What Are We Doing Here?: Reactions From the VP Debate

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As I was saying in my post-debate coverage for The Muckrake Podcast over on the Patreon feed last night, debates aren’t debates. They’re television spectacles. And so, when you walk away from one, what you’re actually discussing is how well the candidates performed for the media and how it will affect their coverage afterward.

In this way, lies don’t really matter. Just as Donald Trump has exposed over the last eight years that shame was always imaginary, that any scandal is ultimately survivable if you simply don’t care, and every institution is practically powerless unless it serves the economic bottom line, so too has he exposed this truth about our debates. You can say whatever you want when the red light goes on. You can be whoever you want to be as long as it sounds good and you do it with a sense of fake conviction.

To this end, Trump failed in his debate with Kamala Harris. He rightfully came off as an unhinged lunatic. Last night, JD Vance learned from that failure. The strategy was to present himself as a common-sense moderate. To launder his and Trump’s extremist views, scrub his public persona, and put the kindest spin on MAGA, a pure and unadulterated authoritarian movement working on behalf of oligarchical billionaires.

And that’s what he did.

The same man who has called for the dismantling of democracy, who said he believed husbands should have multiple votes to represent their wives and children, who has said that women’s only purpose is to bear and raise children, who has long flaunted a belief that abortion should be made totally illegal, who has spent hours upon hours upon hours chatting it up on publicly available podcasts and livestreams and god knows how many hours absorbing antidemocratic rantings in meetings with Peter Theil and neo-fascist ideologues, showed up Tuesday night and presented himself as a whole other person.

It’s incredible what a narcissist with a chronic lying addiction can do.

But, for the intents and purposes of a televised spectacle, it worked. Vance was able to dance his way through the entire program and avoid the consequences of his long, long history of public statements. He didn’t do it alone, however. CBS News delivered one of the worst executed and worst framed debates we’ve seen in awhile, and that is truly saying something. The moderators failed to fact check, save for one solitary time, which was so notable that it has since become a meme. And, in a truly terrible segment, they asked Vance and Tim Walz about their “qualifications.” This meant asking Walz why he misspoke about the timing of a trip to China and asking Vance why he called Trump “America’s Hitler” and then agreed to join his campaign.

That framing deserves a moment because it encapsulates what our media has now done for years. In one instance, Walz was presented to the American public as an untrustworthy liar - even as his opponent started lying at the start of the event and didn’t stop until the camera’s were off - because he seemingly embelished the timing of a trip with the infamous violence at Tiananmen Square while Vance was given the opportunity to tell a story about his views “evolved” with Trump. The fact that these two things are equated in any way, that they are presented as somehow similar, is so wild and off-base that it boggles the mind.

CBS wasn’t alone in their failure. Walz performed a perfectly normal debate routine. If it were to be transported through time to the 1990’s or even the Aughts, it would have been a smash. But these are not ordinary times. The MAGA Movement is extreme. JD Vance is extreme. And standing there, at times nodding and agreeing, as Vance misrepresents himself and his agenda is malpractice. On several occasions Vance was allowed to say “Tim and I actually agree on this,” or present himself as some sort of bipartisan worker, and Walz would welcome it, affirm it, and then move on.

That is in no way what this situation calls for. It was imperative that Walz do two things in this debate. One, communicate the clear and present danger a second Trump Term would represent. Two, deliver an alternative agenda. His handling of the Harris Agenda was fine. He had a basic grasp of the facts, although he struggled because the campaign has moved aggressively to the Right in the past couple of months. It’s not a progressive agenda, save for a few points, and so that was clumsy at moments. And, on the first charge, he utterly failed. He allowed Vance to charm him, cooperated in creating a false reality beneficial to Vance and MAGA, and, save for a couple of instances, rarely pushed back on that absurd notion.

I think there are reasons for this. It dawned on me, after the Muckrake livestream, that we had just watched two Midwestern guys have a debate. As a Midwesterner, I thought about how much my people love to avoid conflict most of the time. Walz’s aww-shucks likeability is an asset, but in this case it might have very well hurt his ability to do his job. There is, of course, Vance’s ability to lie and manipulate, which is unparalleled, honestly. And then, there is the fact that the Harris Campaign has so aggressively courted imaginary “independents” and disaffected Republicans.

This strategy is not only flawed in the reality sense, but politically. Crackpot Barry Goldwater said in 1964, as he was helping the GOP shift toward more overt white supremacist paranoia, that you needed to “hunt where the ducks are.” The result was horrific, but there is truth in the idea. The Democratic Party is, and has for a long time, hunted where there are simply very few ducks. I was worried, when Harris took over the nomination, that rather than representing a new era and new guard that she might be advised and persuaded by traditional Democrats, and I have no doubt that’s the case now. Despite the veneer and the “vibes,” this is a campaign adrift. Sometimes we get forward-thinking agenda, sometimes we get neoconservatism pumped up to 11. Sometimes we hear about the future, sometimes we’re treated to stylized pictures of Harris at the border that #Resistance influencers quote-tweet with “Look how stylish and badass she is!”

The country is moving to the Right. Or, rather, it is being drug to the Right by authoritarians and their enablers in the status quo. You can either go along with it or you can grab hold of the rope and tug it back. We’re seeing the former right now, and the normalizing of MAGA, Vance, and Trump is growing even as they continue to chart a more dangerous course and increase radicalization. The Democrats are ceding so much ground at this point that it’s hard to see, if this continues, how this works out in the end.

There’s a little over a month left in this election cycle. Harris enjoyed a strong lead based on the enthusiasm around her campaign and the stark contrast between herself and Trump. That lead has almost totally evaporated as the Democratic Party has decided to try and take the issue of immigration for their own, which is simply a fool’s gambit and bad politics. But I guess that’s what happens when your party is being influenced by former Republicans and neoconservatives, and when your VP nominee uses his final statement in a nationally televised debate to formally embrace Dick Cheney and refer to him as a person of “positive optimism.”

It sucks. And I know there are strategy meetings today discussing what happened last night and the final push to November. I hope the Harris Campaign has a moment of self-reflection, because the momentum has shifted and it is easily understandable why that happened and what will happen if it continues down this road. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to refute the Trump/Harris fearmongering in Springfield, Ohio, stand up for immigrants, actually communicate the danger to women, people of color, gay/trans Americans, and people everywhere. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea, while you’re at it, to split from President Joe Biden on the continued aggression by Israel in the Middle East, which is not just spiraling out of control but remains incredibly unpopular and divisive.

The good news is that VP debates rarely serve as the defining factor before an election. But they do affect the media’s coverage moving forward, and our media is absolutely desperate to normalize Trump and Vance, and no doubt we’ll see a plethora of attempts to do just that. That will affect things, but it is not a fatal blow.

There’s roughly a month to go. We’re late in this thing. Hopefully last night will be a wake-up call.