The VP Debate Didn't Matter; It Never Was Going To.

It's Trump v Harris, not Vance v. Walz

So much hullaballo. So much media coverage. So much analysis.

None of it mattered. None of it was ever GOING to matter.

The Vice Presidency isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.¹ It is an office with no real power except when the Senate votes in a tie. Most of it’s esteem comes from it’s potential for power; you are one bad day away from the Oval Office. But in terms of dictating policy, adminstering regulation and having actual choices and decisions, it’s useless as the President keeps all of that to himself.² It’s one of the reasons many attacks by Trump on Kamala falls flat; those are BIDEN policies, which he clearly was the decisionmaker on, and tying them to Harris is a little disingenuous.

Nonetheless, during the debate, I was eagerly typing out notes, thoughts, and perspectives about who was winning and who made my think. Then on the morning after, I read it again, and looked at it from a different point of view. None of it mattered. We focused so much energy and investing in this anticipated prizefight that we genuinely lost sight of what this debate was even FOR. Our standards have slipped and our direction misguided. So I scrapped what I wrote (some of it still appears further on, but most of it is gone), moved up my original post for Thursday and decided to rewrite my thoughts on the debate with different guiding principles. I’m glad I did this.

Watching the post-debate crapfest that is CNN these days and the hyperanalysis that resulted was frustrating; nobody cares about the level of innuendo that these journalists and pundits scrutinize debates, particularly a Vice Presidential debate. They focused on misspoken lines, vague answers and who was up on “points”³ whatever that meant to the viewers watching at home. Their narratives were just elitist and condescending. They look at it more like the way a college debate coach would break things down focusing on the “how”; what voters care about is the “what,’ the substance, even if they don’t always fully comprehend what it means. The only one who seemed to get this was David Axelrod, who both praised and criticized each candidate fairly and then said that in the end he thought the American people would seee this as a draw. He was right. Most polls and focus groups saw almost a 50/50% split on “who won the debate” questions.

There is a very easy and simple way to describe how the debate went.

• Vance was all style. He was extremely well spoken and polished. He did a good job of looking the part. He also came across as a slick car salesman selling a lemon. Substantively, he was called out time and again for egregiously lying (“Trump saved Obamacare!” made me guffaw out loud). Some of his answers were evasive and others were outright eyerollers. When he got a question he didn’t like, he would always pivot some way to Immigration and the Border. Some of that isn’t his fault; trying to defend Trump’s rancidness and horrible positions lends itself to do this more often than not. Nonetheless, it was definitely style over substance.

• Walz was the opposite. He had the moral high ground on many of the issues and managed to look good describing many of the more substantive items of the night. He just looked like your dad trying to describe it to someone at a coffee shop or tavern after a few. Very unpolished, pretty hokey, not always coherent. He couldn’t complete a paragraph of an idea, and instead, bounced around from sentence to sentence. However he was relatable. In trying to articulate complex items he was all over the map; on more straightforward right v wrong items he had his best moments of the night. Most people understood what he was trying to say and where he was coming from.

Looking at it those ways, I saw both of them have their moments on Tuesday. I could clearly envision either of these guys lazily lounging around the Naval Observatory or sent to Bumblefuck somewhere doing nothing, saying nothing and waving to crowds. The best moment was when Walz pointedly asked Vance whether Trump lost the election and Vance immediately and very obviously pivoted away and countered. Walz called it a damning non-answer and it was. But it highlighted everything I said in the above two bullets—Vance was style, Walz was substance.

The moderators, CBS’ Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, were OK. Their questions always posed “What would YOU do…” when in reality, as VPs, it’s not their decision. Those are questions that should be directed at the Presidential candidates. I liked Norah O’Donnell pointedly including the costs to each party’s economic policies (Harris= $1.2 trillion added to the debt, Trump= $5.8 trillion(!)) but wished she had included those numbers at the same time so they would sink in for the audience, instead of when individually addressing the candidates. But bar none, their best moment was when after Vance went on an Immigration rant and fact checked him saying that these were not illegal immigrants as he claimed but legal immigrants with temporary protected status. His response revealed why substantively he was doomed to fail, “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check.” At that point, you couldn’t take anything Vance was going to say the rest of the night legitimately. He wasn’t upset that what he said was substantively wrong, he was upset the moderators were pointing out the truth. When he ranted afterwards, the moderators rightfully muted the microphones.

So all in all it was a useless debate for a useless office, to be quickly forgotten. Nothing new or eventful will survive past the weekend, if it even lasts that long. But before leaving I do want to point out something that I really liked about the debate. In the second half of the debate, there was a lot of civility by the candidates toward each other, some genuine expressed empathy and points of common interest, and seeds of compromise being planted. Walz did most of this but Vance had some good moments showing civility as well. Those sharp red/blue polar edges that we’ve been dealing with for over two decades now finally showed some purple hues and mutual respect. I’m not Pollyannish enough to believe that is the future and that the next Presidential election cycle we’ll all be singing Kumbaya. But it did offer a glimpse of what politics may look like once Trump is removed from the stage. I can honestly say, I’m looking forward to going back towards those days again.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

“There is a second place bowl game, but it is a game for losers played by losers.”

—Vince Lombardi.

This is how I often feel about V.P. debates.

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. Thank you John Nance Gardner.

2. I realize that using “himself” is not gender neutral here, but every President to this point has been a male. When we have a female President, which may be sooner rather than later, I’ll gladfully use a more neutral pronound.

3. No, nobody cares about Walz saying he was in Hong Kong during the Tiannemen Square protests; this is a complete non-issue. Nobody cares about the extreme minutiae of nitpicking every detail from his past either. To equate these errors or half-truths with what Trump says daily does a disservice to the country. CNN should know better.