Vance was great, Walz was mediocre, the moderators were vile, and the whole debate insulted American’s intelligence

By Andrea Widburg | Am Thinker | October 2, 2024

The debate really depressed me. It wasn’t J.D. Vance, who gave the best debate performance of any political candidate in decades. Nor was it Tim Walz because I knew going in that he was, as he described himself, a “knucklehead.” It wasn’t even the biased harpies who called themselves moderators because that was to be expected (although they angered me). What depressed me was that our political discourse has devolved into watching candidates get asked stupid questions so that they can give canned statements for two minutes and then bicker for a few seconds with each other.

Let’s start with the general review. First, the greatest non-verbal moment in American debate history:

On the one side of your screen, you see a young, brilliant, charismatic man who politely lets the world know he’s listening to BS. On the other side, the BS.

Vance was in complete control of himself. He’d memorized his lines, he never forgot to remind everyone that Kamala is effectively the incumbent and could always have implemented the fixes that she now promises, he showed complete factual mastery, and he was not “weird,” the appellation the satchel-mouthed Walz had appended to him.

Because he never lost control, Vance made his points frequently and well:

Kamala’s administration has left Americans poorer. Trump’s economic plans will help, and we know that because Trump’s economic plans proved themselves during his presidency.

Abortion is no longer a federal issue, but we need to (a) let the 50 laboratories of democracy work on the issue and (b) make abortion less compelling to women by providing them with more options.

Trump kept the world safe, and Harris’s team has utterly failed.

Vance also handled the inevitable January 6 question with grace and wisely turned to the Democrats’ desperation to censor Americans.

I would have preferred a bit more fire. While Vance did wrangle with the utterly disgusting leftist shrews running interference about Haitians—before those termagants cut his mic—he let several of Walz’s lies go unchecked. He also didn’t challenge the bias in the CBS shrews’ questions, whether on “climate change,” childcare, or anything else. And he failed to highlight the radical leftist extremism that is the real Harris-Walz ticket.

However, I’m a bit of a political firebrand, so my read on this may be different from the intended audience for this debate: Women.

The fact that two women (if I can be allowed to assume their gender identity) were the ones asking the questions was the tip-off that CBS intended this debate to be a very specific forum. Women voters would be able to see simultaneously the “weird,” anti-abortion sidekick to Donald “grab ‘em by the…” Trump and the cuddly, pro-abortion uber-daddy sidekick to Kamala “Mamala” Harris.

Vance did not play this game. His mild demeanor and frequently expressed compassion—for women, for his wife, for his and other people’s children, for Tim Walz’s son having seen a shooting (which I think was a lie, but I’m cynical)—all of this was intended to tell women that Vance is not a threat. Moreover, if Vance is backing Trump, then Trump cannot be a threat either.

It turned out that Vance brought one other pro-female asset into the debate forum: He’s hot. The blue eyes, the twinkle (see the above tweets), the manly beard, and the gentle demeanor moved women:

The takeaway for middle-class women who know that Harris’s policies have been disastrous (inflation, illegal immigration, crime, world chaos) but who still want to vote for Harris because Trump is “bad,” is that Trump will have at his side an attractive man they can trust. That’s a win for the Trump-Vance ticket.

Tim Walz was competent, which, for him, was also a win. He tried to filibuster on his China ties (probably the one decent question asked during the debate), called himself a knucklehead, boasted about his friendship with mass shooters, defended censorship, lied about a lot of things, and got the usual loving support from the moderators. In other words, nothing new there.

The moderators were, as I said, vile, disgusting, biased, uninformed, and all that is awful. Nothing new there, either.

But the worst thing about the debate was the whole damn thing. We know what matters to Americans: the economy, the broken border, crime (which the harpies didn’t ask about), and national security. What would have been a great debate would have been for the moderators to be nothing more than timekeepers who announced those topics and gave each candidate 8 minutes to speak on the topic and 2 minutes for a rebuttal.

In 8 minutes, people could really have heard where the candidates stand on the issues that matter most to vote, and they could have done side-by-side comparisons about the substantive points, the candidates’ intelligence, and their demeanor. What we got, instead, were canned talking points endlessly repeated, with the American people waiting patiently for the fun “gotcha.” I hated it, and I felt insulted by the whole thing.