The VP debate got to the heart of one of Kamala Harris’s biggest weaknesses — picking staff. The choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was a mistake that she has to live with.
The debate between the candidates for vice president — GOP nominee Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — was dominated by Vance, and all but a handful of hardened partisan pundits agree on that conclusion.
Walz wobbled and panicked from the first question — which everyone in the world knew would be about Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel earlier in the day. Yet Walz still fumbled his response, and it got worse from there until the CBS moderators invoked the unwritten mercy rule for left-wing moderators watching the Democrat melt and tossed Walz some softballs on J6 at the debate’s close, by which time the internet was howling and laughing at the Minnesota governor.
There were three important takeaways:
First, Vance is a superb and calm debater and a reassuring figure on the national stage.
Second, Walz is not, and he represents the one big decision Vice President Kamala Harris has had to make since President Joe Biden dropped out. It was a terrible decision. Imagine her Cabinet and White House staff if somehow, she wins.
Third, legacy media is irretrievably broken and cannot be reclaimed from its lurch into rote leftism and extreme partisanship, or even pulled back to a minimum level of seriousness on big occasions.
Do executives at these networks — ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC— not see what has happened? Americans don’t trust the news divisions at the legacy networks. It’s as if those divisions are run by a combination of fresh-from-campus-demonstration interns and hardened partisans from the Obama years.
The CBS debate was not, however, as overtly biased against Vance as ABC’s earlier debate was against Trump, but it was still very, very biased against the center-right and conservative audience. Viewers saw the question set veer quickly from a world crisis and the border crisis to get to the left’s favorite issue of abortion.
With the world tuning in only hours after Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, the moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan did open with an obligatory round of questions on that crisis.
