Wednesday, October 02, 2024

The Vibes Debate

But during ninety remarkably fast-talking minutes in New York—verbally, both candidates are speed demons—the Ohio senator J. D. Vance moved the narrative of the race in a small but perceptible way toward the Republican side. Vance was first to every touchstone that mattered—the first to introduce himself personally to the American people and to bring up the meagre and pressured working-class circumstances in which he was raised, the first to insist that his was the ticket to favor “clean air” and “clean water,” the first to credit his running mate, Donald Trump, with an “economic boom unlike we’ve seen in a generation in this country.” His intent seemed simple—to persuade voters, who are broadly dissatisfied with the direction of the country, that the Democrats are largely responsible for it. But Vance also had an advantage in cunningness. The young senator even managed to turn around a question on family separation, one of the more reprehensible episodes of the Trump years. “Right now in this country . . . we have three hundred and twenty thousand children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” he said. “The real family-separation crisis is unfortunately Kamala Harris’s wide-open southern border.” (In August, a D.H.S. inspector general’s report found that the agency was unable to keep track of all unaccompanied minors who have been released or transferred from U.S. custody after entering the country.)
The "but" at the beginning is to mark a shift from the opening sentences that, conclusively, VP debates don’t matter. Anyone remember the Harris-Pence debate, for example?

But yeah, Vance pushed the race toward the GOP, regardless. Sure he did:
Granted I’m just cherry picking, but The New Yorker view is from a skyscraper in Manhattan. A view of a TV screen.
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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal12:18 PM

    If the host of the debate announces that they will not fact check and one of the debaters is a flagrant liar, they have announced themselves to be on the side of the liar. That's something everyone should learn and Democrats should have a flat policy to not agree to a debate where the host has put themselves in the side of lying.
    The New Yorker is about as credible on this as NPR and NPR has no credibility on it.

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