Sanewashing, Normalizing, and Housebreaking JD
A VP debate reality check
Some quick thoughts on last night’s monumentally inconsequential Veep debate:
As I mentioned on Morning Joe earlier today, JD Vance won on style points, but this isn’t figure skating.
Some larger context is desperately needed here:
Last night’s debate had the effect of sanewashing JD Vance. He didn’t talk about “childless cat ladies,” postmenopausal women, the “inconvenience” of rape, his cozy relationships with the extremist fringe, or his Putin-friendly attitude toward Ukraine. He was slick, poised, disciplined, and on-message.
But, despite all of that, we were still reminded that JD is a mendacious bullshit artist. He was ultimately defined by the last few minutes of the debate when he refused to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and — in a nation that still values basic constitutional norms — that is disqualifying.
This gets to my larger problem with the whole event. As Susan Glasser noted last night: “The conceit of this CBS debate is that this is just a normal policy election, two guys shooting the shit about housing starts and health care financing. Misses the moment pretty dramatically.”
No kidding.
Happy Wednesday. There are 34 days until Election Day.
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Some context, please.
While the punditocracy is distracted by the shiny object of last night’s “show,” let’s remind ourselves what has happened over the last few days.
On Tuesday — the day of the debate — Trump brushed off the traumatic brain injuries suffered by American troops attacked by Iran, as merely “headaches.” On Earth 2.0 that alone would have ended anyone else’s candidacy.
Trump’s cognitive decline was on stark and vivid display. Via the Wapo:
He spoke of “a million Rambos.” “Turnarounds” and “gotaways” and “dead-head spending.”
He mixed up Iran with North Korea and strained to pronounce United Arab Emirates.
He marveled at Hurricane Helene coming so late in the storm season, which typically runs through November. He falsely claimed government agencies can’t name the U.S. population, and he compared the conflict between Israel and Iran to “two kids fighting in the schoolyard.”
Trump, 78, often speaks in a digressive, extemporaneous style that thrills his fans at large-scale rallies. But Tuesday’s event, in front of almost entirely reporters, was especially scattered and hard to follow. Polls show voters’ concerns about Trump’s age and fitness have increased since President Joe Biden, 81, withdrew and was replaced as the Democratic nominee by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Days after he called for “one real rough, nasty day” of violence, and just days after calling Vice President Kamala Harris “mentally disabled” and “mentally impaired,” Trump accused her of murder. (For you newcomers to politics, this is not normal.)
“I’m outraged that [Harris] let in the savage who raped and murdered Rachel Morin,” Trump said during a speech in Wisconsin on Tuesday. “Kamala let her in, let her in.
“She murdered him,” Trump said, mixing up his pronouns. “In my opinion, she murdered him. She did it just like she had a gun in her hand.”
Over the weekend, Trump delivered an hour or so of undiluted migrant hate, as his campaign continues to push debunked lies about Haitian immigrants. (When the moderators of last night’s debate pointed out that the Haitians were, in fact, here legally, Vance whined about the fact-checking so much that his mic was shut off.)
On Tuesday Trump went on a confused rant about migrants from the Congo.
“They come from the Congo in the Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don't know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo." [Fact check: It’s not true. It’s a lie. It’s more Trumpian bullshit.]
He lied about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene. Repeatedly.
As an Associated Press report summarized, “Donald Trump repeatedly spread falsehoods Monday about the federal response to Hurricane Helene despite claiming not to be politicizing the disaster as he toured hard-hit areas in south Georgia.”
Brave Sir Donald. who is dodging a second debate with Harris, also ran away from a scheduled 60 Minutes interview, because, as Adam Kinzinger put it so memorably:
Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong.
He is a small man pretending to be big.
He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous.
He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim.
He puts on—listen—he puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.
**
Exit take: None of this is remotely normal, and we should stop pretending that it is.
I feel a rant coming on…
Or rather, I’m having a flashback to a rant I had with Ben Wittes back in January. As one Republican after another fell into line behind Trump, Ben was reminded of Eugène Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros, which was written about a different political ecosystem in which people turned into rhinoceroses.
Originally written as a commentary on the drift into fascism (and communism), Ionesco depicts one character after another slipping away from normality and transforming into a rough horned beast.
When it was written, the play was considered absurdist theater. But now it feels more like a documentary, because the metaphor seems disturbingly apt today.
This is one of the reasons we so often feel like we’ve taken crazy pills.
We keep pretending that we are living in a quasi-normal political universe. The smart kids in PunditWorld fuss endlessly over the horse-race and the latest blips in the polls, and I’m sitting there going, wait. Wait. Wait. Has anybody noticed that Fred over there has turned into a fucking rhinoceros?
“There’s a rhinoceros running through the halls of the hospital, people. It’s like [we think we] are still in this normal world, and nobody notices that the person sitting across the table from you has a fucking horn coming out of their forehead.
And if we say, “Excuse me, can I mention this?” [we’d be accused of suffering from] Rhinoceros Derangement Syndrome.
Goddamn right we do, because you’re a fucking rhinoceros.
Post-debate punditry
I’ll leave the heavy lifting to others (since there is so much of it.) Today’s Bulwark is especially good — packed with solid morning-after analysis. (See especially Will Saletan, Cathy Young, JVL, and the Morning Shots crew.) Some of the best of the rest:
For 90 minutes Vance stuffed the worst of Trumpism’s political extremes into a suit of traditional Republican respectability. That he largely managed to appear normal is one of the most impressive things the Republican hopeful has ever done.
Dan Pfeiffer, in his Substack newsletter: “The Pundits are Wrong: JD Vance Didn't Win the Debate.”
Tim Walz started the debate a little nervous. He had some awkward moments. Most theater critics on Twitter and the political media scored the debate as a win for Vance. And if this were a high school debate competition, they would be right. Vance was poised. His answers were precise. Walz was overly elliptical at times and missed opportunities to call out Vance’s blatant lies, but political debates aren’t won by winning the approval of the pundits. They are won by making persuasive arguments to the voters tuning in.
On that measure, Walz outperformed Vance. He spent the debate talking about what voters care about, while Vance harrumphed about censorship for reasons that defy explanation.
In other words, Walz spoke to the voters in the battleground states who will decide the election. Vance played to media elites and tried to keep Donald Trump happy.
Joe Klein was not so sanguine about Walz’s performance: “Coach Gets Clobbered.”
This wasn’t as bad as Biden’s debilitated performance in June, but it was close. Tim Walz was incompetent. Actually, he was worse than that: he was a willing accessory in the resuscitation of a mortal sleazeball, J. D. Vance. He treated Vance as if he were a moral equal. But that’s what liberal social studies teachers do: they can’t grock cynicism, they can’t imagine the poison that untrammeled ambition can inject into a formerly intelligent person. Minnesota nice turned out to be Minnesota gullible, Minnesota dumb. Minnesota weak.
David Graham, in The Atlantic: '“J. D. Vance Tries to Rewrite History.”
Vance claimed that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20” and said, “I believe we do have a threat to democracy in this country, but it’s not the threat that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It’s the threat of censorship.” This strange misdirection requires Americans to disbelieve what they saw and what Trump said in favor of an extremely online conservative talking point.
Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic nominee, sniffed blood and asked Vance point-blank whether he believed that Trump had lost the 2020 election. Vance refused to answer, and instead rambled again about censorship. “You guys wanted to kick people off Facebook,” he said, as though that allegation was worse than stealing an election.
**
And the polls?
CNN Instant Poll: No clear winner in VP debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance .
Following the debate, 51% of viewers said that Vance did the better job, with 49% picking Walz. In a survey conducted of the same voters prior to the debate, Walz held the advantage as the candidate they expected to perform more strongly, 54% to 45%.
Politico Playbook: Flash poll: Vance and Walz debate to a draw.
“Dead even: POLITICO snap poll shows stark division on debate,” by Melanie Mason: “Asked who won Tuesday’s debate, voters were split 50-50 over whether it was JD VANCE or TIM WALZ, according to a POLITICO/Focaldata snap poll of likely voters conducted just after the two faced off in a studio in New York City. …
“Democrats overwhelmingly sided with Walz, while Republicans picked Vance as the winner. Walz had a commanding advantage with independents, 58 percent of whom sided with the Minnesota governor while 42 percent gave Vance the edge.
Exit take: If VP debates really mattered, Michael Dukakis would have won the 1988 presidential election after his running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, stuffed Dan Quayle into his locker. Instead, George HW Bush (and Quayle) won 426 electoral votes.
The dogs were unimpressed…
…but felt the need for a burger run. (They both got doubles from Culver’s.)
The best post-debate critique I heard on MSNBC last night was from Marcus, a college student at Oakland U in Michigan, who said the following to Jacob Soboroff:
“If anybody took high school civics class, they’d know what the Vice-President [can’t] do and what the Vice-President can do. I want to make a quick point. Neither candidate on that stage made a point about what executive action they’re gonna take on Day One to do what they want, nor were they asked. Because they know that they can’t! That’s not how the vice-presidency works; you don’t get to do what you want. You do what the President delegates you to do.
It’s at about 5:25 of this clip. https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/watch-youth-voters-in-michigan-focus-on-issues-in-vice-presidential-debate-220634693940
Vance was like the slimy car salesman who keeps using your name to ingratiate himself as he deftly answers objections. You finally submit, hoping to end the pain, all the time knowing you’re going to take it in the a** as he goes to and from his manager’s office “trying to get it done for you”. You drive home in your new ride, thoroughly pissed because you know you paid more than you should have and got less than you wanted, but are glad the pain of dealing with that a-hole is over.
It