“36 Lines You Have Long Since Forgotten”
In my little corner of the social mediasphere, this seems to be the takeaway line. The left are claiming that it’s a petulant admission of lying, and the right are claiming that it’s evidence of bias and that Vance sure showed those moderators.
Not much else seems to have gotten nearly as much traction.
Exactly. Anyone who claims it’s a devastating gaffe simply does not understand the right-wing base at all.
It’s a gaffe, certainly. But given Grampa Trump’s incoherent nonsense doesn’t move the needle on anything, this certainly won’t.
All Trump does is moan, whine and cry like a little chubby toddler who wants another happy meal. It’s just weak.
My biggest takeaway was this exchange.
Excerpt, edited (see link below):
But when the debate turned, near its final frames, to the subject of the 2020 election, Mr. Vance faced a choice: He could validate, once more, Donald J. Trump’s relentless lies about his defeat four years ago. Or he could try something else in the spirit of moving forward. It did not seem like a difficult decision for him.
“What President Trump has said is that there were problems,” Mr. Vance said when asked about his own past assertion that he would not have certified the 2020 election. “We should fight about those issues, debate those issues, peacefully in the public square. And that’s all I’ve said. And that’s all that Donald Trump has said.”
…“Remember,” Mr. Vance said of Mr. Trump, “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.” This accounting was short a few details…
…“We need to tell the story,” Mr. Walz said. “I mean, he lost this election and he said he didn’t”… “I worked with kids long enough to know,” he said, “sometimes you really want to win.”
“A president’s words matter,” Mr. Walz said, punctuating his own. “A president’s words matter. People hear that.”
“It’s really rich,” [Vance] said, chopping the air with his hands, “for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th.”
He moved to equate past Democratic complaints about election outcomes, including invocations of Russian interference in 2016 through Facebook ads and other means, with the response in 2020.
“Jan. 6 was not Facebook ads,” Mr. Walz shot back, as Mr. Vance smiled slightly. Mr. Walz had a question for his counterpart.
“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Mr. Walz said of Mr. Trump, turning grandly to Mr. Vance. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”
“Tim,” Mr. Vance replied, “I’m focused on the future.” He swerved to a point about Covid and censorship.
“That,” Mr. Walz said, “is a damning non-answer.”
There was a reason, he added, that Mr. Pence was not on the stage as Mr. Trump’s running mate anymore… “America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice,” Mr. Walz said, his eyes getting bigger, “of who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/vance-jan-6-debate.html
Good point!
(Please note this post if not meant to be a direct response to @Chefguy, I’m just using this part of his post as a jumping off point.)
I’ve seen this brought up a couple of times. That Walz was stilted, unpolished, and was talking very quickly, more so than seemed natural. I will agree with all of that. I was kind of expecting it.
FWIW, I recognized what he was going through last night. Public speaking is a skill that can be learned. Some people seem to be better at it naturally, and education such as Vances can help. I am not a natural public speaker. And I know what nervousness and anxiety looks like. Every time I had to give a speech in front of a class, or even in front of a small group of people I know personally, I looked like and did the exact same thing. If I had to give a speech or participate in a debate like this in a public setting, I would probably perform pretty much the same way. None of my responses would look anything like my posts here. Here I have the luxury of ample time to consider my words and look things up if I need to. Standing on a stage under bright lights with a 2 minute clock ticking down behind you is a very different thing. And I would not have Walz’s natural charisma and affability.
The China response, which I did see in real time, it happened early, was absolutely a gaffe. But it’s one I can see making myself. You can almost see the gears turning in his head, halfway through his answer he realized there was a much simpler and quicker way to dispose of the question. Maybe he shouldn’t have disposed of the question, but I can 100% see myself doing the exact same thing. I had sympathy for him to be honest.
That’s an excellent article. For anyone who missed the debate (or who was forced to jump over to Instagram to watch cute dog videos from time to time), it’s a point-by-point summary.
This wasn’t just public speaking, it was extemporaneous speaking under pressure. It has little to do with Vance’s education as such. Being a debater is a separate thing from where you got your degree. Hell, in my Catholic girls’ high school, we had brilliant debaters who probably could have wiped the floor with Vance. (Those nuns taught the girls to kick ass and take names, all within the rules of debate.) As you point out, this is a skill that Vance has acquired. And yeah, he likes to do it, which probably flows from some natural ability.
Extemporaneous speaking under pressure is a skill that Kamala Harris also had to acquire in her career. Tim Walz has not had to do that, so he came across as “stilted, unpolished, and was talking very quickly.” Big deal.
I have always been very comfortable with generic public speaking. Never bothered me to stand up to speak in front of a group of any size. But I’m not a trained debater or extemp speaker. All are separate skills relying on separate aptitudes and training IMHO.
The same thing happened the other way when his nibs started his administration. The outgoing policy wonks in various departments prepared the usual briefing materials in November, then waited for the incoming wonks to show up – they never did. Reading that was the second clue I had that Trump’s administration would not be particularly interested in, you know, leading.
The first was his bragging about his inauguration size.
Vance wins on style; Walz wins on substance. (Walz had the advantage of having truth on his side.) So call it a draw.
Vance gets 1/10 of a bonus point for pronouncing “Kamala” correctly.
Vance wins on speaker points. Walz wins on substance and support.
Harris/Walz win the tournament. Vance gets a Speaker Award and dumps his partner the next day leading to classroom recriminations and fights for the rest of the semester.
35 years coaching high school debate. I’ve seen this dynamic before.
Overall, it was a tie. Walz came across as more human, more honest, but a little bit nervous. Vance was slick, polished.
What wasnt a tie, were the lies-
Vance- 7.5 lies, Walz 1 1/2 lie.
Walz only “mostly false” is when he claimed trump hadnt paid any income tax in the last 15 years. Certainly, he paid 0 for ten years and a tiny sum in two, but one year trump did pay six figures in taxes. Personally, I would have rated that “half true”.
I am of the firm opinion that Vance is bucking for 1st chair at some point in the future, whether it’s because dipshit dies in office, or he replaces him after this term. He’s doing a pretty good job of appearing to be gracious and cooperative, but it hides a venomous snake underneath.
I’m honestly astonished that, other than obliquely, nobody has stated the obvious fact that Trump was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths because of his inaction during covid.
Don’t want Gileadvance in any office. His words and associates do not bode well for the US in general or US women in particular. He’s a plg with understated lipstick, but he is still most definitely apig.
Here is NPR’s fact check article:
Vance: …you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America … Unfortunately, Kamala Harris has done exactly the opposite.
…Bzzt. That’s wrong.
Vance: "And then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers.
…Bzzzt.That’s wrong, too.
Vance: A lot of fentanyl is coming into our country … Kamala Harris let fentanyl into our communities at record levels.
…Bzzzzt. Try again.
Vance: If you look at what was so different about Donald Trump’s tax cuts, even from previous Republican tax cut plans, is that a lot of those resources went to giving more take-home pay to middle-class and working-class Americans.
…BZZZZT! That’s the wrong statement. Please call back later and try again.
Vance: I think you can make a really good argument that [Trump] salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came about. … Donald Trump could have destroyed the program — instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.
…[spews coffee] Bzzzt. No, that is really wrong and pretty much lying.
Vance: Look, we currently have laws and regulations in place right now that protect people with preexisting conditions. We want to keep those regulations in place,
So, you are now FOR Obamacare, AKA the ACA, which is what protects those people today, right?
Vance: Thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel.
…Bzzzt. Are you even trying any more?
Walz (on visiting China): I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times … I got there that summer and misspoke on this.
…Ding! Ok, you could have been smoother, better on that one, but WTF cares - this has nothing to do with current political positions and what your administration would do if in power.
That was hilarious! A reasonable reply might have been something like, “no, my statement is correct because …”. Instead Vance came across as whining that “you promised that we’d be allowed to lie!”.
To be fair, Vance did make a half-assed attempt to support his statement – the Haitian immigrants in Springfield may technically be legal, but only because Kamala Harris waved a magic wand over them or something. It was probably Vance’s worst moment of the debate. Once again Walz missed an opportunity – he should have inquired about exactly how many dogs and cats they consumed in their regular daily diet.
I like that Tim Walz is a nice guy.
But he DID let Vance get away with posing as a reasonable, also-nice-guy, centrist choice for voters. Vance’s actual extremism was concealed by Vance and not revealed in any way by Walz.
Maybe it won’t make a difference. As everyone says, VP debates, historically, haven’t made a difference to the voting outcome.
I still like that Walz is nice (and comes across as authentic and all the rest). But I hate that creepy slimy Vance has a new boosted favorability rating. (Apologies if this repeats something higher in the thread–I haven’t caught up with reading it.)
What if you wanted to say that Vance sounded reasonable but what he said was extreme?
thorny – almost always complains about the language of polls – locust