Extremist, Hypocritical, Weird: JD Vance Offers a Whole Array of Targets for Tim Walz

Or should Walz focus on right-wing racists’ attack on Vance’s immigrant wife, Usha, and their brown children, and his weak-tea responses? “Look, I love my wife so much. I love her because she’s who she is,” he told Megyn Kelly. “Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that. But I just… I love Usha.”

“Obviously, she’s not a white person.” What does that even mean? Is it a kind of apology for loving someone who isn’t white? An acknowledgment that it’s kind of…weird? (Of all the weird things Vance has done, that is the least weird.)

Of course, Vance has crusaded cruelly against immigrants—not Indians, specifically, but Haitians and Latin Americans. But racists have been known to target generic “brown” people in their pumped-up rage. (Indian Sikhs regularly got mixed up with Muslims in the spree of Muslim bashing that followed the 9/11 terror attacks.) Should Walz ask, with the Lincoln Project, “What kind of man stirs up hate that could turn on his own children?”

Walz (and Vance too) will each have more latitude to challenge their opponent because, unlike in the Harris-Trump debate, their mics will be on (although CBS reserves the right to cut them off if the cross talk gets unmanageable).

Maybe Walz doesn’t have to ask, as a Fox reporter once did, why Vance is so unpleasant. The reporter was more diplomatic than that, asking the angry-seeming wealthy husband and father, “What makes you smile?” Vance responded with typical peevishness: “I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media, man.” What a charmer. He followed it up with an obviously forced, false guffaw, almost as though the internal engine that starts our laughs refused to turn over for JD (maybe because he doesn’t use it enough).

Perhaps the best tack on that one is for Walz to be his ebullient, girl-dad, Gus-dad, “Coach Walz” charmer, up against a man who looks like it hurts when he smiles. That connects to the other clear contrast, of course, on biography and character. Vance, who has exaggerated his family’s hardships, fled Ohio (not Appalachia) for Yale and Silicon Valley and great wealth; Walz more truly embodies the Midwestern, small-town family values Vance purloined in his best selling part-fiction Hillbilly Elegy. Walz stayed in small-town Nebraska, went to Chadron State College there, taught high school and coached football in Alliance, Nebraska, married his wife, Gwen, also a teacher, and moved to Mankato, where again he taught high school and taught football. As football coach, he also was faculty adviser to the school’s LGBTQ alliance. (Even a recent New York Times/Siena poll found that Ohioans viewed Walz as more “honest and trustworthy” then their own senator. Ouch.)

For his part, expect Vance to continue to lie about and distort Walz’s 24-year record in the Minnesota National Guard. As David Frum correctly notes, Vance could attack Walz’s liberal record as Minnesota governor. But he’s gone for the “he’s a phony” attack, “because Vance himself believes that the ‘phony’ charge is the most powerful one he can fling. And why does Vance think that? Because he himself is such an extreme phony.”

Indeed.

I’ve been looking forward to the Walz-Vance debate since Kamala Harris chose the Minnesota governor. The contrast between a genuine son of the working class who’s held on to his values with Vance, who sold out to Peter Theil and other billionaire autocrats, and who is pursuing a creepy crusade against childless women, is stark.

But Vance is mean as a snake and shape-shifting as a chameleon. How does Walz home in on his biggest vulnerabilities—and avoid getting bitten by the amoral snake? I’ll bet the Coach has a playbook for that. I can’t wait to watch.