One thing is clear – after Tuesday, JD Vance is the Republican Taylor Swift, except he’s not mediocre, insufferable, or incapable of maintaining a long-term relationship. But does that matter for November? They say that vice presidential debates don’t mean anything and that’s usually true. Still, this one conclusively demonstrated that JD Vance is an outstanding speaker – calm, cool, capable, and in charge of the facts. Let’s be objective about his opponent. Tim Walz was not terrible. In some ways, he was effective. Vance did not totally destroy him, though he could have if he chose to. Walz was competent but overshadowed by a giant 20 years his junior.
Walz spewed Democrat talking points and did it while wearing his centrist suit. Except it is an ill-fitting suit. He’s no centrist. He’s a straight-up commie weirdo all on-board with the left’s bizarre, perverted agenda. He’s all in with the Democrat Party on everything from abortions up to puberty and trans idiocy to redistributing the wealth and confiscating the guns. But on Tuesday, he managed to present himself as innocuous, like an annoying neighbor you look out your door for before leaving to make sure he’s not in the yard so you don’t have to talk to him.
It’s now beyond any serious dispute that JD Vance was a terrific choice for vice president. He’s very smart and he’s adaptable. He knows how to connect with an audience. Sure, there were a hundred things I would’ve liked him to say to counter the arguments made by Walz and his two other opponents, the generic CBS crones who were moderating. They tried to get uppity, but their awkward fact checking failed. They behaved themselves after JD Vance cracked the whip and imposed his iron discipline upon them. Except for some passive aggressive catty comments, they pretty much behaved after that. It was a nice display of power.
Clearly, JD Vance’s strategy was to be nice. He was gracious and friendly, and his barbs were only occasionally lacerating. It’s not that he couldn’t gut Walz. It’s that he chose not to, and it seems to me he did that to appeal to people who did not know him yet. You could tell because, at the beginning, he introduced himself to the audience, taking time out of his answer to a question to give a short bio. And he kept going back to his bio, maybe a little too often for our taste. Yes, we know you were born a poor hillbilly child. We got that; let’s move on. But he wasn’t talking to you and me. He was talking to people who didn’t know him very well.
Walz was trying to do that, too. But with his folksy Midwestern vibe, Walz was trying to do something Vance wasn’t doing. Walz was trying to hide who he is. Vance was selling who he is.
There were a lot of important issues the goofy moderators failed to cover, including China. Besides being the preeminent foreign policy question of our age, the PRC is particularly significant because Tim Walz spent so much time there. What’s his connection to the Chi-Coms? Inquiring minds want to know. We damn well better find out before we end up nominating a literal Manchurian candidate. Yeah, there was a segue that mentioned it, but only in the context of Walz claiming to be right there at Tiananmen Square, apparently staring down a tank. His weird response was that he learned a lot about governance from watching the communist Chinese, which was hardly reassuring. So was his announcement that he is friends with a lot of school shooters. Well, he is into the whole trans thing, and a lot of his coalition is made up of lunatics, so it fits.
Nor did we hear anything about the Afghanistan debacle or the Houthis. We heard nothing about fracking and Kamala’s Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde act on the issue. His fake command sergeant major war record claims never came up. Vance made a decision not to pivot to those, which frustrated some of us supporters, though time will tell if that was a good strategy or not.
Instead, the obsessions of bitter cat women like the moderators took center stage. We went endlessly through the nonsense that is the climate change hoax – which inspired a snippy fact check at the end where one of the interchangeable harpies announced that it’s real because she’d been told so by Muh Experts. People don’t really care about the weather, except to the extent that perfectly normal weather phenomena just killed hundreds and rendered thousands homeless in Appalachia. The lame disaster response of the Harris–Biden administration got no play by the moderators, of course. It just doesn’t matter to rich blue people like the moderators.
Then there was the perilous peril to Our Democracy posed by Trump on J6. Walz once again reiterated how he either does not understand the First Amendment or hates it. He did the fire in a crowded theater thing, which is not a thing. Hack cliches do not constitute constitutional law.
What got the most attention was baby killing. Abortion, abortion, abortion. I don’t understand the obsession of these women with abortion. It’s baffling and gross. Vance handled the biased queries well. In contrast, Walz just flat-out lied when he wasn’t being outright crazy. Watch out, those evil Republicans are going to make a list of pregnant women and not let you have IVF, he insisted. I know there are people who believe that. They are idiots, and I know there are other people who merely pretend to believe that. They are Democrat politicians who understand that idiots are a key Democrat constituency.
Walz tried to run away from the bill he signed that lets babies die on the table after botched abortions. He tap-danced around the fact that you can pretty much get an abortion until the time the kid is born under his state’s gross laws. Further, his stories of women dying allegedly from abortion laws were just outright baloney. If you take an abortion pill and have complications because they are dangerous pills and get sepsis, that’s not because the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. Of course, these facts were never checked. Fact checking only goes one way, to the right.
It was a civil debate with lots of agreement, no harsh words, and remarkably little rancor. It started out with JD walking over to shake Walz’s hand, even though that wasn’t part of the script, and JD was just as kind and solicitous as he could be. Maybe he was hoping for more conflict and that Walz would get mad. But Walz didn’t get mad, though he did get flustered. Still, Walz did fine. Not great, just good enough to appeal to some people. You know, dummies.
But JD Vance just blew off the doors. You can’t look at JD Vance objectively and think he’s a dumb guy. And you can’t look at JD Vance objectively and think he’s a nasty or obnoxious guy. If you hate him because he’s a Republican, you’re going to hate him regardless. But for normal people, he was a calm, reassuring presence, and demonstrating that was probably his goal.
It would have been nice for him to gut Walz like a bass, but that might have generated undeserved sympathy. Remember, Vance’s target was not you and me. We’re already all in. We like him, and we like what he stands for. His target was the people who haven’t decided yet, though it’s still hard for me to imagine that someone has not decided yet. And, in the hour or so after the debate as I write this, it seems like he accomplished that.
Of course, verdicts on debates change. We saw that with the last debate, where afterwards the consensus about who won did a total 180. It initially appeared that Harris had done well. Only over the next couple of days did it become clear that the people watching preferred Trump. The poll numbers, which currently slightly favor Trump, reaffirmed that.
What will happen now? Frankly, probably not that much. Vice-presidential debates usually don’t mean a lot, at least in terms of the upcoming election. Vance probably accomplished his goal of making himself acceptable to most undecided viewers. That helps. But what this vice-presidential debate really did was announce the coming of a second huge contender, alongside Governor Ron DeSantis, for the Republican nomination in 2028.
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