In the days leading up to Tuesday’s debate, Democrats went out of their way to say they were nervous about how Gov. Tim Walz would perform.
It was an obvious effort to lower expectations in the hopes Walz would beat the gloomy forecasts and thus look like an upset winner.
They didn’t lower expectations far enough.
Walz had occasional moments of clarity, but he spent most of the night giving rambling answers that filled the allotted time without reaching a clear conclusion. The only thing he won was finishing first in the number of non-sequiturs.
Voters looking for a point where they could say “aha, that’s what the policy would be” had to be frustrated.
I know I was.
What’s the frequency, Tim?
His opponent, Republican Sen. JD Vance, was by far the smarter, more thoughtful and more organized thinker on the stage. His tone was pleasantly even, whether he was defending Donald Trump or attacking Kamala Harris.
Because VP debates are largely seen as referendums on the presidential nominees, Vance’s performance was a boost for Trump and the GOP ticket.
Walz, on the other hand, added to doubts about his readiness to serve, and thus was a minus for Harris.
The difference in temperament was so stark that Walz at times looked bug-eyed as he speed-talked his way through answers that often veered off course, as if his brain couldn’t keep up with his mouth.
“I’ve become friends with school shooters,” he said during an answer on school safety. “I’m a knucklehead at times” was his final weird answer to a question about why he falsely claimed to be in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Vance, by contrast, was cool, deliberate and polite to a fault. He called the moderators by their first names,and began some answers by saying “I agree with Tim” or saying they had common ground, an obvious move to be the one creating a civil and substantive tone.
For mods’ sake!
As expected, Vance had to combat moderator bias, with Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan from CBS, far more interested in things Trump said or did than anything Harris said or did — despite the fact that she is now vice president.
Several times they ended Vance’s time by suggesting something he said was false, but never did that to Walz.
My biggest problem is that they introduced major topics —the economy and the open border — by saying that CBS polls show the majority of Americans favor Trump on both issues, but never revealed details or focused on the significance of the surveys.
Those two questions alone could and should have driven the evening because they are almost always the problems American cite as the most important.
Yet media snobbery usually looks down on what the little people in flyover country care about, and so those two questions were raised in an obligatory fashion.
Not incidentally, Walz was not asked the obvious follow-up question in either case: Why hasn’t Harris fixed the economy and the border during her term as vice president?
The subject where Vance was least impressive was abortion. He tried to take a humble position, acknowledging that “too many don’t trust” Republicans on the issue and said “we’ve got to do a better job of winning back people’s trust.”
That might be a good starting point in a campaign, but it’s late in the day to talk in such sack-cloth terms.
Walz was successful in highlighting the party differences on the subject, but couldn’t effectively refute a Vance claim that a Minnesota law Walz signed allowed for abortions even if a full-term baby were born alive.
Vance cited language he said the law contained, but Walz, while denying that, never quoted the actual language, which might have let the audience decide who won the moment.
If there is any lasting impact to the face-off, it could be more evidence that Walz was not a good pick by Harris. He made a flashy entry, but his shtick as a Midwestern everyman in flannel shirts was quickly exposed as more hype than fact.
Let the record show
The undressing came when he was caught in a series of lies about his military service, including inflating his retired rank and falsely claiming to have served in a combat zone.
He has never addressed the issue in a personal way, except to say in the one interview he and Harris did together, that “My grammar is not always correct.”
Naturally, the CBS duo never went near the subject or any of the other false claims he made about his service.
Nor did they ask about his long delay in calling in the National Guard as large stretches of Minneapolis were burning to the ground in the 2020 George Floyd riots.
One area where Walz has been a bust is among union voters, usually a major strength for Dems. But recent polls give the Dem ticket just a 9-point lead over Trump and Vance — 10 points below Joe Biden’s 19-point margin over Trump among union households in 2020.
The GOP gain is a direct reflection both of the Biden-Harris economic failures and of Trump’s intense courting of the working class. Part of that courting was his selection of Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy.”
As I wrote at the time, the GOP convention in Milwaukee could have been mistaken for a Workers Party gathering.
Among a steady drumbeat of pro-worker speeches, Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union, made an impassioned pitch for why the party should support his members’ demands.
Usually a sure lock to endorse the Democrats, the union ultimately made no endorsement, a victory of sorts for Trump that was underscored when a survey of members showed 60% backing Trump and 34% picking Harris.
The tilt was even more pronounced in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where 65% of the union’s members back Trump, compared with just 31% who back Harris.
Much of that is based on Harris’ radical record, but Walz was supposed to fix that. He hasn’t.