Friday, October 04, 2024

FRANK BRUNI

 

JD Vance Is Smoother — but No Better — Than Donald Trump

Oct. 3, 2024

 

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

I’m ashamed of myself.

During stretches of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, I found myself admiring — sort of — JD Vance. I awarded him points for unflappability, wishing Tim Walz could mimic that composure and tap a well of confidence as deep. I envied his crispness, willing Walz to state his case as clearly and cleanly.

Vance’s answers seemed to have commas, semicolons and colons in all the right places, while Walz’s herky-jerky statements were linked (or not) by ellipses. The paper-grading professor in me gave Vance a high mark, Walz a barely passing one.

But the 2024 election isn’t an essay contest. Nor is it a beauty pageant, with the debates functioning as the interview segment. It’s a morality play. It’s about fundamental values. And Vance’s are rotten, no matter how much oratorical perfume he sprays on them, no matter how eloquently he diverts you from the stench.

The hell of the debate matched the hell of this presidential campaign, in which there’s a temptation — a pull — to evaluate performance, parse communication or dissect policy, employing criteria that we attentive citizens have used across the decades. But such assessments are utterly beside the point. The race for president pits a Democratic ticket with many shortcomings against a Republican ticket with no scruples whatsoever, decency against indecency, respect for the democratic process against unfettered ambition, and psychological stability (Kamala Harris) against a spectacular lack thereof (you know who).

In that context, it’s pointless, even reckless, to dwell on Walz’s visible nervousness during the debate or his many missed opportunities.

Yes, he failed to nail Vance appropriately and effectively for spreading the dangerous calumny — or is it cookery? — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating other people’s pets. Yes, that suggested a discouraging limit to Walz’s political skills.

But it didn’t erase those lies, just as Vance’s mild, even milquetoast manner on the debate stage didn’t expunge his record of hateful, bigoted remarks that demonize whole groups of Americans in the interest of whipping his followers into an election-delivering frenzy. Vance would drive a truck through and over a huddle of thirsty people if they were the sole obstacle between him and higher office. Walz would hit the brakes, climb out of his vehicle and offer them some of his Diet Mountain Dew.

Our reflexes prompt us to observe and analyze this election as we have many others, and so some of us chide Harris for avoiding interviews and, when she does give one, often leaning on vague, canned answers. That’s a fair, worthy complaint to the extent that it’s pushing a person who’s seeking the most powerful office in the world to flex her intellectual nimbleness and present a comprehensive plan.

Some of us tuned in to the vice-presidential debate to gauge Walz’s steadiness in circumstances with higher stakes and higher visibility than the ones he was accustomed to before Harris made him her running mate, and we’re disappointed that he wasn’t sturdier. That’s understandable, and that’s responsible in and of itself. Walz could end up a proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency.

In addition to which, the range of skills that he and the other players in the presidential contest demonstrate and the degree of competence that they project could determine the election’s outcome. Those factors are tactically relevant.

But as I wrote last week and will surely write again before Nov. 5, the normal stuff — the details of one economic proposal versus another, the major and minor line items on the candidates’ curricula vitae — doesn’t matter in this abnormal election, because a single consideration nullifies all others. It’s this:

One candidate is prepared to incite violence if it serves his purposes. We know that because he has done so already. That candidate will invent ugly fictions and promote illegal schemes to overturn the results of an election that doesn’t go his way. That’s not my paranoia talking; that’s his record. He places his vanity, his cupidity, his every want and whim above the integrity of our democracy, the dignity of the presidency and the welfare of the nation. Just a week of his social media posts and a month of his rallies make that clear.

And the crucial takeaway from the vice-presidential debate was Vance’s audacious claim — I questioned my own hearing — that Donald Trump honored the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another when his administration ended and Joe Biden’s began. In what alternate timeline? In what parallel universe?

With that comment and with others, Vance laundered and sanctioned Trump’s depravity, telling us not merely that he stands with Trump but that he sinks every bit as low as Trump.

I’ll take all the ellipses in creation over that exclamation point.


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