The only Vice Presidential Debate hosted by CBS News on Oct. 1 went better for J.D. Vance than it did for Tim Walz. Walz was quite nervous and uncertain at the beginning of the debate and probably thought he could run the same operation that Harris did with Trump in goading his opponent on “hot button” issues and describing the former president as a “threat to democracy.” Vance did not take the bait, however, and was quite collected and confident, even though the CBS moderators, Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell, were also clearly biased against Vance, even cutting him off on several occasions, in violation of the “rules” established for this debate.
Beyond the atmospherics, a handful of substantive issues came up. The first was at the outset, in response to a question about whether each candidate supported an Israeli preemptive strike to take out Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Both backed Israel, but didn’t respond on the preemptive strike specifically (see separate slug).
A second was when Walz tried to go after Trump/Vance on January 6, 2021 and the refusal to accept the “democratic decision” of the national election. Vance then re-focused the discussion on the real threat to “democracy” in Kamala’s censorship of political debate. “I believe that we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country,” Vance said, “but unfortunately, it’s not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It is the threat of censorship. It’s Americans casting aside lifelong friendships because of disagreements over politics. It’s big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens. And it’s Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she’d like to censor people who engage in misinformation. I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we’ve seen in this country in the last four years, in the last 40 years.”
