Tim Walz has said he’s an unskilled debater, and he didn’t disprove that on Tuesday night in the first and only 2024 vice-presidential debate.
Kamala Harris’s running mate came out looking nervous, slightly deer-in-the-headlights, and far less glossy than his rival, the Ohio senator JD Vance.
“[Democrats] are fortunate presidential debates tend to matter a lot more than VP debates,” aptly observed Dave Wasserman, senior editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
Walz, the governor of Minnesota, had an especially bad moment when asked to explain his repeated falsehoods about having been in China during the Tiananmen Square student-led protests in 1989. (Walz did spend a lot of time in China, but starting a few months later.)
The Minnesota governor’s attempt at an answer was bumbling and unsatisfactory. He finally blurted: “I’ve not been perfect. And I’m a knucklehead at times.” He should have been prepared to answer that, probably by stating that he misspoke about something that happened 35 years ago and that he regrets the screwup.
The self-assured and smooth Vance, by contrast, may have won the debate on points, although his constant addressing the female moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, by their first names grated on more than a few women’s nerves. (“I need JD Vance to stop saying ‘Margaret’ in that creepy way,” posted the writer Sophie Vershbow on X.)
He seemed eager to come off as a nice guy, fast-talking about his humble Appalachian roots, all while showing off his Ivy League polish. Leaning hard into the Hillbilly Elegy persona – and away from his crazy talk about the misery of childless cat ladies and the need to monitor menstrual cycles – he probably helped his own chances to be president someday.
But none of that should matter one iota in the presidential election that is only five weeks away. It’s far from the heart of what matters: that Trump has proved himself a danger to America and to the world, thoroughly unfit to be elected president again.
Asked to explain how he could have criticized Trump in the past, and now be ready to stand loyally at his side, Vance claimed he had been deluded by media lies. Utter nonsense.
By late in the debate, Walz had found his footing, especially when the CBS News moderators belatedly raised the subject that should have started the debate, instead of their initial question about the growing conflicts in the Middle East.
But many Americans, no doubt, had tuned out and gone to bed by the time Vance started spreading revisionist history – actually consequential lies – about Trump’s role in the January 6 riot and his desire to overturn the 2020 election. A role, let’s recall, for which he was justifiably impeached.
Vance tried to portray Trump as urging only peaceful demonstrations when in fact the then president incited the riot at the Capitol.
Now Walz was ready to pounce.
“Mike Pence made the right decision,” Walz said, making the obvious point about the former vice-president who refused to do Trump’s bidding that day. “This was a threat to our democracy in a way we had not seen.”
Walz added a glaring truth: “And that’s why Pence is not on this stage.”
That, of course, is the real issue – that Trump’s vice-president, after the 2020 election, did the right thing and his boss sided with the people who wanted him hanged for it. The two are done with each other. Vance is a late-coming opportunist.
In the closing minutes of the debate, Walz had his best moment when he challenged his rival with this essential question:
“Trump is still saying he didn’t lose the election. Did he lose the 2020 election?”
Vance tried a non-sequitur comeback: “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans?”
To which Walz shot back: “That is a damning non-answer.”
He was right about that. Trump’s lies and his destructive refusal to peacefully transfer power are the very reason JD Vance was standing on that stage.
Vance may have prevailed on tone and presentation. But Walz is on the side of democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. I call that a win.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
