Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and his wife Usha Vance leave that stage as Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and his wife Gwen Walz greet moderators Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan after a vice presidential debate, on Oct. 1, in New York.Matt Rourke/The Associated Press
How far into Tuesday night’s debate did you get before you started to worry you were having some kind of neurological episode? I think I was about 20 minutes in.
It was civil. It was calm. J.D. Vance and Tim Walz kept pointing out the things they agreed on, offering conciliatory points or saying they believed the other had honourable intentions or a few decent ideas, even if they saw the country’s problems and solutions differently.
In the midst of this dog-eat-dog (and migrants eat both of them) election cycle, at the far end of a decade of zero-sum political warfare and performative insanity, this détente was nothing short of demented. It was like someone dousing your house in gasoline, striking a match, watching the entire thing burn to the ground, then turning to offer you a marshmallow on a stick and apologize if the smoke was bothering your eyes.
“Gaslighting” may have been Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2022, but it wasn’t until Tuesday night at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York that it got its staged dramatic reading.
One of the many things on which the two gentlemen apparently agree is that it is wrong to blame migrants for every problem that touches American shores, for example.
“Tim just said something that I agree with,” Mr. Vance said at one point. “We don’t want to blame immigrants for higher housing prices, but we do want to blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country, which does drive up costs, Tim.”
Mr. Vance’s performance was so utterly smooth and self-assured that it was almost possible to forget for a moment that he has of late made it his part-time job to blame migrants for everything up to and including eating people’s pets.
The conventional wisdom on vice-presidential debates is that they don’t move the needle electorally and are basically theatre, so the goal for participants is to do no harm to their ticket. (If you would enjoy the sensation of your brain melting and running out your ears like Velveeta, try to imagine what it might take for a running mate to dent Donald Trump’s reputation by doing something more outside the bounds of decency or sanity at this point.)
But even within the limited confines of that debating Hippocratic Oath, Mr. Vance and Mr. Walz came in needing to accomplish opposite projects, as far as shoring up their own weaknesses in the eyes of the 37 undecided American voters who will decide the whole shebang.
Mr. Vance is preternaturally intelligent, and he is both well-armed and eager to use all the factual and rhetorical switchblades stuffed into his pockets. Skill and substance are not weaknesses for him; likeability is. His task in the debate was to present himself as someone other than a guy you would try very hard not to have a second conversation with if you met him at a party.
An expert shape-shifter from a life that taught him to don new personalities like Halloween costumes, Mr. Vance was more than up for the task. So complete was his transformation to butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth nice young man that he even physically looked different on the debate stage – softer and less hawkish.
Mr. Walz, in contrast, has burst onto the national political scene since the summer as basically the most likeable Midwestern dad alive, flipping pancakes for everyone while making cracks about how weird the other guys are. The knock on him and on his ticket – exacerbated by the sparse media interviews to which he and Ms. Harris have submitted – is that he is either a lightweight or a friendly ghost of convenient unknowability.
He was visibly nervous in his first answer, and while he soon steadied, he never quite seemed to find himself on that stage. He was a pale silhouette, lacking both the easy ebullience he’s contributed to his own campaign and the mind-your-own-damn-business Midwestern impatience he’s tossed so effectively at the Republicans.
The combined result of that and Mr. Vance palpably reining in his venomous tendencies was the weirdly tranquillized tone of the debate, and the creeping sense that you had stumbled into some kind of gaslighting festival.
It was only in the last 15 minutes or so that the whole thing started to bear any resemblance to the plane of reality where we all have to live.
A moderator brought up how Mr. Vance said he would have rejected the 2020 election results, then asked whether he would try to upend November’s vote if the outcome made Mr. Trump unhappy.
“What President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues, peacefully in the public square,” Mr. Vance said, with all the earnestness of a high-school valedictorian.
And then, in a sweetly patient voice, he continued, “Remember, he said that on January the 6th the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the President, Donald Trump left the White House, and now, of course, unfortunately, we have all of the negative policies that have come from the Harris-Biden administration.”
There’s a Seinfeld episode in which various characters use the phrase “yada yada yada” to gloss over awkward things they don’t feel like talking about. The death of a fiancée, sex with an ex and a derailed adoption are all at various points conversationally fast-forwarded using that phrase.
Nobody on Seinfeld, notably, tried to yada yada yada an attempted insurrection, but then Mr. Vance is an overachiever. A few minutes later, he didn’t even break a sweat as he refused to answer point-blank questions about whether Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election.
And here, after more than an hour adrift in a bewildering sea filled with objects that looked lovely, soft and shiny on the surface because they kept their poisonous spines tucked beneath the waves, we had finally arrived at a recognizable shore.
On this fetid island, the royal colour is orange, inconvenient things poof out of existence if you look away from them and your highest purpose is catering to one small man’s very large feelings without ever letting on that you can see the tantrum gathering at the corners of his mouth.