October 2, 2024
The two vice-presidential candidates and the moderators of last night’s debate were highly successful at not being themselves. Tim Walz’s performance was rich in policy detail but nervously delivered. His usual infectious enthusiasm and mid-western charm were strangely absent. Most notably, he failed to land any serious blows on Vance’s obvious fallibilities, such as his brazen, false accusations against the legal Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio. J. D. Vance shed his “weirdness” at least for one evening and was positively cordial and agreeable as he deftly failed to answer almost every question. The moderators ran an efficient, orderly debate with probing, insightful questions and enforced the debate rules, including shutting off the microphones during one spirited exchange. However, underneath the facade of normalcy and the appearance of a polite exchange of ideas lies a dangerous truth: J. D. Vance delivered his “non-answers” so smoothly and artfully that even his stubborn adherence to “the big lie” of a stolen election appeared normal. The fact that Vance can so effortlessly lie makes him an even more significant threat to our democracy than Donald Trump. Vance has the intellect and slick salesmanship to realize the dystopian vision revealed in Project 2025. Moreover, his lack of a moral compass means he will stop at nothing to achieve power, including fabricating cruel lies such as those that have upended the lives of an entire community within his home state. Suppose J. D. Vance continues to deploy this more palatable representation of himself. In that case, he will be a wolf in sheep’s clothing that disguises the true ugliness of his vision—one that is antithetical to democracy, unsympathetic to the plight of women, malicious in its unfair scapegoating of hard-working immigrants, and counter to America’s long tradition as a beacon of hope for the oppressed and persecuted of those seeking a better life in our prosperous nation.