The Harris-Walz debate fiasco

 Victor Davis Hanson:

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, as anticipated, easily won the vice-presidential debate Tuesday, October 1, on demeanor, facts, and analysis. But in fairness to a sometimes herky-jerky and nervous Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, he had the harder task of defending the temporary pseudo-conservative make-over of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

His additional burdens were her co-culpability for the last three-and-a-half-years of the Biden disaster, and her unwillingness to implement her supposedly "change" agenda in the last months of her vice-presidential tenure.

The CBS News moderators, Nora O’Donnell, and, especially, Margaret Brennan, also as expected, ganged up on Vance. They had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing from the last disastrous, and biased debate moderators.

The two moderators shamelessly broke their own rules by fact-checking (wrongly and solely) Vance. They ignored questions of the administration’s tardy responses to Hurricane Helene, the Ukraine war, the recent Trump assassination attempts, or crime, while only briefly touching on Iran and a Middle East on the brink of total war. Instead, they concentrated, as also expected, on climate change, abortion, healthcare and childcare.

All were issues they thought might more easily embarrass Vance. And, of course, as also expected, the two ended the debate pressing Vance on January 6. And yet Vance again parried easily and won decisively. In doing so, he dispelled the smear that he was somehow "mean," when, in fact, he proved calm and magnanimous as he methodically dissected Walz.
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It follows the chaos of a longshoremen’s strike intended to shut down the entire country. And it follows Harris’s continued inability to survive even serial soft-ball interviews without her memorized and banal answers.
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The debate also demonstrated that Trump's selection of Vance as his VP was a smart move.  Despite Vance's limited experience. he was clearly a smarter candidate than Walz or Harris for that matter.  We have come to expect biased moderators from many in the liberal media and the CBS team lived down to that expectation.