My column for the San Francisco Chronicle on the Vice Presidential debate

Lies and the lying liar who tells them: Sen. JD Vance...

Walz came to debate, Vance was just lying around

By Jack Ohman

Oct 1, 2024

To hear Sen. J.D. Vance tell it in the CBS News Vice Presidential debate, you’d think that his running mate wasn’t a convicted felon, a coup plotter, and a congenital liar.

Oh, and, to Vance, immigrants are to blame for, well, everything that ails America.

Everything.

Health care? Immigrants. Housing? Immigrants. Pet eating? Immigrants.

Throw in his repeated references to the “Kamala Harris Administration,” and you’d think that she’s been president herself for the past three and a half years. Oh, and this czarina also runs the “regulatory regime.” Such power for a vice president!

Gov. Tim Walz, Vance’s opponent in what-appears-to-be-the-only VP debate, came off as what he is: a nice guy, a social studies teacher, and a football coach from Nebraska and Minnesota who speaks like a regular human.

Imagine that.

Candy-coating the massive Trump lies is, to put it bluntly, almost impossible, and Vance, who once called his own running mate a possible American Hitler, didn’t do a terribly effective job in doing so.

Over the course of this warp-speed campaign, Vance has been not only disappointing, but in the words of his debate opponent, “weird.” The only time the word “weird” was uttered was when Vance called carbon emission’s culpability for climate change “weird science.”

No. Denying it is weird science.

Vance was not held accountable for saying that lying to serve a larger purpose isn’t taught in any law school I’m aware of, Yale or not. Nor was Vance able to muster an admission that Trump was lying about the outcome of the 2020 election.

Note to Vance: Remember when Trump’s last VP was subject to his boss’s passive approval of his hanging?

Vance was a slicker, smoother version of Trump, but even this Earl Scheib-level Bondo/cheap paint job wasn’t good enough to obscure a basic fact: Vance and Trump are practiced, accomplished liars.

Oh, but Walz said he was in Tiananmen Square in 1989! OMG!

OK. He was there then, but not standing in front of the tanks, something Donald Trump would be morally incapable of doing, for he loves the dictators, the oppressors, the liars and the fraudsters.

Maybe Vance should debate an AI version of himself that his right-wing Silicon Valley architects have built from scratch. It would be interesting, to say the least, and we’d have more clarity about who Vance really is: a Thiel-Musk-Sacks bot. 

Did Vance achieve the goal of normalizing Trump? Nope. He just sounded like another 40-year-old not-qualified drip BSing his way through a job interview, complete with a replica of his would-be boss’s red tie/white shirt/blue suit outfit.

In contrast, Walz’s act was accessible and relatable. He could speak confidently as a former six-term member of Congress and a re-elected two-term Minnesota governor, and he spoke in the way people there and outside the Beltway speak: In the words of Garrison Keillor, he put the hay down where the goats could get it. 

Vance hasn’t run anything more complex than his mouth.

My critique of Walz’s performance would center on not defining who, precisely, Vance is. Minnesota Nice sometimes isn’t that effective when your opponent is one of two men standing between us and the systematic dismantling of American democracy.

To be sure, Walz missed a few openings. 

If one were to summarize Vance’s “arguments” based on the Big Lie, a premier Hitlerian tactic, he was indeed more effective than Walz in some respects, like the ability to lie “bigly.” 

For example, Vance laughably asserted that Trump fixed the Affordable Care Act, even as his running mate said he had “concepts for a plan.” Well, the American people didn’t even hear “concepts,” let alone a plan on this debate stage.

In Vance, what they heard was a man who will say and do literally anything to achieve power, even if it means denying objective reality. The mere fact that Vance agreed to serve as Trump’s running mate — after doing multiple 180s about Trump himself — says it all.

Walz’s Minnesota Nice act melted like the March snows in the Gopher State when January 6^th came up. 

Vance risibly asserted that Trump said “peacefully handed over power,” and complained that Hillary questioned the results of the 2016 election because Vladimir Putin spent $500,000 on Facebook ads.

Walz moved in for the kill like a Minnesota muskie hitting a crippled minnow: “January 6^th wasn’t Facebook ads.”

Vance’s parry on censorship being more important than the coup attempt on January 6^th was mostly silly. Walz’s riposte? 

“That is a damning non-answer,” and it was. 

Walz noted, correctly, that the Supreme Court said that you can’t “yell fire in a crowded theater.”

True, and you can’t yell “fire” when your running mate, the rhetorical arsonist, set the theater on fire.

Perhaps the funniest moment in the debate was when Vance, against with an actor’s practiced deadpan, was forced to utter his programmed line that he was proud to have the endorsement of the certifiable Bobby Kennedy and, gulp, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard,  (D-Hawaii) who makes Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene  (R-Ga.) look like Margaret Thatcher.

Another Vance gem: “Donald Trump governed in a bipartisan way.” How? When? In anyone’s lifetime here on this planet?

Walz cited Matthew 25:40, which notes Jesus said whatever you did for least among us, you did it for me.

He might have added, in Matthew 25:40, that Jesus also said “for I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink … I was sick and in prison, and you did not look after me.”

Walz should have also noted that thou shalt not lie.

Unless it’s convenient for Vance and Trump on a debate stage.

Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist who also writes at JackOhman.substack.

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