace and security all over the world. So when people say that Donald Trump’s economic plan doesn’t make sense, I say ‘Look at the record he delivered: rising take home pay for American workers.’”
The pundits and assorted experts can debate the validity of Senator Vance and Governor Walz’s specific claims, but in my opinion at least, Senator Vance has the benefit of doing something completely new, that we haven’t seen before from any of the candidates this cycle. While I personally believe President Trump’s communication skills and style are underrated, especially given his outsize influence on the entire world whether he’s in or out of office, there is no doubt that he does things in his own stream of conscious, sometimes downright rambling manner, nor does he have much patience for weaving statistics into an argument in the Harvard debate style mode. The result is at times closer to the bragging of a carnival barker than a traditional politician, telling you their wares are the best and most beautiful in the world no matter what, and given he is undoubtedly a polarizing figure, clearly this turns at least some people off, even some of his supporters such as my lovely wife at times. Senator Vance had the opportunity to change all that on Tuesday, doing what no one has ever done in a head-to-head format: Normalize his running mate’s governing philosophy and record in the more conventional language of politics, with a specific eye of making it more reasonable to persuadable voters. Time will tell if he succeeded in that regard, but I suspect the key takeaway from this debate, the one that will have a measurable impact, is how Senator JD Vance made President Trump acceptable to a significant number of people in what is expected to be an extremely close election.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 