Editor’s note: Big Tent Ideas always aims to provide balancing perspectives on the hottest issues of the day. Below is a column from Christian Whiton, where he argues that J.D. Vance narrowly lost the debate against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. You can find a counterpoint here, where Nicole Kiprilov argues that Vance handily won the debate and presented a clear contrast to his Democrat opponent.
Sen. J.D. Vance, who is Donald Trump’s running mate, narrowly lost Tuesday night’s debate to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s choice to succeed her as vice president. Luckily the debate was so boring and pointless it will have no impact on the race — a longstanding feature of vice presidential debates.
CBS News, which hosted the debate, focused the discussion on matters of little interest to voters. The progressive hosts — two women with zero political or journalistic gravitas — focused first on the progressive religion on climate change alarmism. From there, they meandered through abortion, gun control and misleading “fact checks” that introduced false, anti-Trump information about tariffs, illegal immigrants, and the make-believe cause of hurricanes (climate change of course). (RELATED: NICOLE KIPRILOV: JD Vance Walked Into Walz Debate With A Clear Strategy. It Paid Off In Spades)
Vance parried the questions and biased topics with adequate capability, but failed to go on the offensive against Walz and the moderators, which is the only way Republicans can win debates.
Oddly, this lesson was known as far back in vice presidential debates as 1992 when then-Vice President Dan Quayle, burned from an unfair attack and perceived loss four years earlier, jumped out of the gate with a series of attacks on then-Sen. Al Gore. Trump took the necessity to go on offensive in debates to a new level beginning in the 2015 Republican primaries.
Vance lost the opportunity to paint Walz, Harris and their party for what they really are: a collection of progressive radicals who are out of touch with the American people and who have decimated the economy, intentionally flooded the country with illegals, driven the government to fiscal crisis and brought us to the brink of global war.
The most disappointing part of the night was Vance letting Walz get away with sounding moderate and reasonable on abortion. Vance was even voluntarily defensive, saying the he hoped Republicans could earn back the trust of the American people on abortion.
Huh? In fact, Trump is right where the American people are on that topic. What Republicans need to do is to break through the Democrat and media propaganda, and Walz was the perfect target to do so. This is true not only on abortion, but all social issues.
For example, on Sunday, Walz arrived at a football game at the reliably leftwing University of Michigan to boos and cries of “Tampon Tim.” The chant was a reference to a law Walz signed all but requiring schools to install tampon dispensers in boys’ rooms for students as young as fourth graders. CNN, the liberal political tabloid, “debunked” the claim that Walz put tampons in boys’ rooms, which of course means the claim is true.
The CNN article itself conceded that schools in fact were subjecting young male students to menstrual products in “gender-neutral” bathrooms. These actions are some of the most revolting of the radical transgender agenda, which itself is a fundamental part of the Left’s authoritarianism which involves using government to force you to accept and believe something you know to be a lie.
A month earlier, in April 2023, Walz signed a law allowing out-of-state children to get puberty blockers and sex-change surgeries without parental consent and even prohibiting authorities from cooperation with concerned parents. Disgustingly, Tampon Tim issued a press release at the time boasting, “In Minnesota, you will not be punished for seeking or providing medical care.”
That “medical care,” typically given the even more Orwellian term of “gender-affirming care,” often involves damaging and irreversible drug regimens and surgery for kids being coached that their depression might actually be the result of being born the wrong sex.
It is quack medicine: the Cass Review completed in April in Britain, led by the former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, found of young patients with gender dysphoria that “a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.”
A further digression is important here. When the report came out, the indispensable Andrew Sullivan, himself an opponent of Donald Trump, asked if those advocating the transgender agenda would recant: “Will they ever admit that their ideological extremism, and their ‘queer’ conflation of trans and gay experiences, has led to one of the greatest medical abuses of gay kids in history?”
Let’s be clear: Tampon Tim isn’t just a weirdo who put tampons in fourth graders’ bathrooms to please some of the loonies who populate politics in Minnesota, which last voted Democrat for president in 1972. He was willing to allow and even encourage the intentional deception and mutilation of gay kids in service of his political ideology and power.
It worked: the move helped endear him to Democrat activists and Harris to the point Walz was installed as vice presidential nominee over less radical Democrats like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
When combined with Walz’s signature of a separate law in April 2023 enshrining late-term abortion up to the time of birth, we see the degeneracy of today’s Democrat Party. Walz isn’t just a weirdo; he’s a deviant.
How is it that Vance allowed a collegial 90 minutes to drift by without making Walz, Harris, and their party own this radicalism? Did he expect to win points from the media for polite collegiality?
The Democrats’ devolution into their current position came at the same time that Trump has evolved the Republican Party into a New Right that has transcended the social issue debates of the past (e.g., gay marriage, “family values”) and landed on popular blue-collar social and economic policies combined with revulsion and unabashed opposition to the Left’s woke agenda. Where was that new Trump agenda and energy?
On most topics, Vance did a serviceable job. But when Republicans are merely tying Democrats in venues like this one, they in fact are losing.
No vice presidential debate has ever mattered much to a campaign and hopefully this one will be no different. But as Donald Trump closes the campaign strongly with a new, narrow lead in must-win Pennsylvania and good showing in other swing states, the debate was a lost opportunity.
Christian Whiton was a senior advisor in the Trump and George W. Bush administrations.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/CNN/”CNN Special Event: Vice Presidential Debate Hosted by CBS”)
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