You had this 7th grade social studies teacher you loved. He was fun, inspirational; you thought he was really smart. He was less formal than the other teachers. He was masculine—he was a coach—but he was also empathetic. He might have given you a break when you didn’t hand in your homework on time. He had good, solid, patriotic ideas about the country.
If only, you might have thought…if only someone like that could run for office.
Well, we saw the high school studies teacher destroyed by a professional politician last night. This wasn’t as bad as Biden’s debilitated performance in June, but it was close. Tim Walz was incompetent. Actually, he was worse than that: he was a willing accessory in the resuscitation of a mortal sleazeball, J. D. Vance. He treated Vance as if he were a moral equal. But that’s what liberal social studies teachers do: they can’t grock cynicism, they can’t imagine the poison that untrammeled ambition can inject into a formerly intelligent person. Minnesota nice turned out to be Minnesota gullible, Minnesota dumb. Minnesota weak.
It was evident from the very beginning. Walz was rattled. He was speaking too fast, doing that Washington thing of skipping over basic facts to get to the—wait for it—legislative details. Coach shouldn’t do details. I was hoping he’d be slow. I was hoping he’d be back-country wise. I was hoping that he’d treat Vance like a wayward son who got lost in the fancy city ways, not as an equal. He should never, under any circumstances, have agreed with Vance on anything…unless a threshold apology had been elicited: He needed to force Vance to admit that he had made up the story about Haitian immigrant eating pets—and kept harping on it, even if that wasn’t “nice.”. He needed to hammer home the pain and anxiety that Vance and Trump had inflicted on those families in Springfield, Ohio…and once he did that, he needed to get Vance to admit that the tax dollars the legal Haitian immigrants were paying into the Springfield, Ohio coffers were helping to keep that city afloat. He needed to hammer Vance on Trump’s gratuitous cruelty. He did none of that. He totally let Vance off the hook. He did it all night. I truly wish Walz had been a wrestling coach: he would pinned J.D. with the racist cat-eating nonsense and never let him off the mat. Only at the end did he finally sting—just barely—Vance on Trump’s traitorous lies about the 2020 election. And even then, he didn’t drive it home. I feel bad for the guy. He was overmatched.
Vance was very good, but not as good as he was allowed to appear. Walz allowed him to strut the various Trump fantasies, especially about illegal immigrants, but also about the disastrous effects Trump’s proposed tariffs would have on the economy. Vance was excellent when it came to camouflaging all the qualities his smart-aleck, Tucker Carlson arrogance had led him to blurt in the past—he was empathetic, brilliantly so; he was reasonable, he talked about his family’s problems. He said there were some things Walz said that he agreed with. Walz’s reaction was classic high school social studies: well, he’s been a bad kid but maybe he deserves a break.
This was a trap that an amateur debater might have noticed: You don’t allow a bully miscreant to pretend he’s a nice guy. For those who remember Leave It to Beaver: Vance was Eddie Haskell, getting away with it, as always. This was, to say the least, not a show of strength on Walz’s part—and the appearance of strength is a good part of what this election is all about.
Well, okay. Exhale. This was only a vice presidential debate. Maybe people were watching other things. The Mets did win, but that ended before the debate. Walz was weak and confused. He was not a leader. And, one wonders—for me, for the first time—why Kamala Harris chose this softie rather than a vice president who might really go after the miscreants on the other side. I hope other people aren’t asking that question….but tonight made Donald Trump’s path back to the White House—and he is the American antichrist—a little bit easier.
So JD Vance, who has been in the Senate for a cup of coffee, is considered the “professional politician” over a guy who did years in Congress and is the two term Govenor? To quote Kissinger, “under what theory”? As a conservative, Vance is not my cup of tea but that was as solid a debate performance as I can remember. Yes, Vance won by simply and constantly reciting the poor Biden record as well as that Harris is still in office and is the embodiment of this hapless administration.
Ps CBS was as biased and arrogant as one could expect, particularly the wayward, smug and erroneous M Brennan “fact check.” But a leopard can’t lose its spots so I blame Trump for agreeing to this crazy inside the beltway debate system.
Coach Walz is, since 2019, Governor of a large Midwestern state and formerly sat in Congress for 12 years, which is a much longer career as a politician than his opponent, who just entered the Senate less than three years ago. And yet you characterize him as an "aw shucks" amateur who got bested.
Coach Walz just sucks.