Vance vs. Walz: A Royal Ass-Kicking That Was
“The moderators were obnoxious,” said Brit Hume of Fox News in his opening reaction to Tuesday’s debate.
And Hume was right.
For some reason, Democrat propaganda news organs are allowed to control the presidential debates, and every time they get an opportunity to present one of these affairs they never cease to disappoint.
Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan were the moderators of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, and the terms agreed to were that they wouldn’t fact-check the candidates as ABC’s propagandists David Muir and Linzey Davis did to Donald Trump in the previous debate.
They violated those terms, of course, but that backfired. Badly.
An example…
JD Vance just TOOK COMMAND of this debate by fact-checking these debate "moderators" who tried to fact-check him!
This is how it's DONE.
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 2, 2024
They didn’t try to fact-check Vance again, though there were a few snide editorial comments and a host of attempted “gotcha” questions Vance casually batted away with aplomb.
This, in a nutshell, is why it was a great choice for Trump to nominate J.D. Vance as his running mate. In fact, it’s an exposition of a massive difference in leadership between Trump and Kamala Harris – or Joe Biden, for that matter.
Strong, effective leaders surround themselves with capable people. They actually seek to be the dumbest person in the room where decisions in their organizations are made. In Trump’s first term, that wasn’t as successful as it could have been – or as it’s been in his private sector exploits – because he’d never worked in government before and didn’t have a lot of personal contacts to draw from. He also represented a sizable sea change from a Republican Party which had utterly squandered the legacy Ronald Reagan left it, and so Trump didn’t have a deep well of proven leaders.
So he got stuck with the H.R. McMasters, Rex Tillersons and John Kellys, who had solid resumes but not the relationships or orientations Trump needed to drain the swamp.
And Mike Pence was another good example of Trump’s inexperience in 2016.
Vance is an example of his experience in 2024.
Trump has a running mate who, thanks to the benefit of his own experience, is on board with his agenda in a way Pence never was.
And what you saw from Vance was that Trump was not afraid to pick someone even more polished, even more composed, and even more in command of facts and details than he is. That’s not what you saw with Kamala Harris, who refused Josh Shapiro as her VP choice out of insecurity over his talent relative to hers.
Vance is far and away the best communicator – in the old political sense – of the four presidential and vice-presidential nominees of both parties. And he showed it Tuesday night.
He made zero mistakes. He was never stumped. He didn’t stumble. He never lost his cool. He saw all the questions coming and had devastating answers ready.
And he was an island of sanity in a sea of absurdity.
Vance was asked to defend the simple, obvious notion that deluging America with 15 million illegal aliens will necessarily pump up the demand for a basic necessity like housing, something which would have irritated most politicians, much less ordinary people. He offered up a Federal Reserve study proving it, which showed great preparation, but the question itself indicated how dumbed-down and ridiculous the intersection of politics and media have become.
Tim Walz whined about illegals, a not-small number of whom (over 600,000) are criminals and a shocking number of whom (13,000) are murderers, not to mention the unknown number who might have walked across our southern border with a backpack full of deadly Chinese fentanyl meant to poison Americans slung on their backs, being “demonized.”
Walz was so rattled by a question giving him an opportunity to explain the lie he told about having been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre in China that he melted down. He failed to give the easy answer that he’d flubbed the timeline mostly for political effect, but that what he was trying to get across was an understanding of how China works. That wouldn’t have been wonderful, but Walz might have at least limited the damage from that lie being exposed.
Instead, he called himself a “knucklehead.”
And then he claimed, perhaps by mistake, that he’d been friends with school shooters.
Walz managed to recover, mostly once he was given a softball question on abortion, and he spent the second half of the debate composed, if not particularly effective. But Vance did nonetheless hang Walz on the infanticide bill in Minnesota that he signed, which allows doctors to escape responsibility for the well-being of babies born after surviving abortions. Walz denied that was what the bill did, and failed to take advantage of an opportunity Vance gave him to parse his answer to make sense.
“What was I wrong about?” Vance challenged Walz. He had no answer, just a blanket denial.
Which resulted in this image on TV sets all over America…
For 90 minutes Americans got to see a master class in how a political debate should be conducted. Vance was cool, in every sense of the word, and he utterly dismantled Walz, and more importantly, Kamala Harris.
He was hopeful, but he was also dismissive of the ruling class’ fraudulent narratives. What value are “experts,” he noted, when their supposed “expertise” yields poor results predictable by sheer common sense?
Brennan and O’Donnell acted like he was from Mars when he said that. Most of the American people, who see those poor results, know exactly what he meant.
It was a blowout. An utter rout. Walz wasn’t awful in a general sense, but against Vance he failed miserably.
And he knew it. It was so bad that Walz spent half the time writing notes when Vance was talking (Vance took none), and it looked like he was literally getting schooled.
And a list of questions beginning with climate change idiocy and ending with an ad nauseam discussion of January 6 couldn’t save him.
Vance refused to allow himself to get dragged into the latter discussion, and instead forced a conversation about censorship and its corrosive effect on democracy. And when Walz brought up the canard that you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater, Vance buried him on the government abuse of social media platforms to suppress true information.
When he was done, all Walz could say was “I don’t run Facebook.” That hardly helped his cause when the point was that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris improperly have been for much of the past four years.
We are a very, very long way away from Walz calling Vance “weird.” It was Walz who looked weird on Tuesday night.
No one expected the vice presidential debate to move the needle in the 2024 race for the White House. But nobody expected the beatdown Vance laid on Walz, either. We’ll see if the public is swayed.
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