Coach Walz on the field

Can Tim Walz turn the Trumpian tables on J.D. Vance and triumph as an everyman against an elite, out-of-touch demagogue?

What is a man?

Tomorrow evening — in what’s looking to be the last debate between top-of-ticket candidates this election season — Tim Walz and J.D. Vance will take their respective cases to the nation, and that question will, inevitably, be on the table. 

It’s never been clear what debates mean or what effect they have. Still, putting aside those unanswerable questions, this confrontation does have the potential to make a difference, even if on vibes (which, as we have argued, really do matter even if they aren’t the whole story), largely by presenting a struggle between two starkly different models of modern white masculinity, both in terms of the candidate’s visions and what they exemplify personally. And that might mean there’s more at stake here than usual, especially considering the thin polling margins in the race thus far.

Walz, for all his rhetorical savvy, claims not to be an especially strong debater — and has even admitted to being nervous about the whole thing.

“He’s a strong person,” said Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who’s known Walz since they were each first elected to Washington in 2006. “He’s just not a lawyer-debater type. It’s not like he was dreaming of debates when he was in first grade.” [CNN]

Indeed, one of Walz’s defining qualities is that he isn’t a lawyer — one of the very few non-lawyers to seek the vice presidency in the modern era. It’s part of his identity as an actual, unironic man of the people, an accomplished politician and a speaker with a knack for clarity, though not in the prosecutorial style many have come to expect from candidates for high office. Rather, his identity and explanatory style have been honed by his years as a classroom teacher (and, don’t forget, a congressman), coupled with his Midwestern bona fides.

Why Walz matters

Is Walz’s apparent discomfort a head fake? A rope-a-dope? It’s hard to say (he’s actually been not at all bad in past outings). But the debate is a chance to turn that sort of small-town, aw-shucks authenticity — a style associated in the past with conservatives via Ronald Reagan — back against the conservative movement itself, and claim the right to represent masculinity from those who’ve sought to define it down to a fundamentalist notion distinctly opposed to so much of contemporary life — a position nobody encapsulates quite so well as Vance.

Which brings us back to Walz’s signature rhetorical achievement of the campaign so far. Way back in August, in the weeks leading up to his naming to the Democratic ticket, he managed to do what nobody else had: reset the national political conversation, define the vibes,  and diminish the Republican candidates by calling them out as “weird” — creepy, obsessive, out-of-touch peddlers of ideas straight out of the dustbin of history.

Let’s Walz

And since then Vance — despite his lawyerly credentials and self-construction as an avatar of working-class Midwestern white male sensibility — has largely fallen flat as a popular communicator, with gaffes and misunderstandings that have made clear his disconnection from the rural constituency he claims and highlighting his status as representative of both the East Coast academic elite (as a product of Yale Law) and of the West Coast technocratic elite as a Silicon Valley venture capital insider and intimate associate of the so-called PayPal Mafia.

But Vance — who’s even led Trump on this — has responded by shifting to overtly fascist rhetoric, launching a virulently racist, sexist, and nativist campaign against Ohio’s Haitian community (since intensified by Trump and extended against immigrant communities nationwide) that “weirdness” does not even begin to describe.

So Walz will be fighting a very different battle here — the Vance who’ll be on display is no longer the weird guy he was able to rally the people about over the summer; rather, he’s become a demagogue, encouraging pogroms against his own constituents, and largely speaking to an audience of one — the former president, who’ll want to see a fight, a dynamic that might be exacerbated by CBS’s handing off of real-time fact-checking to the candidates themselves.

“Trump likes that he’s able to go into the lion’s den and communicate on policy issues,” said one person familiar with Vance’s debate preparations, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy. “That’s probably going to be a big scene that will please him.” Vance’s aides say privately that his experience facing skeptical interviewers could help him at Tuesday’s debate. [Washington Post]

Walz has the chance here to show off what he has to offer — an inclusive, expansive definition of what it means to be a man in the 21st century — and showcase that as a core vision against Vance’s defensive, isolationist, fear-stricken maleness.

Walz’s style is one of warmth and compassion. He can speak effectively on policy, to be sure, but his strength is empathy, and demonstrating a jovial kindness and an enthusiasm about others from different backgrounds. [Seth Masket]

And the debate offers Walz the venue to do just that: exercise his proven ability to make people feel the alternative he represents and to win in the arena of emotion against the demagogues.

Coach Walz: dude and mensch

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