Vance and a Different -- and Possibly Even Worse -- Kind of Sanewashing
This year's Vice Presidential non-debate happened two days ago. Thankfully, I am spending October as a visiting scholar in Dublin, so it was 2am Wednesday here when Tim Walz and J.D. Vance entered the CBS studio on Tuesday evening. Professor Dorf thus drew the short straw for writing Dorf on Law's immediate reaction, and his analysis was much more informative and interesting than the event itself. I recommend it to anyone who has not yet had a chance to read it.
In any case, I will not bury my lead/lede: Vance exposed himself as even more of a shameless liar, and he did nothing to change or explain his chilling lack of care for the human beings who have suffered because of his bottomless pit of ambition. (See my commentaries from last week here, here, here, and especially here.) Yet somehow, the story from the non-debate is that he was "smooth" and maybe even "normal." So I guess all it takes to neutralize a very recent history of embracing neo-Nazis' lies and a longer history of endorsing eugenics and misogyny is to not scream or smirk on camera. The vacuousness of the American political conversation has never been more shocking.
Because I was not Dorf on Law's primary responder for this non-debate and thus did not feel the need to offer my independent views without being affected by other commentators' takes, I did not self-sequester when assessing what happened. I have absorbed many, perhaps most, of the reactions in the major papers and on non-Fox cable, and I have watched almost all of the late-night comedy shows, as well as looking at the transcript and as much of the recording of the non-debate as I could stomach.
My reactions: (1) The event itself was almost exactly what I would have expected, but sadly (2) The insta-conventional wisdom among pundits was at least as bad as I expected, and in many ways even worse. Below, I will explore all of that, focusing more on the latter than the former. Along the way, I will -- for the benefit of those who might have missed it -- explain why I continue to insist on calling these events non-debates rather than "debates." (See? It is impossible for me even to use that word in this context without at least putting it in scare-quotes.)
To start with the big picture, we might ask whether any of this matters. Vice Presidential and even Presidential non-debates are generally forgotten or at most only remembered for a single moment -- and that moment is not necessarily a one-liner or even something someone said, given that the only thing anyone remembers about the Mike Pence-Kamala Harris event in 2020 was the fly that landed on Pence's helmet-hair. The most vivid moment in the history of VP non-debates is not particularly recent, with Lloyd Bentsen's "You're no Jack Kennedy" zinger in 1988 being one of the few quotable moments in the history of these things.
The 2016 non-debate between Pence and Tim Kaine was notable because it followed the pattern for all such events, that is, it was followed by a completely unprincipled groupthink response among the punditry, with Kaine being deemed "fidgety" whereas Pence's sanctimonious, sighing condescension was deemed "calm." As I noted shortly after the Pence-Kaine snoozefest, the punditry had faulted Al Gore's performance in 2000's first non-debate with George W. Bush because Gore supposedly sighed too much. Meanwhile, Pence in 2016 did the same thing yet was somehow declared the winner.
As I concluded after Kaine-Pence:
And that [inconsistent treatment of Gore and Pence] is, ultimately, an even bigger indictment of these non-debates than the substance-versus-style issue. After all, if everyone were to agree that substance never matters, then both sides could compete on style. When what counts as good style changes so randomly, however, the winner is evidently decided by the unwritten rules of the kind that determine high school popularity.
Are there exceptions to that depressing pattern? Yes, but not completely. The first presidential non-debate this year was abnormal in one big way, but normal in the other. The abnormality is obvious: Joe Biden was simply terrible on style and substance, so much so that he was soon forced to face reality and plan for his overdue retirement. It was depressingly normal, however, in that Donald Trump was again an unhinged liar but was judged by a completely different standard and thus let off the hook. The more recent event between Harris and Trump was abnormal in that nearly everyone actually acknowledged the reality that she had trounced him, but that was quickly followed with "... but did she do enough to convince people that she has serious policy ideas?" In other words, we were soon right back to the same old moving of the goal posts for the Democrat.
Usually, however, these events are judged on the most ridiculous and unpredictable bases, from Barack Obama's supposed surliness in 2012 (even though the consensus "winner," Mitt Romney, spent the entire time lying "his ass off," as Jon Stewart put it at the time). That is why I called long ago to stop these charades entirely. At best, they are wastes of time soon forgotten. At worst, they allow charlatans to launder their horribleness into something that everyone is supposed to accept as somehow not horrible. And this week saw worst of the worst.
Why am I so stuck on the debate/non-debate thing? A real debate, no matter the format, has opponents making actual arguments and responding to their opponents' arguments with relevant counter-arguments. Vance simply did not answer the questions that the moderators posed (with one minor exception), and commentators once again allowed "confident assertions without logic or evidence" to be what passes for arguments. When he tried to respond to Walz, he made stuff up. Again, Vance lied and lied and lied.
One of those lies (which has received a lot of deserved ridicule) was this doozy: [I]t's really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country." As usual, the fact-checkers were useless (even the ex-post fact-checkers), with the assigned truth-seeker at The New York Times blandly offering this assessment: "This is misleading." Similarly, when Vance lied by saying that he had never supported a national abortion ban, the fact-check came back: "This needs context."
But even the people who called that lie out for what it was were somehow lulled into the conventional wisdom that Vance had become something other than what the world knew him to be. Stephen Colbert, for example, had a very funny joke about Vance's "peacefully gave over power on January the 20th" line, yet he then offered this: "The point is that J.D. Vance may seem normal, with the sound down and no furniture around, but never forget the man he works for is Donald Trump, who is profoundly abnormal."
Yes, Trump is profoundly abnormal. But no, Vance is not a problem only because he supports Trump. Vance is a problem because he is willing to bring harm to people for his own gain, making matters worse rather than better whenever he is challenged on his lies. He thinks that women exist to have babies and spend their lives taking care of them (or, after menopause, caring for their children's babies), that only biological parents are parents, and that being parents should give people more political rights. And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
Vance thinks that you can redefine "legal immigration" as illegal merely because he says the law is a "magic wand." He constantly says that everything that has ever happened in the past three-plus years was done by Harris, and he continued to lie not only about "Kamala Harris' open border" but also asserted matter-of-factly "that she enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country." He is not merely carrying water for Trump's abnormality. He is abnormality personified.
Until Tuesday night, most people recognized as much. Now, however, only a few people have not imbibed the Kool Aid and have been able to resist the new conventional wisdom. One of those stalwarts is E.J. Dionne, whose column in The Washington Post was accurately titled: "Vance’s debate performance was a breathtaking exercise in sane-washing."
And Dionne's use of that term was especially important because it had until now been used only to describe the press's habit of cleaning up Trump's incoherent rambling. Last month, for example, I quoted a commentator's response to a classic sanewashing of Trump: "I hope the press is this nice to me if I ever do a speech where no one can tell if I just had a stroke or not." When people listen to Vance lie constantly and then say that he seemed normal -- or, as the always-ready-to-surrender Post editors described the non-debate, "A polite night of substantive debate," adding feebly that "[t]he absence of Trump gave Americans a chance to evaluate the two major party tickets on the issues" -- it is just as much sanewashing as turning Trump's confused words into English sentences.
A British journalist somehow wrote this for The Atlantic:
The head-to-head between Tim Walz and J. D. Vance was a vision of what American politics could be without the distorting gravitational field generated by Donald Trump—a political interlude beamed to you from Planet Normal. [L]et’s enjoy the climate on Planet Normal. Onstage in New York were two people with regular attention spans and an above-average ability to remember names and details. Vance, the Republican, offered slick, coherent, and blessedly short answers to the CBS moderators’ questions. (The Bulwark compared him to a “smoother, 2016-vintage Marco Rubio.”)
Note that "The Bulwark" is (along with the Lincoln Project) the center of the NeverTrump universe, the supposedly reasonable old-fashioned conservatives who have received all kinds of credit for turning their lives upside down by rejecting MAGA. Yet here they are, faced with a man who is everything Trump is but worse, and they are likening Vance to the lifeless Florida Senator before he was put out of his misery by Chris Christie. Being compared to Rubio would usually be an insult, but Vance will surely take it, because it is better than being known as a barely functioning human being.
I suppose that Planet Normal is where people who are completely abnormal, abhorrent, abject monsters go to prove that they can take none of it back but get credit for being able to put together complete sentences, keeping a straight face while they whine about being fact-checked. And it is "smooth" when they, for example, make it worse by lying about the CBP One app, which was in fact introduced during the Trump Administration.
Even so, I agree with Professor Dorf's assessment that, "[i]f not exactly charming, Vance came across as more or less normal. Just as Keegan-Michael Key as the character Luther was President Obama's 'anger translator,' so Vance acted the part of Donald Trump's 'not-crazy-and-demented-person translator.' But only to a point." And that point is where Vance becomes his own man, a true believer in a dystopian, antidemocratic future that involves taking away rights from the people Vance disdains. Note also that Professor Dorf is deliberately having "more or less" doing quite a bit of work there.
So this is not merely another example of non-debates being judged on the basis of arbitrary distractions like sighing or zingers. This is a matter of seeing people who were right about Vance suddenly being blinded by a change in optics with absolutely no change in substance. The editors at The Post were right that the night was polite, but far from being a substantive debate, it was an opportunity for Vance to continue to eschew substance and then be rechristened as Mr. Reasonable.
The only hope is that, like other non-debates before it, this one will fade quickly from the public's mind and have no long-term effect. But "vibe" changes are the kind of things that linger, and the people who ought to know better need to stop being such easy marks. This is not a game.