What Tim Walz failed to land (and what he got instead)

The vice presidential candidates each had just two things to accomplish Tuesday night. First, do no harm (to their ticket). Second (and this is a bonus): Score a viral moment.

The bonus point was important for Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) in particular. Only 1% of voters watching the presidential debate were undecided, so the goal is that viral moment – and his friends in the Democratic Party media were standing by ready to echo it.

By the second hour, Walz was busier blocking punches than even trying to throw one back.

And boy did he give it to us. When moderators asked the governor to address why he lied about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre, he responded: “I grew up in a small town.” It was perfect. Hysterical. It played right into Vice President Kamala Harris’ response to any question at all: “I grew up in a middle-class family.” Will Ferrell couldn’t better parody a politician.

But Walz wasn’t done. He rambled on and on. He — no joke — talked about how he rode a bicycle as a child. The moderators had to prompt him again! And he couldn’t answer, so he said he said it was because he was a “knucklehead.” And all this in the first 45 minutes, when a couple of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia swing-state voters with power were still awake.

But it was rocky for Democrats even before this. Walz was clearly nervous. He won six House races in a contested congressional district, but he’s never debated on a national stage, and he was up against Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who’s been out sparring with hostile reporters for months while Walz has gathered rust in the shed.

And that was before the moderators even asked about current events, like the war in the Middle East. How even could Walz answer the first question and say what his administration’s policy toward an Israeli strike on Iran might be? He doesn’t know what policy his administration would have, and it’s not his fault. His running mate doesn’t know either.

Both men quickly set out to defang each other, though they were so polite you could almost hear them say “my friend across the aisle” or some other outdated political courtesy. It’s been 12 years since the candidates last pretended to like each other. Vance got aggressive first with the moderators, calling them out for promising not to fact-check only to try doing so anyway. Everyone hates reporters. As a reporter myself, I can tell you: It’s impossible to dislike them too much. Easy target.

By the time the first hour drew to a close, it was so clear Walz had lost that top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama’s pet David Axelrod, were chirping about how these VP debates don’t matter and political reporters were noting how lucky Democrats are for that.

Walz knew it too. The ultimate goal of a vice presidential candidate is to do no harm to his principal, but by the second hour, Walz was busier blocking the punches than even trying to throw one back.

Remember Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas)? Probably not, but you might remember the line, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” It was a viral moment back before we had a phrase for it (or even the internet). Few will remember that future Vice President Dan Quayle dominated the debate during which it was uttered. They only remember that line.

Walz needed a line like that. He didn’t get it. Or if he did, he scored it on himself. Instead, the debate undid the actual viral moment from the early, honeymoon phase of the campaign.

Whatever people think of Vance now, he’s not weird.

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The fire rises: City Journal: 'A Palestine of the mind'

French writer Pascal Bruckner first rose to prominence in the early 1980s with his work “The White Man’s Tears,” which tore at the academic left’s obsession with the Third World and its hatred for the West. The strange combination of infatuation and self-loathing he observed 40 years ago has become fully mainstream in the American Democratic Party. With broader war breaking out in the Middle East, his critique is on display more than ever. In City Journal, Bruckner writes:

In 1974, the writer Jean Genet, an uncontested celebrity of the French Left, whose works extol the beauty of hoodlums, assassins, Black Panthers, the S.S., and Yasser Arafat’s Fedayeen, explained his attachment to the Palestinian cause: “It was completely natural for me to favor not only the most disadvantaged but those who distill hatred for the West most purely.”

For decades now, the Palestinians — or rather, a mythical view of the Palestinians — have brought together two elements essential to this distillation: they were poor, in contrast with the purported colonizers, who arrived partly from Europe (though a million Jews thrown out of Arab countries, beginning in 1948, also became Israelis); and they were Muslims, that is, members of a religion that some on the Left see as the spearhead of the disinherited. Thus, during a time when leftist revolutionary horizons were darkening, a certain orphaned progressivism took up the Palestinian revolt against Israel. Surprisingly, however, what originated as a minority preference has developed into a majority position, winning significant support from the highest reaches of political power and from the academy, in both Europe and the United States — and reshaping the mind of an era.
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The war in Yemen set off in 2014 by Saudi Arabia cost 370,000 lives, without provoking Western protests. The same can be said of the 400,000 victims of Bashar al-Assad. When Arabs kill one another, no one flinches. When Israelis confront Palestinians, though, the cry of “genocide” arises immediately; let us not forget that the Palestinian population has tripled in the last 50 years (from 1.3 million in 1948 to close to 5 million today). We owe to the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Dachwich (1941–2008) this profound and bittersweet remark: “Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy. The interest taken in the Palestinian question flows from the interest attached to the Jewish question. ... If we were at war with Pakistan, no one would ever have heard of me. ... You have given us defeat, weakness and fame.”

The Palestinian is our last natural savage, innocent even when killing or slaughtering. We excuse his terrorism because of his “despair.” He is the great Christic icon carried by the radical Left, and his beatification has been under way for 70 years. But the love borne for the Palestinian is unfortunately only a function of the hatred of the Israeli. The Palestinian tragedy over the last half-century is a result, not just of their corrupt (Fatah) or bloodthirsty (Hamas) leaders, or of their being the pawns of various diplomatic intrigues in the region; what plagues them most is that the progressives of Europe and America, almost totally ignorant of the reality of these people, have transformed them into an imaginary revolutionary cause ...