By Dave Andrusko
It’s truly amusing to read most pro-abortion outlets concede that pro-life Sen. J.D. Vance ran circles around pro-abortion Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, but it doesn’t really make any difference because, after all, they’re just the undercard.
Let’s get to my six takeaways from Tuesday night’s debate in New York City.
#1. Please read NRLC take on Vance v. Walz. It is extremely well-written and covers a lot of the ground that was not plowed last night in addition to clarifying just how completely Walz is a champion for the Abortion Industry. Here is just a taste:
Tim Walz opposes the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act while in Congress. The bill would ensure that an infant who survives an attempted abortion is afforded the same degree of medical care as any other newborn of the same gestational age.
As governor, Walz repealed similar state-level protections for newborn babies in Minnesota.
Tim Walz supports a policy allowing unlimited abortion for any reason throughout pregnancy. He signed legislation to enshrine a “fundamental right” to abortion for any reason until birth in Minnesota law and invalidated existing protections like the state’s parental involvement law.
Vance confronted Walz on this truth:
As I read the Minnesota law that you signed into law, the statute that you signed into law, it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion, where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late term abortion. That is, I think, whether it’s not pro-choice or pro-abortion, that is fundamentally barbaric. And that’s why I use that word.
Walz tab danced around what is, in fact, passive infanticide saying the issue had been fact-checked after the Trump/Harris debate and, in addition, “That is not the way the law is written.” Vance tried to get Walz to explain where his characterization was incorrected, but Walz blathered on before switching to saying “Things worked best when Roe v. Wade was in place.”
#2. Walz penchant for lying came up in living color. Margaret Brennan, one of the two moderators, had this question: “You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protest in the spring of 1989. But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn’t travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy? You have two minutes.”
His answer was pathetic but the best he could do.
“I’m a knucklehead at times,” Walz said, and he “misspoke.”
#3. Let’s talk about how CBS News promised its moderators would not conduct any fact-checking. Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey wrote
It took them less than 20 minutes to violate that, interjecting at least twice to contradict J.D. Vance, and then cut off his microphone when he attempted to rebut their “fact check.”
Nor was that their only attempt to rescue Walz. Throughout the debate, O’Donnell and Brennan would ask Vance to clarify claims and frame context for his one-minute rebuttals, while simply allowing Walz to frame his own rebuttal times. This happened throughout the debate, and it created the exact same three-on-one dynamic that plagued the ABC debate. [My underlining.]
Admitting that you’re a “knucklehead” is not the kind of change voters want. That could have been an endearing bit of self-deprecation, but coming after two minutes of distraction and drivel, it looked more like self-recognition. In that moment, Walz revealed himself as a shady politician rather than a “stand-up guy,” and it colored the rest of the debate.
#4. For reasons that escape me, Vance is supposedly a “bulldog,” playing the bad cop. But as many people have commented, his performance last night illustrated why Trump had selected him as his running mate. Audrey Fahlberg of National Review Online writes
But rhetorically speaking, his [Walz] GOP opponent Ohio senator J. D. Vance was crisp and polished from start to finish – constantly reminding the audience about high prices and unfettered immigration under the Biden-Harris administration’s watch, and often smirking at the camera when Walz had the floor. His performance last night was a strong asset to a GOP ticket whose chief advocate often veers off script and gets easily baited into tense exchanges. Not so last night with Vance. Before answering the first question about foreign policy, he made a clever point of introducing himself to swing-voters and humbly asking for their vote, a clear attempt to soften his image to an on-the-fence electorate that has spent the past two-and-a-half months watching his vice-presidential candidacy through the prism of an unsparing media.
5. Vance repeated reminded the audience that Biden-Harris had been in power the last nearly four years. The New York Times’s Lisa Lerer bashed Vance unendingly. But, no doubt gritting her teeth, she did acknowledge
And he asked a question some of Mr. Trump’s campaign aides would like the former president to press daily: If Ms. Harris wants to lower housing prices and other costs, why hasn’t she done that yet?
“Who has been the vice president for the last three and a half years? And the answer is your running mate, not mine,” he said to Mr. Walz.
And #6. Speaking just for me, I thoroughly enjoyed Vance as he demolished the media-created caricature of him. It would have been nice to more fully flesh out Walz’s very dark extremism on abortion.
For example, this from Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL):
In 2023, Gov. Walz signed a bill (HF 1) creating a right to abortion for any reason and at any time during pregnancy. But he went even further: He also signed a bill (SF 2995) repealing a requirement to provide medically appropriate lifesaving care to born-alive infants. Under Walz’s legislation, viable babies could be set aside, with only comfort care, and allowed to die. Babies with disabilities, whose lives are often devalued, are especially at risk. Minnesota’s abortion policy is now as extreme as any in the world—and serves as an ominous sign of what a Harris-Walz administration would pursue in the White House.
NRLC President Carol Tobias put it best:
Tim Walz refused to answer a simple question about whether he supported abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy and instead engaged in fearmongering and propaganda. His full-throated support of unlimited abortion throughout pregnancy may have been something he didn’t want to admit to during the debate, but his record is clear. Tim Walz supports abortion anywhere, under any circumstances, and at any time throughout pregnancy. His radical, extreme position on abortion is out of touch with the majority of Americans.
If pro-abortion extremists Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were elected, they would put preborn babies in the crosshairs and future generations of Americans would be endangered.
