Why the slow collapse of Harris-Walz won't stop before Election Day
The vice-presidential debate didn't bail out the Harris-Walz campaign. Going forward, it's just a continued dose of bad news including their poor response to the hurricane.
Ohio Sen. JD Vance, as anticipated, easily won the vice-presidential debate Tuesday, October 1, on demeanor, facts, and analysis. But in fairness to a sometimes herky-jerky and nervous Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, he had the harder task of defending the temporary pseudo-conservative make-over of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.
His additional burdens were her co-culpability for the last three-and-a-half-years of the Biden disaster, and her unwillingness to implement her supposedly "change" agenda in the last months of her vice-presidential tenure.
The CBS News moderators, Nora O’Donnell, and, especially, Margaret Brennan, also as expected, ganged up on Vance. They had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing from the last disastrous, and biased debate moderators.
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The two moderators shamelessly broke their own rules by fact-checking (wrongly and solely) Vance. They ignored questions of the administration’s tardy responses to Hurricane Helene, the Ukraine war, the recent Trump assassination attempts, or crime, while only briefly touching on Iran and a Middle East on the brink of total war. Instead, they concentrated, as also expected, on climate change, abortion, healthcare and childcare.
All were issues they thought might more easily embarrass Vance. And, of course, as also expected, the two ended the debate pressing Vance on January 6. And yet Vance again parried easily and won decisively. In doing so, he dispelled the smear that he was somehow "mean," when, in fact, he proved calm and magnanimous as he methodically dissected Walz.
The nation perhaps learned that a confident Trump selected him to articulate his MAGA positions, and perhaps in a manner superior to Trump’s own.
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In contrast, an insecure Harris picked Walz. The vice president was assuming that he would not upstage her and perhaps, by his limitations, would make her look competent in comparison.
The debate will give some momentum to Trump-Vance in the last month of the campaign.
It follows the lethargic Biden-Harris reaction to Hurricane Helene, whose toll in human life and property had been initially and vastly ignored by the media.
It follows the growing specter of a theater-wide Middle East war, as a solitary Israel faces off against Iran and its appendages (all empowered after 2020 by Biden-Harris).
It follows the chaos of a longshoremen’s strike intended to shut down the entire country. And it follows Harris’s continued inability to survive even serial soft-ball interviews without her memorized and banal answers.
As a result, the slow, steady hemorrhaging of support for Harris-Walz will likely still continue in the last month of the election.
