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Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first running mate John Nance Garner famously once declared that the vice president’s office was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” In the first and only VP debate of the 2024 election, Governor Tim Walz and Senator J.D. Vance tonight went out of their way to prove the ornery Texan pretty much right.
As different as two American politicians can be today except for both being white guys who are aiming for the ultimate bench warmer gig, Walz and Vance know their brief was to do no evil for 90-minutes on Tuesday.
Despite some sparing over who won the 2020 election, the January 6 MAGA assault on the Capitol near the end and Walz condemning Vance for “a damning nonanswer” on the matter, the two candidates sealed the fairly dull deal.
Often proving not ready for primetime since his July selection by Donald Trump, Vance raised his game and constantly reminded viewers that he came from the drug addled working class. The thrust put the first term senator’s most reasonable version of himself forward in a PowerPoint presentation by any other name.
Looking to complement his rival as a way of waving a bipartisan and “common ground” flag, Walz never even mentioned the “weird” insult that made his national bones against the GOP candidates this summer. What Walz did do Tuesday is lock in from the jump as the midwestern everyman and smoothed off his own crowd-pleasing rough edges at the cost of being on defense more than offense.
In the end, one of the most anticipated VP debates ever became more like a traditional VP debate where the principals try to make themselves less relevant in contrast to their puffed-up bosses.
By that metric, Vance was the more successful with his moderate tone defending the more extreme of Trump’s measures like mass deportation, the tentacles of Project 2025, and clamping down on reproductive rights. The senator deftly returned again and again to the fact that Kamala Harris is the sitting vice president under Joe Biden and if she wanted to get something done she should do it, not promise it. A stance that Trump proved unable effectively hold in his own messy debate with Harris on September 10, Vance will have scored points with the GOP base – which was his unspoken other job tonight.
Improving after an uncertain start, Walz appeared to be grinding it out to hold off ripping off his shirt and going full progressive Hulk. What swipes he got in on Vance via Trump were diluted by his own lack of a real jab and CBS moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan briskly moving things along.
The result wasn’t quite the pleasant chat between buddies the 2000 match-up between then Senator Joe Lieberman and former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was. On the flip side, Walz and Vance’s debate had none of the fireworks on the 1988 face-off between then Senators Lloyd Benson and Dan Quayle where the Texans rendered the future VP DOA politically with his stabbing “you are no John Kennedy” line. In fact, minus a certain brazen fly and a famous “I’m speaking” line, tonight’s VP debate was a lot like the debate between then Sen. Harris and sitting VP Mike Pence in 2020.
Which is another way of saying, with the race so close in its final days and the explosive international situation, no one will remember this debate by this time next week.
Hosted by CBS and helmed with even hands by the soon-to-exit O’Donnell and Brennan, the VPOTUS parlay was simulcast on CNN, MSNC, the BBC, Fox News, ABC, NBC, Univision and more on TV and online. In what will likely be the last meeting between any of the candidates on the Dems and GOP tickets before Election Day, Vance and Walz’s summit of sorts mostly served to showcase the skills of the CBS anchor and the Face the Nation host in keeping everything on track.
Otherwise, in a whirlwind of this prolonged election where the polls have the VP and the ex-POTUS in a near dead heat, so the VP debate will not reset the table.
Still, it could set the future.
With Gov. Walz likely to drift into political obscurity after serving out the rest of his term if the Democrats come up short, what tonight’s made for radio debate could do is determine Vance’s future in the GOP as either the incumbent vice president in 2028 or the presumptive nominee for the party, or not.
Undoubtedly aware of that himself, Vance started off with a low-key introduction of himself and the so-called “effective deterrence” geopolitics policy of Trump when the ex-Celebrity Apprentice host was in office from 2017 to 2021.
Literally a made in Hollywood politician, with Ron Howard’s 2020 adaptation of the Senator’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has proven a hit with Christian nationals and the MAGA base since Trump picked him as his running mate. Outside the corral, the 2022 elected Vance has issued one blunder after another, especially regarding to women with policies and assertions that strike many as medieval. Then there’s also the fact that the Marine veteran is the former president’s running mate, and not Trump’s ex-VP Pence, who was the subject of the January 6, 2021 siege of the Capitol by a MAGA mob wanting to stop the certification of the 2020 election.
Oddly, even when the toxic topic of the January 6 insurrection was raised by the moderators late in the debate, Gov. Walz neglected to go hard into the horrors of that day, and Trump’s courtroom dramas over the 2020 election and his own indictments.
More civil discourse about shaking hands after this election and “prayers and best wishes,” looked poised to go off the rails right near the end when Vance suddenly went on about 2016 , Vladimir Putin’s role in election and the power of manipulated social media in Trump’s victory. Walz did hit the “January 6 was not Facebook ads” line, but his follow ups was soft.
Lacking the weight of history on his shoulders that Vance has, Walz tonight appeared to morph back into his 12 years as an agreeable congressman, centering on policy talking points and Trump’s “fickle” leadership on the world stage and his ego. “Steady leadership” was the term Walz repeated, seeming far away from the everyone Coach role he has taken on since being named to the Dems’ ticket in early August by Harris.
Intentionally or not, the tactic ruffled no feathers except to normalize Trump as just another politician – which is far from the truth in an election that Joe Biden cast as a vote on American democracy. Walz let Vance get away with Stop the Steal diction and spin the bottle to make censorship and cancel culture Kamala Harris’ fault.
After a slightly unsteady start, the 60-year-old governor found his grove for a spell once Vance’s fake story about the legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio allegedly eating pets was brought up. Apples in a barrel for the Dems, the lie that Vance and Trump have been spinning quickly got lost in the rhetorical shuffle. However, as became evident about 30-minutes into the debate, that hot topic led to the one squabble of the night between 40-year-old Vance and CBS’ O’Donnell and Brennan and the candidates’ microphones embarrassingly silenced.
With expectations lower for the folksy Minnesota governor, Walz would have immediately been in a position to have an easier ride tonight – if current events and his own rehearsed inhibitions hadn’t intruded.
The Iranian missile barrage at Israel today was rebuffed by a combination of IDF and US military forces, but it left a hole in this frayed campaign. It was a hole that both candidates tried to fill with praise of their running mates. On Israel, immigration, home prices, abortion, guns, health care and everything else, the two shared a “bunch of ideas,” as Vance put it
Earlier today, coming off the latest escalation in the Middle East and other events, CNN’s Jake Tapper bluntly said Walz could be vulnerable on carrying water for the last four years. “It seems like the world is on fire,” Tapper stated to Dana Bash and Abby Phillips in the pre-debate game.
That was Vance’s playbook. That was where former Trump critic Vance punches came from that Walz’s practiced lines could not rebuff.
As always, even in an anti-climactic event like this debate, the candidates will be out on the campaign trail on Wednesday. As Harris wraps herself in governance with a trip to hurricane hit Georgia, Gov. Walz is heading straight to the battleground state of Pennsylvania with Sen, John Fetterman.
The Trump campaign hasn’t released Vance’s schedule for this week, but in a win on points, you can be sure it will be a victory lap – unless his thin skinned running mate steps in his way.
