Vance may have won the debate, but Walz showed he would govern with more integrity | Opinion

Tim Walz may have lost the debate on stylistic points the other night, but he sure came off looking like a guy who cared about public policy, about bringing people who differ together, and he made several pleas directly to viewers to examine the issues carefully before voting.

Before the debate, Walz admitted that debates aren’t his strong suit, that he was a public-school teacher, not a Yale-trained lawyer as J.D. Vance is.

He hit the nail right on the head for me. I debated a Republican primary candidate who was a trial lawyer in my run for a U.S. Senate seat in 1996 and, to this day, I am convinced I blew the debate, not to mention the primary election. First, just like Walz, I was nervous as hell preparing for it and speaking under the bright lights and the freezing temps of the TV studio. Second, I didn’t master the soundbite very well even though I was pretty good at it outside the pressure cooker of a debate.

I often joked about what’s it like to move from my classroom days at the university when I had a 50-minute class period to cover a topic to a call from a reporter who expected a sound bite no longer than a couple of sentences or a paragraph. Good luck shifting from one of those to the other in the formal debate atmosphere.

As far as teachers doing debates are concerned, I’m reminded of Harry Truman’s complaint that he needed a one-armed economist because he had grown weary of economists who always proclaimed, “On the one hand, this” and “On the other hand, that”. Teachers do the same thing, not much different than my memories teaching political science when I would always attempt to balance information and opinion by giving both sides of an issue. You do too much of that as Walz did for many years as a public-school teacher and it’s tougher to emerge the passionate advocate and streetfighter for a cause when you always see the other side as well.

The trial lawyer is good at that as I learned the hard way in my debate. If you know anything about a lawyer taking on a client, it’s not about finding ways to understand the other side, it’s about smothering the judge and jury with a set of facts that proves your case.

It reminds me of the veteran lawyer advising a young lawyer new to the firm. “If you have the facts on your side, pound away at the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound away at the law. If you have neither on your side, pound away at the table.”

And that sure seems like what Vance did. He pounded away at the table recasting himself as a believable and reasonable officeholder, a decided shift from his even shiftier days.

Clearly, Vance was good, but as pundit Charlie Sykes opined about the debate, Vance may have won the debate on stylistic points, but the debate is not a figure skating competition and Vance’s failure to call Biden the 2020 victor of the presidential election sums up who really lost the debate.

Vance looked smooth as silk as he corrected the radical and goofy impression he created of himself in recent months. But Walz looked earnest, like a regular guy struggling for the right answer and committed to the truth and the facts. He even called himself a “knucklehead “when he admitted he misspoke about where he was during the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.

Then there’s the question the media asked incessantly in the lead up to the debate: does the debate matter anyway, especially for vice president? I am so sick and tired of those gatherings of supposed undecided voters who figure out a way to get their 15 seconds of fame by explaining their reaction and decision on how the debate changed their minds or reinforced how they felt.

From watching too many of these sideshows, it sure seems that some of these folks know exactly how they are going to vote and they either planted themselves in the undecided group to promote their choice of candidate or they simply decided there is a much greater chance of getting TV exposure as an undecided voter rather than a committed partisan.

The media seems focused on the wrong question by focusing on the difference a debate makes in the minds of voters. The real question is what difference the debate makes in predicting governing behavior, how it predicts the temperament, the integrity, the knowledge the candidate brings to the campaign for office.

Some criticized Walz looking down to take notes during a question from the moderators or a response to Vance. In other words, God forbid that a candidate may be thoughtful enough to take notes, so his understanding of the question and response is completely accurate before answering. The alternative is the crafty Yale-trained lawyer never once taking a note, just carefully re-scripting his and Trump’s campaign mistakes and lies.

In the end, there is only one issue that decides the debate between Vance and Walz and it goes to the heart of governing the nation’s complex and sometimes intractable challenges, notwithstanding the words of a smooth-talking lawyer in debate performance in a TV studio far removed from the day-to-day decision-making in the West Wing and the Oval office. It’s whether the winning candidates for presidents and vice-president are committed to governing a democracy with the attendant allegiance to the rule of law and the integrity of our electoral process.

Vance’s decision to refuse to say Trump lost the 2020 election, his downplaying the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2020 and his refusal to rule out challenging the outcome of the 2024 race, even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate says it all. Vance substantiated the direction he and Trump intend to take this country. They are committed to governing a dictatorship or some form of autocratic government that denies the rightful place of elections, the rule of law and a free press in a democracy. That’s really all we need to know about the debate as we look ahead to the November election.