I think it’s fair to say that Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate didn’t play out like most of us were expecting it to. Republican Sen. J.D. Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have been sharply critical of each other on the stump, and I expected the same rancor to bubble up on the CBS News debate stage. Instead, the two men engaged in an issue-centric discussion that remained surprisingly civil throughout. Unfortunately, that meant the whole thing was also very boring. It may have been a good debate, but it was terrible, terrible television.
I feel sort of bad saying that, because in many ways, Tuesday night’s debate was everything that people claim to want from political debates. The candidates were respectful to each other: They shook hands both before and after the debate, and during their exchanges, it often felt like they were trying to one-up each other with niceness. They were also respectful to moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan. As for the moderators, they came prepared with serious and specific questions, treated both candidates equally, and kept the debate moving. The whole thing was brisk, unbiased, substantive, and resoundingly normal. And, if you’re like me, you could barely keep your eyes open for most of it.
Why was the debate so boring? In part because it was a proxy fight over other people’s policies and records, waged by two men who will likely have minimal input into whatever policies their running mates choose to pursue if elected in November. The vice presidency is not a particularly substantive position, and it doesn’t ultimately matter what either Walz or Vance think about Finland, or health care, or gun control. (I mean, it matters more than what I think about those things, but it matters less than what, say, Mike Johnson thinks.)
This is true of every vice-presidential debate, of course—but the issue-centricity of Tuesday’s debate felt especially fake because, in most other settings, JD Vance has been plainly disinterested in running an issue-centric campaign. The only reason why JD Vance is a national political figure right now is because he consciously decided to embrace the ugliest, most divisive aspects of Trumpism to advance through the Ohio Republican Senate primary in 2022, and then again to win Trump’s favor as he vied for the vice-presidential slot earlier this year. Let’s be real: He isn’t on the ticket because of his interest in repairing the damage that outsourcing and free trade may have done to the American working class. He’s on the ticket because he’s both shameless and ambitious enough to “yes, and” all of Donald Trump’s worst instincts.
Everybody knows this. I know this, you know this, the CBS News moderators know this, JD Vance knows this, and Tim Walz knows this. Vance isn’t a “talk about the issues” guy. Vance is a “tell race-baiting lies about Haitian immigrants” guy. Given that context, I didn’t want to see Vance and Walz talk about the issues. I wanted to see Walz call Vance a “weirdo” and Vance mock Walz for only having been an assistant coach. I didn’t want to watch Walz keep on calling out the common ground that he and his counterpart share, I wanted Walz to roll his eyes and mumble “C’mon, man” when Vance was trying to pretend that he and Trump cared deeply about women’s reproductive health. I didn’t want to see Vance smarmily thank Walz for mentioning Finland, I wanted to see Vance brandish a crudely Photoshopped picture of Walz personally escorting several MS-13 members across the Texas border. I didn’t want sham civility, I wanted Walz and Vance to manifest the rhetorical brutality that defines our current political moment.
This all isn’t just a function of me being a mean, bitter cynic, though of course I am. JD Vance is not a normal candidate, and in treating him like one, both Walz and CBS News did viewers a major disservice—and not just in the sense of giving them 90 minutes’ worth of very boring television. Vance might have been counseled to try to perform empathy and civility in order to gull the swing voters watching Tuesday night’s debate, but the fact remains that he rose to his current position primarily because of his willingness to echo and advance some of the meanest, least credible attacks and opinions voiced by his running mate. We saw none of that Tuesday night—which perhaps is why Trump apparently got bored with what he was watching and decided to start posting about Pete Rose while the debate was still happening. Count on Vance to get the message and revert to malignant form before the week is up.
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