Tuesday, October 1st was the first time I’ve seen more than snippets of Senator JD Vance, and I suspect it was the same for most readers. The Vice-Presidential candidates’ debate gave us an opportunity to understand both the Republican Vance and Democratic Governor Tim Walz more clearly.
One came off – as The Guardian put it – as a “slick talker” while the other “sincere and truthful.”
If you didn’t see the debate and have been in a news vacuum for the last week, the slick talker is the same one who’s legally changed his name three times.
Vance did come across more polished and confident, while Walz seemed the opposite at times. Walz seems to have more to lose in this election: he’s got the weight of our democracy on his shoulders, while Vance will have the chore of implementing Project 2025, a Trump-Republican blueprint for the elevation of an elite class, destruction of the Middle Class democracy and – literally – the America we know.
As far as experience in government and governing, Walz outshines Vance, due to having served multiple terms in the US House of Representatives and as Governor of Minnesota.
Vance came onto the political scene when he ran for the US Senate in 2022, winning in large part due to his primary financial backer, billionaire Peter Thiel. More on him later, but Vance’s government and governing experience has been 2 years in the Senate, voting the party line and introducing only ultra-conservative bills, many of them anti-abortion related.
All the while not actually closing on any laws benefitting US Citizens thanks to a completely dysfunctional House and Senate Republicans’ outright refusal to support anything bipartisan.
At the debate, Vance seemed a different person than he has on the campaign trail. Softer. Smoother. He’s been told he needs to appeal to demographics that don’t like him so much right now because of his inability to interact with normal humans and show compassion and empathy.
In other words, women. Could this be why he wore that seemingly inappropriate hot-pink tie? Was he after Barbie fans?
Did he think this would make it easier for any of us to accept his stance on abortion and women’s rights, which he reiterated during the debate?
The side of Vance we witnessed during the debate should give us concern. For instance, he didn’t answer Walz’ question as to whether he thought Trump actually won the 2020 election, to which Walz followed up, labeling the statement as “a damning non-answer.”
Walz showed respect for the two female interviewers while Vance talked over them more than once, confirming what he thinks of women: As child-bearers and caretaker grannies.
That certainly doesn’t include women having careers and contributing to the health and stability of their families in a myriad of ways, but instead he condones them having and raising children. Over half of the world’s population sequestered and constrained. Over half the world’s talent, culture and creativity snuffed out.
Truthfully, there are millions of families in the Middle Class who hold on to that status because there are two breadwinners in the family.
There were several concerning takeaways from Vance’s debate performance, most notably his doubling down on lies about Springfield, Ohio’s legal Haitian immigrants eating the town’s pets. He must know that we know that was a lie by now, right?
While Walz responded to the issue of the lack of affordable housing by pointing out that prices have been driven up by corporations purchasing homes, Vance’s solution was to build homes on Federal lands. Federal lands, usually in the middle of true nowhere, where there is no infrastructure (roads, utilities) and they’re not close to any jobs.
There may be an ulterior motive here: Trump has been saying he wants to give companies access to the natural resources on federal lands. This reminds me of the many dying coal-towns in my home state of West Virginia, where the company controlled every aspect of life. Now the coal’s gone, the companies gone, and the people gone or living in desperation.
Plus, how would those families get access to the grandmothers who are supposed to be caring for the workers’ children?
Vance said that President Biden has made fentanyl into an over-the-counter drug (he didn’t), that deaths from the drug have skyrocketed when they have plummeted, and when seizures of the drug have soared.
Like every Republican elected official has, Vance then proceeded to blame all our border problems on Biden. The truth lies in their cowardly compliance with Trump’s order to kill the bipartisan immigration bill.
Aside from more border agents and immigration judges, the bill would have hired or freed up agents to run the fentanyl-screening equipment that now sits idle at the border. I repeat: we have equipment that isn’t being used for screening and people are dying of fentanyl overdoses daily.
Then there was the Vance whine about the rules of the debate: Something like “you said we wouldn’t be fact-checked” when he got fact checked. If you missed it in real time, the media hasn’t let it go unnoticed.
Vance served in public relations as a Marine in Iraq, and a big part of the PR job is learning to spin the basic truth into something softer on the ears and heart. He was practicing that skill continuously during the debate.
Vance also tried to convince listeners that as VP, Kamala Harris should have already done everything she and Walz have been promising. If you had a civics class in school, you know that it’s not the VP‘s administration, but the president’s. Does Vance know the job description he’s applying for in this election?
I think he does…
Here’s what’s scary about electing JD Vance to a position one cholesterol-laden heartbeat away from assuming our presidency. First, his financial backing has come from billionaires, including Peter Theil, who’s often referred to as an “accelerator” for his drive to create an autocracy in America, with the rise of an elite class and the creation of an underclass.
Even though Thiel is openly gay and married to his husband, he feels Project 2025 won’t include him in its discriminatory stance against LGBTQ persons. Nice for him, huh?
As one of my favorite attorneys likes to answer legal questions, “well, that depends.”
JD Vance is how he’ll do this. How? Once elected and sworn in, at some opportune time to be determined, Vance will become president and commence the true implementation of Project 2025.
Seriously, can anyone imagine Trump having the focus to take on something this big? I can’t, and neither can the minions who will slide into the highest levels of our government beginning January 20th. Nor can those men who wrote or financed the plan, or Vance, who authored the forward for the plan. Trump would become a nuisance to an efficient implementation.
That’s why Vance was – in my opinion – forced on Trump as his VP. It’s obvious the two candidates aren’t sending each other “love letters,” like Trump & Kim.
Either through death or incapacitation or by invoking the 25th Amendment, Vance takes over, and then we see what the wealthiest, most evil, most adversarial people in the world have in story for the rest of us. A Middle Class doesn’t exist in an autocracy.
Even more frightening is the fact that Vance’s wife, Usha, clerked for two members of the US Supreme Court: Roberts and Kavanaugh. We’re all fearful of this election making it to the top court, because we know how the conservative court will rule.
So, it’s up to us to make the margin of the popular vote so high, and the wins in every swing state so unquestionable, that Trump and his Republicans are embarrassed in their efforts to overturn a free & fair election.
