GOP U.S. Senator JD Vance didn’t just defeat Democratic Governor Tim Walz in last night’s vice presidential debate. Vance also defeated the two CBS moderators when they attempted a deceptive fact check.
Walz faltered from the beginning. He fumbled myriad questions and appeared unprepared and befuddled. Often times, he peered into the cameras with wild, terrified eyes. He admitted that he could be a “knucklehead.”
Vance brutalized Walz by tying him to the failed economic and other policies that Vice President Kamala Harris has carried out as President Joe Biden’s second in command. Indeed, Vance wisely made Harris the sitting president when he attacked the Biden administration’s policies.
Even hate-Trump CNN talkers said Vance won.
“Climate Change” and the Economy
Vance clobbered Walz — or rather, running mate Harris — on “climate change.”
“Senator Vance has said that there’s a climate problem in the past, Donald Trump called it a hoax and then joked that these things would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in,” Walz said. “What we’ve seen out of the Harris administration now, the Biden Harris administration is, we’ve seen this investment, we’ve seen massive investments, the biggest in global history that we’ve seen in the Inflation Reduction Act, has created jobs all across the country.”
Vance easily shot down the argument:
What [Trump] has said is that if the Democrats, in particular, Kamala Harris and her leadership, if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America, and that’s not what they’re doing. So clearly, Kamala Harris herself doesn’t believe her own rhetoric on this. If she did, she would actually agree with Donald Trump’s energy policies.
Walz foundered when he attempted to discuss the economy and Harris’ plans for the economy, including “2 million new houses proposed under this plan with down payment assistance on the front end.” Walz also touted a $6,000 child tax credit and $50,000 tax credit for small businesses. Trump, he claimed, gave tax breaks to the rich.
Vance was ready.
Harris has been “the Vice President for three and a half years, she had the opportunity to enact all of these great policies,” he replied. “And what she’s actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25 percent, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60 percent, open the American southern border and make middle class life unaffordable for a large number of Americans.”
Continued Vance:
If Kamala Harris has such great plans for how to address middle class problems, then she ought to do them now, not when asking for a promotion, but in the job the American people gave her three and a half years ago.
Walz, Vance said, had “a tough job here because you’ve got to play whack-a-mole”:
You’ve got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver rising take home pay. Which, of course, he did. You’ve got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver lower inflation, which, of course, he did. And then you’ve simultaneously got to defend Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record, which has made gas, groceries, and housing unaffordable for American citizens.
Fake Fact Check
When the two candidate debated immigration, Vance critique of Harris’ policies was unanswerable.
“We have a historic immigration crisis because Kamala Harris started and said that she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s border policies. Ninety-four executive orders suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, massively increasing the asylum fraud that exists in our system, that has opened the floodgates,” he said.
Walz mistakenly mentioned Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian Biden “migrants” are running amok, crashing cars and eating the city’s ducks and geese that live in its park. Vance had “vilified a large number of people who were here legally in the community of Springfield” in his commentary on the crisis, Walz claimed.
“Look, in Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” Vance replied. “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”
After comments from Walz about the ballyhooed immigration bill that failed in Congress — a bill that presidential candidate Donald Trump supposedly killed despite not being a member of Congress — Brennan stepped in on Walz’s side with a “fact check.”
“Just to clarify for our viewers,” Brennan said after Walz quoted the Bible, “Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status.”
Vance straightened her out, then corrected a falsehood from Walz.
“The rules were that you guys were [not] going to fact check, and since you’re fact checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on,” Vance said:
So there’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.… That is the facilitation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership. And Kamala Harris opened up that pathway.
Brennan thanked Vance “for describing the legal process.”
“Those laws have been in the books since 1990,” Walz said.
That’s when the network cut the candidates’ microphone.
Replied Vance, “The CBP app has not been on the books since 1990. It’s something that Kamala Harris created, Margaret.”’
“I’m a Knucklehead”
Perhaps the worst moment for Walz was his response to Brennan’s question about his false claim to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing in 1989. “But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn’t travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy?” she asked.
A shaken Walz served up a word salad worthy of Harris:
Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there who didn’t get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I’m proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. Passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of 89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China. The issue for that was, was to try and learn. Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They, look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect. And I’m a knucklehead at times, but it’s always been about that.
Reaction
Walz’s performance was so bad that even CNN talkers said Vance won the debate.
Abby Phillips said Walz was unprepared, while Dana Bash said he was overprepared, and his lack of interviews with national and local media showed.
But Jake Tapper explained Walz’s collapse best: “J.D. Vance is much more experienced at this, at public speaking, at defending himself, at pivoting.”
On the fact-check exchange, Cuomo bluntly said “Vance was right.”
“There was nuance to it,” he continued, “but the bigger problem is why he was moved on,” and Brennan’s saying “’we’ve got so much to get to.’ Says who?”
MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace hilariously explained that Vance “mansplained” to the moderators when he corrected the fact check.
GOP CNN analyst Scott Jennings expertly dissected Walz’s failure, and explained that he simply isn’t qualified to be vice president.
Walz was clearly “outclassed,” he said. “Can you imagine this guy sitting in the White House Situation Room with that facial expression that’s like 50 percent sheer terror, and 50 percent extreme bafflement?”
The split television screen showed the “difference between a competent Vance and a totally in-over-his-head Walz.”
And Walz’s answer to the question about Tiananmen Square “was probably the worst VP debate meltdown since [James] Stockdale in ’92. ‘Who am I and why am I here?’” Jennings said.
“Walz does not belong at this level of American politics,” he continued. “Vance does.… Tim Walz wandered into the wrong bar tonight.”
