The most important exchange in the Vance-Walz debate was a dark one
JD Vance called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler” before agreeing to be his running mate. He outraged millions when he falsely said Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats. So the shock of this week’s vice presidential debate was that he came off as polite, even empathetic.
“Jesus have mercy,” Vance said when his Democratic opponent, Tim Walz, said his 17-year-old son had witnessed a shooting.
Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, has next to nothing in common with Vance. But at one point Waltz told the nationally televised audience, “I agree with a lot of what Senator Vance said.”
In other words, the debate was as dull as the job of vice president itself.
Perhaps that’s because the VP candidates were worried about damaging the person who selected them as their running mate. The understudy job tends to have greater potential for harming than helping. Historically, voters don’t factor in the VP choice when voting for president.
“The most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,” is how John Adams, the first vice president, described it.
But times have changed, and the job has gained power over time. Who becomes vice president does matter. Most recently, the VP has been crucial in getting laws passed. As the president of the Senate, the VP casts the decisive vote in the event of a tie in the 100-member chamber. That happens a lot these days because there is almost an equal number of Republican and Democratic Senators.
As Biden’s vice president, Harris cast 33 tie-breaking votes, breaking a 200-year-old record. She had impact, and made Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief package happen in 2021. She also cast the vote that lowered drug prices for millions of Americans and advanced efforts to mitigate climate change.
Of course, the primary duty of the vice president is to be breathing in case the boss dies. Rather alarmingly that has happened eight times in US history, including after Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were assassinated.
Only 10 of the 29 vice presidents who have sought the White House have won, according to the Pew Research Center. But Biden was Obama’s VP and won, and now Kamala wants to continue the winning streak.
We live a few blocks from the vice president’s official residence, a grand Victorian home very near the British embassy. And, judging from the size of her motorcade and security details – police motorcycles, Secret Service SUVs, an ambulance – the VP matters.
The next vice president, as Harris was three years ago, will be thrust into the national limelight from relative obscurity.
Until a couple months ago, most Americans had never heard of Walz, 60, the governor of Minnesota and a former high school football coach. Vance, 40, was mostly known for writing the 2016 best-seller Hillbilly Elegy. He had never run for office before being elected to the Senate in 2022.
But after Trump picked Vance as his running mate, more was known about Vance – including how he savagely criticised Trump in the past, calling him “cultural heroin” and “reprehensible.”
Many people, especially women, see him as far more rigid and conservative in his stances than Trump. He has held hard-right stances on abortion and called women without children “childless cat ladies.”
“Vance was focused on his own image rehab tonight with the phony nice-guy routine,” a Republican political strategist Mike Murphy wrote on X.
The debate didn’t do much to highlight the huge policy differences between the candidates, partly because Walz bumbled at times and wasn’t a strong debater. One of the most memorable things Walz said was to call himself a “knucklehead” for once saying that he was at Tiananmen Square during the 1989 deadly protests (he was there the same year).
So the headlines were the candidates listened to each other, were courteous and civil. When they said they agreed with each other – as they actually said they did on a few topics – that was news in this poisonously vile election campaign.
“I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here,” Walz said. “And I’m sympathetic to misspeaking on things.”
“Me too, man,” Vance said.
But after the unexpectedly sugary debate was over, the lasting and most important exchange was a dark one. Because Trump has insisted the last election was “stolen” from him, a charge that many blame for the deadly violence on Jan. 6, 2021 at the US Capitol, there is huge concern that that may happen again if Harris wins and he again refuses to accept the results.
So during the debate, Walz asked Vance: “I would just ask, did he lose the 2020 election?”
“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance said.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.
A non-answer was the loudest one.