“I’m a knucklehead at times.”
That pretty much summed up Gov. Tim Walz’s night during the vice presidential debate in New York City on Tuesday. He clumsily evaded questions about discrepancies in his personal record, his flip-flopping, and what the Biden-Harris administration has done for America and ended up with the viral gaffe of the night when he said (hopefully mistakenly) that he’d become friends with school shooters.
It was, in other words, a resounding loss for Walz. And yet, he still managed to be protected from the full force of a disastrous performance — all because the moderators for CBS News decided where to keep the questions and what the tone of the debate was going to be.
No, there was none of the aggressive fact-checking of the presidential debate hosted by ABC News. That’s likely because Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, shut down moderator Margaret Brennan over a point regarding how the Biden-Harris administration had encouraged illegal immigrants to apply for legal Temporary Protected Status, thus making the border crisis worse.
However, there were a number of questions that Brennan and co-moderator Norah O’Donnell didn’t ask Walz — and, in doing so, protected him from a more serious blow to the Harris campaign.
Here are just a few of the things the moderators didn’t bother discussing:
1) Arguably our biggest geopolitical adversary, China
China was brought up by the moderators once, and it wasn’t in the context of trade or Taiwan or the global military race. Instead, it had to do with how Gov. Walz’s stories are, um, often at variance with reality: “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?” co-moderator Margaret Brennan asked, according to the transcript.
Short answer: Not really, if you cared to know.
JUST IN: Tim Walz turns into a stumbling mess, calls himself a ‘knucklehead’ after he was confronted about the lie that he was in Hong Kong in 1989 during Tiananmen.
After going on a 2-minute rant about how good of a guy he is, Walz finally answered the question.
Walz has… pic.twitter.com/rJ324rYytH
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 2, 2024
The rest of the time, if China was brought up, it was by the candidates themselves in an attempt to make a point. There were no questions about why the Biden administration left so many of the Trump administration’s tariffs on China in place yet stubbornly insists it is, as Vice President Harris calls it, a “Trump sales tax.”
There was no talk about Beijing’s military build-up. Nothing about what a Trump or Harris administration would do if there was an invasion of Taiwan, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Nothing about intellectual property theft. Nothing about Beijing’s military presence in the South China Sea. Nothing.
It’s almost as if it didn’t matter.
2) Tim Walz’s stolen valor
Remember that whole stolen valor scandal, where Walz claimed to have retired at a more senior position than he actually did or been on the front lines when he actually wasn’t?
That’s a pretty big deal. If there’s one thing that almost every American — left, right, or center politically — agrees upon, it’s that misrepresenting one’s military service for political gain is reprehensible.
Yet, the only time it was brought up during the entire affair was … during Walz’s rambling answer about why he lied about being in China during the Tiananmen Square protest. That was as close as the moderators came to making a point about Walz’s bogus backstory — and it was hardly even close to the most shameful misrepresentation Kamala Harris’ running mate has made.
3) Ukraine
Do you know how many times the nation-state of Ukraine, which $175 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has been appropriated to defend and where it’s most likely that an ongoing conflict metastasizes into World War III, was mentioned Tuesday, by anyone?
Zero. Nada. Nil.
Not by a moderator, not by a candidate. Both Walz and Vance made one passing mention of Vladimir Putin, but entirely in the context of whether Donald Trump likes the guy. (He doesn’t seem to, really, but that’s hardly the point.)
A just and stable end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict should be what any administration is focused on from day one. Yet, the war didn’t even merit being brought up. Funny, that.
4) The filibuster
Last week, Kamala Harris dropped all pretense and made it clear: She intends to drop the filibuster, the 60-vote supermajority required to pass legislation in the Senate, in order to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land. Instead, this would mean a mere 51 votes would be needed to pass legislation.
Logically speaking, once the filibuster is gone on one issue, it’s pretty much gone on every issue. Remember the golden rule of politics: Do unto your opponent as your opponent does unto you. Also, given how the Senate races are shaping up, it’s not unlikely that the upper chamber is split 50-50 — which means that the vice president, one of the two men on stage, would be the deciding vote.
Were the CBS News moderators biased in favor of Walz during the debate?
Given that the elimination of the filibuster could lead to all sorts of unforeseen consequences — for instance, consider that Barack Obama’s elimination of the filibuster for judicial nominations during his time in office in order to get a few federal judges through is why Donald Trump was able to get three conservative justices on the Supreme Court without any real Democratic support — you would think this would be something the two men who might be delivering the deciding vote to nuke the filibuster would be asked about.
Number of times the word “filibuster” came up during the debate, according to the transcript? Again, zero. Strange, hmm?
5) Any potentially “woke” social issue
DEI training in the military? Pornography in our schools for the purposes of LGBT indoctrination? Parents allowing their children to undergo “gender-affirming care” (puberty blockers, hormones, surgery)? Transgender men being included as women under Title IX regulations? Transgender surgeries for inmates? Men competing in women’s sports?
Zero mentions. Zero mentions. Zero mentions all around.
One of the things that J.D. Vance successfully hammered home on Tuesday was, for all of the promises that the Harris-Walz ticket makes, keep in mind that this is just the Biden-Harris ticket running for re-election. After the first debate went wrong, they hit the refresh button on the electoral browser and the top of the ticket changed, but not much else did. Harris and her team have had three-and-a-half years of track record behind them — and look where it’s gotten us.
And yes, the economy and housing and Haitian migrants are important. But so is all that, too. There was a lot of talk about Jan. 6 and the unbacked assertion global warming was somehow responsible for Hurricane Helene. (Scientists don’t have a consensus about whether climate change makes hurricanes stronger, but that wasn’t the tack the moderators took. Again: Funny, that.)
There was no talk about any of the five issues listed above, all of which will affect both America and the world over the next four years more than the current dock workers’ strike will. But guess which one got mentioned?
Yes, Vance won, and by a significant margin, and the Minnesota governor was a knucklehead throughout. But Walz won in his own way — because, as much as the Ohio senator was the more capable man on stage, the moderators and CBS News picked what they were going to talk about.
The problem is, when the establishment media was picking the topics on which he was being a knucklehead about, the potential damage was limited. He may have come across as a dunce, but CBS News made sure he was a very well-protected dunce.
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