The best news for Republicans tonight: J.D. Vance went out there and blew up the caricature of him created by Democrats and the Harris campaign. Vance was smooth, sharp, well-informed, gracious — as I said earlier tonight, Vance makes the case for another four years of Trump way better than Donald Trump does. J.D. Vance stepped on stage and executed the game plan he wanted to execute — and one way or another, he’s likely to be a key player in the 2028 presidential race.
Tim Walz, on the other hand… well, to use a line from that Saturday Night Live sketch, he seemed to be Charlie Brown as a grownup. His default facial expression seems to be one of deep concern. The CNN report that Walz was nervous feels really plausible right now. The Minnesota governor didn’t go on the attack much, and he didn’t even seem all that folksy. He seemed like a governor who had been obscure up until about two months ago, too small for the moment, not ready for prime time or to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The best news for Democrats tonight: Find a voter who will change their vote based upon how the vice-presidential debate went.
The moderation was far from perfect tonight, but it was much less intrusive than in the Trump-Harris debate. The candidates got to talk, and for the most part they got to go after each other – with only one real exception, the moderators didn’t try to interject their own view of the facts.
Vance closes with the fact, which Donald Trump struggled to articulate, that Kamala Harris is currently the vice president.
Turning Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into a champion of free speech, as Vance tried to do, is laughable. Kennedy has called for using state power to punish organizations that express dissenting views on climate change. Read more here: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-rfk-jr-s-environmentalism/
“From Bernie Sanders, to Dick Cheney, to Taylor Swift” is a line we lived to see in an American debate.
Woodrow Wilson mentioned. Cue the drums of Isengard.
That’s the persecution of dissidents BY THE WOODROW WILSON ADMINISTRATION, Noah.
Walz shouldn’t get away with the “fire in the crowded theater” line as “the Supreme Court standard.” That was set by an odious Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion to justify the persecution of dissidents and conscientious objectors during WWI, and it was mooted by Brandenburg.
Walz closes the night by blurting out the old “you can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater’ line to justify limitations on free speech.
Walz scores actual points at the end of the debate about January 6 and the 2020 election, and probably regrets that this didn’t lead the debate.