Donald Trump, as dark and threatening as his second presidency would be to this country, has never stopped acting like the politician as walking TV show — a reality-based character who is really, in his way, an entire series, because he carries so much drama around with him. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we have to extend the candidate-as-entertainment-character metaphor to the other players in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Yet in the case of the two vice-presidential candidates, Tim Walz and J.D. Vance, one almost can’t help it.
These two, in the campaign thus far, have really been characters: Walz the middle-aged sitcom dad, benign and earnest and well-meaning, willing to look like a goofball, yet with a plainspoken moral center and the ability to deliver a zinger that makes him the show’s secret weapon. As for J.D. Vance, he has been the smooth yuppie backstabber out of a corporate thriller, the climber willing to say anything. Given all that, I went into their debate wondering: Would Walz, likable as he is, come off as tough enough? And would Vance succeed in playing down his out-for-himself unctuousness?
Here’s what I saw, and it was all in the eyes. Vance’s are baby blue and rock-steady, with a Zen relaxation to them; when he looked into the camera, it was with a soothing sincerity. (He’s like Jared Leto’s lawyer brother.) Whereas Tim Walz looked into the camera with a frown, and when he spoke, his eyes had a tendency to pop out in a stare of boiling-kettle anger. That may sound unfair. This was the vice-presidential debate, not a men’s-magazine cover-model contest. But I focus on the eyes because they expressed so much of what the two candidates did — and didn’t — bring to their game.
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Walz won on policy points: not just on having the better policies, but on having so many more of them. Kamala Harris has come in for major criticism for the lack of detail in her own presentation, and Walz, at times, almost seemed to be trying to make up for that. He was the Midwestern governor as proud wonk, full of numbers and stats, talking about what this bill did for people, and what that bill would do if we could only find a way to pass it. There’s so much florid unreality to Donald Trump’s campaign that hearing Tim Walz’s finely tilled plans for how to fight climate change, the housing crisis, or the health-care crisis always made you feel like he was on solid ground.
Yet his answers, in tone, did not inspire the kind of serene unquestioning confidence you want to feel about a candidate. Walz was working so hard to pack in the content of his programs that he seemed agitated, a bit flustered, too excited in a dyspeptic way, always talking so quickly that though you saw he was trying to be a straight-shooter about how politics works, it frequently came off as if he was scrambling to sell his points. In his way, he did a version of what the Democrats have done for 40 years: highlighting their moral commitment along with their bureaucratic expertise, a combination that’s sometimes convincing and always admirable but rarely…inspiring. It’s a pitch for leadership that’s short on poetry.
Okay, you say, but who needs poetry? Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are fighting to save America. Yes they are, and I believe they’re the ones to do it. But the way you save America is by winning the election. And on that score, J.D. Vance gave an astonishingly impressive performance that was all wrapped up in the aura of a winner. With those piercing eyes and that perfectly coiffed hair, his FM-DJ-meets-Fox-News voice, and his absolute refusal to get riled about anything, even if it was one of his pet ideologies (like the evils of immigration), he worked the debate stage with remarkable panache. He had confidence; he had calm; he had a Mona Lisa smile that allowed him to stay above the fray. And, to my surprise, he had a touch of what Ronald Reagan did — the ability to make all his statements sound like a form of assurance. That was true even when he was selling pure malarkey.
He argued that Donald Trump…was the savior of the Affordable Care Act! That the scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal was somehow not Trump’s doing, and that the Republican policy on women’s reproductive rights is all about generous, open-minded ideas of helping people find progressive ways to create families. He dodged questions he didn’t like by going off on tangents he never returned from. And he kept dipping into two grand canards that he inflated to the level of mythology. The first was that Kamala Harris is to blame for everything under the sun you don’t like. Vance was like a broken record excoriating Harris for things she had little to no power over as vice-president.
But his other epic lie, and this was the insidious one, was to simply wipe away reality and treat Donald Trump’s presidency as if it were a lost utopia of rising wages and world peace and low inflation and — what about those corporate tax cuts? Oh yes! — trickle-down prosperity. Sound familiar? It’s not just that Vance lied. It’s that he presented a kind of shining-city-on-a-hill mythology that he, for one, believed in like a religion. So won’t you?
This is the magic trick that Reagan brought into politics: enunciate a fairy tale with enough belief, and the voters will follow. But it’s one that the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were able to take a page from. And Tim Walz could have used some of that poetry. He told his own personal story, but he needed to talk, much more than he did, about the larger vision of what the Democrats believe in.
Right out of the gate, answering the very first question about Iran’s ballistic-missile attack on Israel today, Walz was full of alarm about the things Trump would do in response, but he didn’t enunciate the idea that he and Kamala Harris would keep the world safe. For a long time, before James Carville ever uttered his immortal fortune-cookie secret of all presidential-campaign wisdom, “It’s the economy, stupid,” it was an unquestioned truth in America that the #1 priority for people voting for president was the issue of national security. The Democrats have long had to battle the idea that they’re not just “soft on crime” but soft global warriors who would make citizens feel, in their reptile brains and guts, less secure.
In this election, even though everyone is saying that they care most about the economy ($9 cartons of milk will do that to you), I think the national security issue looms large. Trump not only threatens to hand over Ukraine in a gift basket to Vladimir Putin. He has been talking, in his rallies, about the looming possibility of World War III — a prospect he says will be brought about by the Democrats, but the fact that he’s the one who keeps talking about it is more than a bit unsettling. Yet it was J.D. Vance who kept stroking the debate audience with a warm tone of paternal assurance. Tim Walz was the one who looked anxious.
For those of us who believe that a second Trump presidency has the potential to be catastrophic, the wave of “joy” that took place after Kamala Harris’s ascendance expressed several things at once. First and foremost, there was a cathartic relief that Joe Biden had been successfully pushed aside. There was the palpable feeling that Harris, as a candidate, had unified the party by coming off as a stronger and savvier leader than many had predicted. But the other aspect of the joy, let’s just admit it, is that we thought, once again, that we had this in the bag. (It’s what I think of as that night-the- “Access-Hollywood”-tape-broke feeling. The feeling we relive each time Trump levels up in his transgressions and we go, “Now he’s really finished!”) And of course, once again, how wrong we were.
I’m not saying that Harris will lose. But what’s become inescapable in the last few weeks is that she could lose — by a cat’s whisker of swing voters in rural Pennsylvania. And the second you voice that thought out loud (Kamala Harris. Could. Seriously. Lose.), what you’ve really said is: The country remains divided, Trump still wins over millions who should know better, and the whole fantasy of a blue wave — the fantasy that America at large will now return to its senses — is likely just that: a fantasy.
All of which raised the stakes on tonight’s debate. The reality of vice-presidential debates, though we spend one night every four years pretending that they matter, is that just about all of them do not. (Remember Lloyd Bentsen’s famous quip to Dan Quayle in 1988? The mother of all master-snark debate put-downs? “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” It didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference.) But with the 2024 presidential contest now such a dead heat, where almost anything could tip the scales, every little bit counts. So this debate was an evening of political theater that could make the tiny bit of difference that could make…the difference.
If you read a transcript of the debate, or simply listened to it with your head, you might say that Tim Walz eked out a win. The policies he presented are sane and progressive; the aura he presented was humane and compassionate, to the point that he seemed all too eager to find common ground with Vance, a favor that Vance began to return (because I think he realized it was playing well for him). But Vance himself, behind that faux-saintly beard, proved tonight to be a slithery matinee idol of a politician who is rooted in genuine reactionary ideas (the hostility to immigrants, the idea that Trump didn’t try to steal the 2020 election), but whose ideology on the debate stage might come down to, “If it feels good, say it.” Because when you do, it makes the voters feel good too. And that’s a scary thought.