The confrontation between Vance and Walz was what the debate should look like

The biggest takeaway from the debate between Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz is that this is what a serious debate about high office should look like. It was calm but passionate, thoughtful and truly useful for any voter who wants to understand the policy differences between the two tickets. The candidates actually listened to each other, acknowledged some similarities and identified real disagreements. Equally important, they all managed to put forward a coherent case for their own ticket, highlighting key issues in their respective campaigns.

Both the tone and content of the debate were much better than those of the two presidential debates. The Trump-Biden debate obviously had the most consequences, because it showed what the White House had hidden for months: the sitting president is saddled with serious cognitive problems. The public came to the conclusion that he could not serve another term and may not be fit to serve now. That led to his sharp decline in the polls and gave senior Democrats the power to push him out of the race.

The vice presidential debate was also superior to Trump’s debate with Kamala Harris, where the former president, irritated by Harris’ attacks, fell into the hole of personal attacks and vitriol and lost focus on the policy issues important to the voters and which polls show Trump has an advantage.

Tim Walz, who had not conducted one-on-one interviews during the campaign, used the debate to introduce himself – and did so well. He performed the main job of any vice presidential candidate: he made a strong, coherent argument for the top of the ticket.

What did Walz’s argument look like? On the positive side, emphasis was placed on national abortion rights (a pledge to restore Roe), health care, child care, family leave, and federal housing assistance. He would spend big federal dollars on it. He was a strong supporter of Obamacare, though he never used that term, and attacked Trump as a threat to that program and a threat to anyone with pre-existing conditions. (Vance responded effectively, but the damage was already done.)

Walz continued to portray Harris as an outsider — a major campaign theme — with big plans for the future, and not as the sitting vice president tied to the failures of an unpopular administration. Vance responded predictably by saying, “She’s been in office for three and a half years, why hasn’t she done any of these things?”

Walz attacks on the Trump-Vance ticket focused on “tax cuts for the rich” and the danger Trump’s actions on January 6 posed to our democracy. Vance responded that Trump had transferred power peacefully on January 20, but he danced around the moderator’s question. He never responded or acknowledged that Trump had actually lost the 2020 election.

Instead, he said he was focusing on the future, not the past election, an avoidance that would have served Trump well in his debate with Harris. Walz made this issue the most powerful part of his closing remarks. According to him, Trump is a ‘danger to democracy’. Then he asked, “Where is Donald Trump’s firewall?” That question reflects the fears of many voters.

Vance also made a strong case for his ticket, highlighting the campaign’s central issues, especially the economy and immigration. Like Walz, he did so effectively and without personal invective. The only issue he could have underscored better was his campaign’s theme that the world was much safer under Trump, that it is filled with wars and chaos under Biden-Harris, and that Trump through force will destroy America’s stability and place in the world can recover.

Vance made two overarching points. The first was Trump’s success in raising real wages for ordinary Americans and keeping inflation low. He did it once, Vance kept saying, and he can do it again. He was particularly strong in emphasizing Trump’s policy to restore American manufacturing, and not imports from countries “that use slave labor.” That policy essentially consists of high tariffs, which Harris and Walz condemn as a tax on all Americans.

The second problem, as you might expect, was Trump’s effectiveness in limiting illegal immigration, a sharp contrast to the failures of the Biden-Harris administration. Walz’s response was that everything would have been resolved if Trump had not scuttled the bipartisan compromise bill in Congress. Vance failed to counter that charge, as he might have done, by pointing out the bill’s major flaws, the millions who entered the bill illegally before the bill was proposed, and the influx of criminal gangs. He did highlight the wave of fentanyl. Vance closed the debate by saying that the current administration represents “broken leadership” and that “we need change.”

The moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS, deserve a C- at best. But at least they weren’t as terrible as ABC’s Linsey Davis and David Muir, who repeatedly “fact-checked” Trump (sometimes wrongly) and brushed aside Harris’ mistakes. ABC should be credited with an in-kind contribution to the Democratic campaign.

O’Donnell and Brennan made two mistakes, one obvious and one hidden. The obvious one concerned their question about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. The moderators made an unnecessary point of saying that these were “legal” immigrants. (That’s an interesting choice of words, since I don’t think they’ve ever called anyone “illegal,” a verboten word in their rarefied world.) Vance tried to interject to explain why calling them “legal” was misleading . The moderators were having none of that. They simply refused to explain it to him. His attempt at commentary was brief, but the moderators cut off his microphone, inadvertently underscoring a point Vance later made about the danger of censorship by big corporations, often in collaboration with the government.

The less obvious problem was the moderators’ inability to bring up what many say is the issue voters care about most: high prices. They limited that discussion to just one topic: housing. They didn’t ask about the high prices for food, gas or other things. Voters are complaining loudly about it, attributing the problems to the current administration and saying that Trump has handled inflation much better. Vance wisely raised the issue, but the moderators studiously avoided it.

Despite these shortcomings, the debate was a serious one that served the audience well. Both Walz and Vance presented their tickets effectively, focusing on policies, not personalities, and avoiding mudslinging. Their presentations were a much-needed lesson for a deeply divided country. They showed the right way to combat serious differences in a democracy.