The Daily Beast Podcast - Tim Walz Failed in One Big Way: He Was too Nice

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz failed to meet the moment at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate in New York City in one big way, according to the hosts of The New Abnormal.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hi, welcome back to the new special bonus episode for you today. This is a real-time response to the vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walls. Take it away, Andy and Danielle. Thank you.

That was amazing. Hi, Andy. What the hell was that, Seamus? That is him doing his best game show voice. This debate was so annoying. Like, I was absolutely annoyed. And I'm going to say this. I really liked Tim Walz. And, you know, and I said that from the beginning.

I think that he was a good choice. But I needed to see teeth during this. And by teeth, I mean, like, take a bite out of J.D. Vance. Jaddy Vance stood up there and we normalized his lies. He sanewashed Donald Trump. And he seemed like a reasonable guy. because Tim Walz kept saying, you know, well, I agree with him on some things, or that sounds okay, as if like this is a normal election. He didn't really bring it until the end, which I think mattered.

Absolutely. This was painful to watch. As I've said before, presidential debates, vice presidential debates, whatever, are stupid. They encourage lying. And that was very evident tonight. By that metric, I thought Katie Vance did a, he did a fine job, actually. If you don't mind the fact that he lied every time he opened his mouth, he came across okay. Walls, I didn't think, was great, not because he didn't say the right things, but he didn't really, like he said, Danielle, he didn't really show any personality. And as you and I have both said before, these are pageants. The Tim Walls that we've seen give, you know, speeches and go around the country and be a normal human being. And not that he seemed abnormal, for lack of a better word, but I don't know. He just, if you look at

at this again as pageant as theater, which is what it is, unfortunately. He didn't do a great job, I don't think. My thing with this is that it is. It is political theater and it's political pageantry. I do not think that debates change anybody's minds. I think that it just allows people to double down on where they are because I was looking at some Republicans that I don't ask me why I still follow them. But I was looking at some Republicans that I follow on Twitter because I refuse to call it X. And they were like, J.D. Vance is doing incredible. J.D. Vance is setting the stage. J.D. Vance's responses, you know, are clear and concise and blah, blah. And I'm just like, because they're trying to present him as being normal. Oh, he doesn't go off on a tangent about eating dogs and pets,

and he doesn't talk about electric sharks or Hannibal Lecter. That must mean that he can be the vice president of heartbeat away from the presidency. No, it doesn't. The man lied. I think somebody was counting, he lied at least 96 times. And I'm certain that there were more. His entire framing around women and around abortion was total and complete bullshit. And that that was the point where I wanted Tim Walls to really actually prosecute the case in the way that the vice president did. It was reproductive care was abortion and it was also gun rights. And I'm just like, Jady Vance basically looked into a camera and told kids that dying in school by an AK-47 is a fact of life. He said that.

So why didn't Tim Walz come out with that as opposed to making it seem as if they have reasonable gun ideas when the members of the House of Representatives, the Republicans, replaced their pins with AR-15s? Like, how do you have a rational conversation when you know that that is what these people do? do. So the fact that he didn't bring, like, the receipts there, piss me off. Yeah. Look, I want to go back to the abortion part of the debate because I want to give a shout out to one of the moderators, Margaret Brennan, for an absolute embarrassment of a question. Oh, my God. She started off the abortion segment. Her question was to Tim Walz, and her question was basically Donald Trump says you want abortions in the third trimester, or the ninth.

month. I forget exactly what she said. How do you respond to that? Are you kidding me? That's how you frame the abortion question? That was absolute malpractice. And I don't know what the hell they thought if that was some kind of clever question or what. But it's just to frame it as Donald Trump lied about this without saying that he lied about it and asking Tim Walls to respond. I mean, it was basically when did you stop beating your wife? It was that level of questioning. And And it was absolutely gross. And you're right, J.D. Vance tried to, he sane washed himself. Yep. He sane washed his own abortion opinions. Chris Godner, frequent guest here on the new abnormal publisher of Law Dork, posted on Blue Sky. He said, shorter J.D. Vance. What I learned from

Ohio voters is that they think my abortion position is scary and crazy. So I'm not talking about it anymore. And that's exactly right. That's exactly what Vance did. He sat there. And, And he pretended that he was a reasonable person on abortion and that he very much cares about women. And the fact of the matter is he's not and he doesn't. I mean, and then also the consistency around bringing up his mother and like, oh, I was, you know, around a lot of single women and I was around, you know, and I was raised by a single mother and all of these things. And I'm like, oh, so maybe that's why you hate women. because mommy wasn't there for you all the time. And that's where your issues come in.

Because frankly, again, this was a place where walls could have hit him over the head and made him need to apologize, walk back, or contort himself into saying that, oh, I didn't mean childless cat ladies. Oh, I didn't mean that the only purpose for post-menopausal women was to be the caretakers of still fertile women. Oh, I didn't mean that kids should. should, you know, get shot in their classrooms. Like, why?

This was easy. Those were easy points because it's literally all on podcasts. People can hear them for themselves. So I feel like he offered up too much agreement, which, again, to your point, made it seem like J.D. Vance is normal when he is actually more extreme than Donald Trump. Because why? He wrote the fucking forward for Project 2025. Yeah.

And the degree to which Vance just, I mean, again, you expect lying. But the degree, the mythical Republican party he kept describing that cares about things like child care and health care. Like, I love alternate history, science fiction. And so I found that all very interesting because it was just, it was like a world in which, you know, it's like saying, what if Germany won World War II? Like, it didn't happen. It's an interesting thought exercise.

And that's the same thing that I felt watching Vance. well, it would be interesting if the Republican Party cared about things like child care and health care. It doesn't. And then trying to completely retcon what happened in 2020 with January 6th and with the election, the fact that he is able to sit there and rattle and keep saying things about, you know, a peaceful transition of power when Donald Trump tried everything in his power to prevent that. And for him to sit there and to just pretend that that never happened, it's so shameless and so beyond the pale. And, you know, look, he's rewarded for it. And the debate format also rewards him for it.

I mean, there needs to be another word for gaslighting. We use sane washing. We use gas lighting. But to honestly tell Americans, do not believe your lying ass eyes, but believe the words that are coming out of my mouth as if we. all were not glued to our televisions, our phone screens, our computers on January 6th, with our jaws on the ground, looking at smoke, pluming from the Capitol building, looking at people with Trump flags and using them as weapons. In that moment, they tried to tell us

that, oh, this was Antifa. Are you insane? Like, we watch people scale over the Capitol building, breaking windows. And for him to stand up there with that smug, stupid, I wanted to smack it off of his face. Look, as he's talking about this moment that cost people their careers and their lives. Yeah. Like, that's the thing. There were officers that lost their lives. And then there are those that had to leave the force because of the post-traumatic stress of that day. And you had Donald Trump, who had the ability from the moment that he saw that mob turned violent, then break the barriers. He could have been on the phone, calling in the National Guard,

getting as much help as needed. And what did he do? He sat there tweeting and throwing ketchup at the walls because he wasn't allowed to go to the Capitol building. I mean, it's the revisionism, but it's like it's so insulting. It's insulting to the American people to take. tell us that what we saw is not what is real. I forget who it was Andy that said, oh, it was a tourist group or like whatever type of nonsense they've said since. Absolutely. And look,

and he did it over and over again. He sat there and tried to sound reasonable on climate change. At the same time, he kind of slipped and called it weird science, which I caught. And that was just like, you know, you just gave the game away there by calling climate change weird science, because one of those words is true, science, the only weird thing is you. It was over and over again the entire debate. Again, Wals was not as effective as I would have liked him to be. And maybe that's his personality. And maybe he just couldn't do it.

I thought Kamala Harris calibrated it perfectly in her debate with Donald Trump. She didn't take bait, but she made perfectly clear how ridiculous of a person she thought he was. J.D. Vance didn't do that. Sorry, Tim Wals didn't do that. He had a couple moments. He tried to push back and he tried, he tried to bring up the, you know, the Springfield, Ohio thing with the Haitian immigrants and migrants and the dog and cat eating. He didn't, I didn't think, I'm glad he brought up how disgusting it is. I thought, I wish he had been more effective on it. The one time I think maybe he was effective and we'll see, because this is a lot of this is going to be up to the media in which clips they play was. at the end where he said, you know, basically, after Vance had spouted his January 6th nonsense, Wall said, did Trump lose the 2020 election? And Vance said, I'm looking to the future. And Wall said that's a damning non-answer. Yeah. We needed more of that throughout the debate and less of, you know, this is great. This is what

America's all about. The two of us on stage having a reasonable discussion and, you know, and shaking hands. I don't know. I think the time. for shaking hands with people who are encouraging lynch mobs is way over. Here's what I will say, Politico put out an hour into the debate, vibe check, J.D. Vance is doing really well tonight. And I'm like, so the reality is, is that anyone can do well when they lie. Anyone can do well when they're pretending to be somebody other than themselves. anyone can do well when facts don't exist and then complain when you are actually fact-checked. And that doesn't, and that's not damning in and of itself.

Yeah. So the fact that you have mainstream corporate media that is like, oh, J.D. Vance won, but I'm like, run the fucking receipts. J.D. Vance called for a national abortion ban. He said that women should be punished. When asked specifically about abortion in cases of incest or rape, he said that rape was inconvenient. He said about our children being gunned down in their classrooms that that is a fact of life and that people shouldn't be able to leave abusive relationships and change marriages like they do

their socks. Those are just off the dome. And those are not even most of his damning statements that he has made on his right wing misogynistic junket that he has been on ever since he became a senator. So it is wild to me that you have folks like Politico that are putting out trash like that, Axios, that wanted to again bring up Tim Walls' misspeaking about China and totally ignore the actual elephant in the room, which is the fascist in sheep's clothing. I mean, this is where we are. This is where we are. Yeah. And look, it's the same, you know, I guess it wouldn't be us if we didn't hammer at the media. So I will close, although, Danielle, you're welcome to speak after me, obviously, but I will close by saying this is the same media that is going to tell you that J.D. Vance won this debate, which by their standards, he did, even though he lied time and time and time again. And as you said, you know, got really mad at even the tiniest little bit of, it wasn't even a fact check, really. It was more like context that the moderators gave. And he was like, the rules were you aren't going to fact check.

Like the biggest ninth grade dweeb you've ever seen. This is the same media that whines about, why won't Kamala Harris sit down with us? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This is why. Yeah, because, you know, again, there's no reason to sit down with people that have jobs that are about accountability and responsibility and providing information to the public and abdicate that duty.

So where is the purpose here? But, you know, political pageantry, thank God. Vice presidential debates don't matter as much as presidential debates do because I was unimpressed. And that's how I will leave it. I was unimpressed. I think, Danielle, one thing we can agree on before we leave. Thank God this is the last debate.

Thank fucking God. Thank God. Yes, we don't need to sit through that again. And again, folks, we clearly love you because we did it so that you don't have do. You're welcome. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going.

This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.