It’s the end of the season — debate season for the general election, that is — and we have perhaps mercifully been granted only three of these newsmaking messes. The first one knocked Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race and remains easily the single most immediately consequential debate in American political history. (Think about that, folks — you witnessed an awful sort of history!) The second one showed Kamala Harris at arguably the best she is capable of being, while Trump blustered about rogue pet consumption and generally fumbled away his electoral momentum.
And now we have the final showdown, tonight’s debate between vice-presidential nominees: Ohio senator J. D. Vance and Minnesota governor Tim Walz. I can assure you that no matter the outcome, the media will declare Walz the winner, unless he removes his clothes during the halfway commercial break and insists on doing the rest of the night au naturel. I can also assure you that I have my unavoidable biases, though they’re stranger than most: I have complicated feelings about both politicians. Mostly, I dislike to varying degrees everyone who’s running for office in 2024. I think it’s fair to say I dislike Vance the least of all four candidates on the two major tickets and Walz the most.
To be sure, Kamala Harris is every bit as phony as Walz. But I find Walz more offensive than Harris, really, because he is more effective — his cornpone shtick plays well among a certain voter demographic, and during his tenure as governor he has proven to be a relentlessly cold-blooded panderer. In a debate preview from CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, we learn that Walz is apparently suffering from a case of nerves and wants everyone to know that he’s just not sure Coach Tim can stand up to the heat of a Big Important Debate. This is, of course, “expectations management” nonsense of the most obvious sort, intentionally leaked to set up a counter-narrative once Walz confidently executes his playbook in the debate.
Walz is not stupid, after all; he is in fact a canny liar and serial exaggerator of his résumé who also has developed a genuine knack for talking folksy political blatherskite to voters — it’s a valuable skill — and I fully expect him to do a competent job tonight. Look, if Harris can learn her briefing book, so can Walz. The only question is what that playbook is — what are his angles of attack going to be?
I’d advise J. D. Vance to get ready to defend claims of pet-eating in Ohio and to not take the bait in any great depth. Have a tight two sentences prepared and move on, with the understanding that Trump made this an issue in the last debate but Vance was the one who perpetuated it on the campaign trail — in essence personalizing it and making it about him as an Ohioan. Vance needs to remember that he’s here to help Trump win a national election, not just Ohio, and spend his time on what matters. (Another way of putting it: Every second spent discussing this subject might as well amount to 5,000 lost votes in the Research Triangle of North Carolina.)
Other than that, I doubt Vance will have any trouble deflecting attacks persuasively unless his make-up team makes him look too rosy-cheeked again. (It’s a problem, they have to address it.) If Walz dares to open his faux-populist yap about Yale, I hope Vance is prepared to drop a nuclear bomb on his head instantly. (“What did you do after graduating from high school, Tim? I went to Iraq.”) More likely, I suspect Walz will employ his standard yam-faced “har har” Foghorn Leghorn impression, and he’ll do it over J. D. Vance as he speaks. The idea will be to re-create the moment from the 2012 vice-presidential debate when Joe Biden — then still lucid but every bit as much the arrogant gasbag he remains — simply talked all over polite Paul Ryan and laughed at him throughout as if Ryan were so crazy he shouldn’t be taken seriously.
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