J. D. Vance, Tim Walz Vice-Presidential Debate a Draw

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I started writing this just after I watched the October 1 debate between the two major-party candidates for Vice-President, Senator J. D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Governor Tim Walz (D-Minnesota), held at CBS Television Center in New York City with Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan as moderators. If the first Presidential debate this year on June 27 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was a clear victory for Trump – so much so that within a month Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats, ended his campaign for re-election and endorsed his sitting Vice-President, Kamala Harris, instead – and the second between Trump and Harris September 10 was an equally clear win for Harris, the Vance-Walz debate turned out to be a draw.

The J. D. Vance who showed up wasn’t the crazy we’ve been hearing about in scattered news reports, the one who said the Democratic Party was run by “childless cat ladies” and the only reason post-menopausal women exist is to take care of their grandchildren. (Vance himself was raised by his grandmother after his mom flamed out on drugs, and he credits his grandma – whom he calls by the bizarrely infantilizing nickname “Mamaw,” pronounced “ma’am-awe” – with saving his life.) Nor was it the acolyte of Silicon Valley multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, who’s publicly questioned whether America should remain a republic and has given money to the man Vance names as his intellectual mentor, Curtis Yarvin, who has openly proclaimed that Americans need to get over their “dictator phobia” and accept one-man rule.

It was Vance, not Walz, who used the word “weird” in the debate (twice). Though Walz became known throughout America for having described the ideas and behavior of Trump and Vance as “weird,” he kept that statement in his sheath. For the most part, Vance and Walz came off as two well-meaning politicians who both want what is best for this country. There were a few fireworks, notably about women’s right to reproductive choice – on which Vance has definitively (at least for now) abandoned his former support for a nationwide ban on abortion and adopted Trump’s position that abortion legislation should be left to individual states – as well as on the Right’s allegation that Left-leaning Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are censoring Right-wing voices on social media.

One thing Vance did that was very savvy was blame Kamala Harris for every thing he thinks is wrong about the Biden administration and its policies. To hear Vance tell it, it was Harris who personally canceled all of Trump’s restrictions on immigration and opened the border to 25 million “illegal aliens.” It was Harris who made possible the explosion of fentanyl in the U.S. It was Harris who single-handedly drove up the price of housing in America by letting in all those “illegals” whom he and Trump will save the nation by deporting en masse. It was Harris who canceled Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” energy policy (even though the U.S. is producing and exporting more fossil fuels than at any time in its history, as Walz correctly pointed out) and thereby drove up the cost of everything in the U.S.

Vance ably zeroed in on one of the bizarre weaknesses of Harris’s candidacy. Like Hubert Humphrey, who ran for the Presidency in 1968 after unpopular incumbent Lyndon Johnson withdrew from his re-election bid, as the sitting Vice-President Harris has had to answer for everything Americans don’t like about the current administration while having had virtually no power to change it. Vance said time and time again that if Harris were really concerned about all the issues she’s been raising on the campaign trail, she could have been working on them from day one.

That ignores the fact that, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once put it, the Vice-President of the United States has only one real function: to wait for the President of the United States to die. The first Vice-President, John Adams, called it “the most insignificant office the mind of man has ever created.” Whether they’re Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George H. W. Bush, Al Gore or Kamala Harris, Vice-Presidents who run for the Presidency immediately to succeed the President they served under have the dual burden of being blamed for everything the people don’t like about the current administration while not being credited for the things people do like. (There’s a reason no sitting Vice-President won a Presidential election between Van Buren in 1836 and the first Bush in 1988.)

Vice-Presidents have only as much authority as the Presidents they serve under give them – as George W. Bush did with Dick Cheney or Barack Obama did with Biden. Absent a major grant of power from their President, a Vice-President has no independent authority at all – though in the first two years of Biden’s Presidency, with the U.S. Senate equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, Harris had to cast more tie-breaking votes on major pieces of legislation than any Vice-President in U.S. history. Republicans like to blame Harris for the situation on the U.S. border; they claim that Biden made Harris the “border czar,” and Harris blew the job.

Biden actually gave Harris far less authority on border issues than that. He tasked her with going to Latin American countries that send a lot of immigrants to the U.S. and doing what she could to discourage them from doing that. There’s some room for debate as to whether she did a good job even with that limited authority. The recent PBS Frontline documentary on Harris and Trump showed footage of an embarrassing speech Harris gave in Guatemala telling would-be immigrants, “Do not come,” and an even lamer interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt in which he cross-examined her about whether she’d ever visited the U.S.-Mexico border. (She hadn’t, but she’s been there since, most recently on a September 27, 2024 campaign stop in Arizona.) But it wasn’t the sweeping power to allow or block all immigration that Republicans have claimed Biden gave her.

As for Walz, he reminded me uncomfortably of fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey in more ways than one. In his book The Selling of the President 1968, Joe McGinniss wrote about Humphrey (I’m quoting from memory here), “His excesses – he talked too loud and too fervently – were just annoying in person but became fatal on TV. A person on TV is a guest in your home. It is impolite for him to shout. Humphrey vomited on the rug.” Though Walz didn’t do quite as badly as that, there were still all too many portions of the debate where Vance kept his cool, while Walz at times visibly lost his temper and screeched at the audience.

Instead of the affable high-school teacher and football coach that’s come through in his social-media posts and the public speeches and TV appearances he gives alone, Walz came off as querulous, impatient, almost angry. If the purpose of a Vice-Presidential debate is to showcase which of these people should American voters trust if they have to take over the Presidency if the incumbent dies (a bigger risk with Vance than with Walz because Donald Trump is visibly old and infirm, as well as showing increasing signs of mental derangement), frankly Vance did a much better job on that score than Walz. That’s true even though Walz actually has executive experience as the governor of Minnesota and Vance, who’s been a U.S. Senator for less than two years, does not.

Walz was able to parry at least some of Vance’s most effective thrusts. When Vance claimed that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and former Hawai’i Congressmember Tulsi Gabbard had endorsed Trump, Walz came back with a list of Harris’s endorsers that ranged from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney – and threw in Taylor Swift’s name for good measure. (Swift posted her endorsement of Harris on social media and signed it, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”)

Rachel Maddow’s Quite Different J. D. Vance Story

The J. D. Vance who appeared at the October 1 Vice-Presidential debate was a quite different character than the one MS-NBC host Rachel Maddow had profiled the night before on her regular weekly program (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVhHNSe9Ks). She began her story, after an apologia explaining that she hadn’t been sure she wanted to do it at all but decided to go with it on the eve of the debate with Walz, with one of her long introductions about Charles Walgreen, founder of the Walgreens’ drugstore chain, who in 1934 became convinced that the University of Chicago, where his daughter was a student, was indoctrinating her in Communism and “free love.” He launched a campaign to defund the university, and got a hearing before the Illinois legislature where his principal witness against the university was Right-wing author Elizabeth Dilling. Dilling went around the country in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s denouncing various public universities as hotbeds of Communism and free love, and according to Maddow her rhetoric lives on in Vance’s.

Maddow’s main source for Vance’s real views was a September 17, 2021 interview Vance gave to Right-wing podcaster Jack Murphy, whose full black beard makes him look like a malevolent Santa Claus. Vance told Murphy, “Our leaders now are so corrupt, so vile, that if you assimilate into their culture, you’re assimilating into garbage liberal culture. You’re not assimilating into traditional American culture. … You can’t teach that we live in a great country if the leaders are actively aligned against it. … Step one in the process is to totally replace – rip out, like a tumor – the American leadership class, and then reinstall a sense of an American political religion.”

“You said something that I should like to zero in on,” Murphy responded. “How do we effectively rip out the disgusting leadership class? … Because let me expand on that just for a second. It’s not just – obviously, elections. That’s one thing. But unfortunately, this evil leadership class has already taken over all of our institutions. … Aside from elections, how do we rip out this leadership class? If these institutions are rotted and corrupted to the core, this elite ideology is everywhere and in all these things, what other options do we have besides voting them out, which we’re seeing is ineffectual?”

Vance answered, “This is a tough question, but it is maybe the question that confronts us right now.” He mentions Curtis Yarvin, anti-democratic Right-wing author and blogger, as his inspiration. Maddow then cuts to a clip of Yarvin himself giving a speech in front of a banner reading “RAGE” – which he explains is an acronym for “Retire All Government Employees.” As he mentions what RAGE means, his audience laughs approvingly.

“The problem with this is, why have you never heard of this before?” Yarvin says, “Why has no one suggested this before? … You have a government in Washington. You’re either for it or against it. And what is a government? A government is just a corporation running a country, nothing more, nothing less. It just so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed, and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what all corporations have found. We simply delete them. We haven’t been able to do that for over 200 years. So it’s gotten a little bit stale.”

Yarvin went on to explain, “The other thing about getting rid of your government is you can’t say the limits of the government are the limits of the formal government. You have to say, well, what is the system, actually? And it includes a lot of things, including things that are called universities, that are funded by the state. It’s a very, very large system, and it also must be destroyed. Fortunately, there are a lot of very talented Americans who actually know how to run things and make things work, and they are generalists. You need to get these people, put them in a position of responsibility, and have them do their thing. And finally, you need a CEO, and a national CEO is what is called a dictator. It’s the same thing. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they have to get over their dictator phobia.”

The world heard that argument before in the 1930’s, when ideologues on both the Right and the Left claimed that democracy had reached the limits of its political capability and the future belonged to dictators: Hitler and Mussolini on the Right, Stalin on the Left. It seemed to have ended with the Allied victory in World War II – though in order to achieve that, the republics of Great Britain and the United States had to ally themselves with the Left-wing dictatorship of Stalin to beat the Right-wing dictatorship of Hitler. But as capitalist democracy reaches its limits, and as societies all over the world seemingly inexorably move towards a redistribution of wealth and income in favor of the already-haves over the have-nots, more and more people throughout the world are being seduced by the arguments of phony “populists” like Donald Trump, J. D. Vance and their counterparts in other countries that the “elites” are out to get them and only by smashing the system and substituting absolute one-man rule can their lives be made better.

America Gets Affable Vance, Not Dictator-Loving Vance

But the J. D. Vance (or “JD Vance,” as he rather oddly spells his name, evoking the old 1950’s and 1960’s abbreviation for “juvenile delinquent”) America got to see on October 1 was not the acolyte of fascist-loving Curtis Yarvin. It was the affable author of Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir that got seized on by much of America’s liberal community in search of explanations for how Donald Trump had been able to win the Presidency. Vance did a much better job of keeping his cool than Walz did, though there were a few issues on which the fangs got bared.

One was the now-notorious story both Trump and Vance have told on the campaign trail of how Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are allegedly stealing people’s pet dogs and cats so they can eat them. On a previous appearance with Dana Bash on CNN, Vance had given a bizarre defense of this story that more or less acknowledged it wasn’t true but said it was necessary to make up stories like that to get the media to cover the “suffering” of the American people. When Vance brought that up, CBS’s co-moderator, Margaret Brennan, explained that the Haitians in Springfield were here legally under so-called “temporary protected status,” thanks to a program enacted and signed into law in 1990 by Republican President George H. W. Bush.

Vance immediately reacted as if Brennan had slapped him. He accused Brennan of violating the agreed-upon rule that the moderators would not “fact-check” the candidates. That was a rule put into place at the Republican Party’s insistence after the Trump-Harris debate, at which Trump claimed it had been “three against one” because the moderators were calling him on some of his lies and therefore, in Trump’s mind, joining Harris on the attack against him. Brennan called her remark a “clarification” rather than a “fact-check,” and for the only time all evening, the moderators used their agreed-upon power to cut off the candidates’ microphones, essentially telling the candidates to stop talking because nobody could hear them. Only we could still hear them, albeit with echo and at a lower volume, lending an oddly surreal touch to the moment.

Vance also claimed that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. “Obamacare,” had been failing when Trump took over and he “rescued” it. Walz correctly pointed out that Trump had promised to repeal the ACA on day one of his Presidency. He’d even signed an executive order to that effect, though the courts struck it down. Walz also described the dramatic moment when one of the many Republican attempts to repeal the ACA went down to defeat on the Senate floor after the late John McCain (R-Arizona) cast his famous thumbs-down vote against it. (This was the so-called “skinny repeal,” a bill no one – including the people who voted for it – wanted to become law. Its only objective was to get the issue before a so-called “conference committee,” in which House and Senate Republicans could have quietly negotiated a bill to take the ACA’s place.)

One of the most bizarre moments of the debate was when Vance claimed that Harris’s alleged “open border” policies had led Mexican drug cartels to make money by selling illegal guns to the United States. “Thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel … then the amount of illegal guns in our country is higher today than it was three and a half years ago,” Vance said.

The truth, as is well known by people who’ve actually studied the issue, is the other way around. Mexican drug cartels routinely send their hit people across the border into the U.S. to buy guns and other weapons because Mexico has common-sense gun regulations and the U.S. doesn’t. As Michael Williams of CNN explained in a post-debate fact check, “An estimated 200,000 guns are trafficked from the U.S. into Mexico each year, the Mexican Foreign Ministry has said — an average of nearly 550 per day. In 2021, Mexico sued several U.S.-based gun manufacturers, claiming they ‘design, market, distribute and sell guns in ways’ that arm cartels in Mexico. Mexico strictly controls the sale of firearms. There is only one gun store in Mexico, and it’s controlled by the army. That makes the large-scale smuggling of guns from Mexico into the U.S., where laws are laxer and gun stores plentiful, unfeasible.”

Walz did step in it a few times during the debate. In explaining why he changed his position on a ban on AR-15’s, AK-47’s and other so-called “assault weapons” often used by mass shooters in the U.S., he said he had met with family members of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting and they had convinced him to support a ban on these weapons. But he misspoke and said he had “befriended school shooters” – and Trump seized on his gaffe in posts to his social-media site, Truth Social. Walz also said he’d been in Hong Kong when the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tienanmen Square in Beijing happened. He wasn’t, though he visited China in August 1989, two months after the protests and their brutal suppression by the Chinese military.

Mostly, though, the debate went surprisingly smoothly, especially given the rancor of the previous debates that included Donald Trump. Vance and Walz not only made a point of shaking hands at the start – something Trump hadn’t wanted to do before his debate with Harris, only she basically forced him into it – but did so at the finish. They even introduced their wives to each other at the end of the debate. The instant polls taken after the debate indicated that both men’s favorability ratings went up, and one online commentator called the debate refreshingly “normal” – to the extent that any event involving the Presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, especially with a part-Black, part-Asian woman running against him, could be “normal.”