Gov. Tim Walz may not have been in Tiananmen Square, but tonight he got hit by a tank.
Walz lost on issues, to which the Harris-Walz campaign has a congenital allergy, he lost on style, defaulting to word salads about being a regular guy from a small town whenever a question (like lying about Tiananmen Square when he was befriending members of China’s Bureau of Foreign Affairs) made him uncomfortable, but he lost on television.
Kamala had gotten rid of one confused old white man only to replace him with another.
Not since the Kennedy vs. Nixon matchup has there been a candidate who performed so much worse when people could see his face. And Walz’s bugged-out eyes, quivering apple pie chin, and the profile of a decaying jack o’lantern lost the debate more eloquently than any words.
They say that the radio audience that listened to Nixon and Kennedy debate had a different impression of who won than viewers who caught the black-and-white show. Unfortunately for the governor, few people are listening to a radio vice presidential debate once the sun goes down in Minneapolis. Or are doing much of anything except locking themselves in their homes with a loaded shotgun and a map of the quickest way out past the zombie hordes.
That is to say Gov. Walz performed badly. He performed badly according to CNN, Frank Luntz’s focus group of random schlubs eager to appear on cable news at 9 PM and the major media which quickly pivoted to discussing something, anything else, while pretending nothing happened. Only MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called the debate for Walz on account of her conviction that J.D. Vance was really a Russian spy named Sergey trying to seduce her.
Walz need not have really shown up. The talented moderating team of Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell put in their late bid for the presidency and vice presidency by debating Vance more effectively than Walz had. It helped that they had control of the microphones.
