Extreme, hypocritical, weird: JD Vance offers Tim Walz an array of targets

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

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

Of course, Vance was viciously anti-immigrant—specifically, not Indians, but Haitians and Latin Americans. However, racists have been known to target general “brown” people in their pumped up rage. (Indian Sikhs received regularly mixes with Muslims in the Muslim rampage that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks.) If Walz asks, with the Lincoln Project“What kind of man harbors hatred that can be turned against his own children?”

Walz (and Vance) will have more leeway to challenge his opponent because, unlike the Harris-Trump debate, their microphones will be on (though CBS reserves the right to turn them off if the crosstalk becomes unmanageable).

Perhaps Walz doesn’t have to ask, as the Fox reporter once did, why Vance is so unpleasant. The reporter was more diplomatic than that, asking the angry-looking rich husband and father, “What makes you smile?” Vance responded with typical irritability: “I smile at a lot of things, including fake questions from the media, man.” What a wizard. He followed it up with an obviously forced, fake laugh, as if the internal engine that initiates laughter refuses to switch over to JD (perhaps because he doesn’t use it enough).

Perhaps the best solution to this is to have Walz be his raging, girl-daddy, Gus-daddy, “Coach Walz” charmer against a man who looks like it hurts to smile. This is of course related to the other clear contrast in terms of biography and character. Exaggerating his family’s hardships, Vance fled Ohio (not Appalachia) for Yale and Silicon Valley, and for great wealth; Rather, Walz embodies the Midwestern, small-town family values ​​that Vance instilled in his best-selling feature film. A Hillbilly Elegy. Waltz He stayed in small town Nebraskahe attended 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 he again taught high school and coached football. As a football coach, he was also a teacher advisor for the school’s LGBTQ association. (Even a fresh one New York Times/ According to a Siena poll, Ohioans viewed Walz as “more honest and trustworthy” than their own senator. Ouch.)

For his part, expect Vance to continue to lie and distort Walz’s 24-year record as a Minnesota National Guard. As David Frum rightly notesVance may challenge Walz’s liberal Minnesota gubernatorial record. But he walked away from the “fake” attack “because Vance he himself believes that the “fake” charge is the strongest he can throw. And why does Vance think that? Because he himself is such an extreme fake.”

Indeed.

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

But Vance is mean as a snake and shape-shifting like a chameleon. How can you discover Walz’s greatest vulnerability—and avoid being bitten by the amoral snake? I bet the coach has a playbook for that. I can’t wait to watch it.