BY MAX BURBANK | The key question, the lens through which you have to view the October 1, 2024 debate between Junior Senator from Ohio JD Vance and Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz is: Did it matter? This VP debate, or honestly any VP debate? I gotta say, “NO.”

Not much anyway, maybe not at all, even in a stomach-buckling, nail-masticating race as close as this one. I mean, how many VPs since Spiro Agnew (since that’s the earliest VP I can remember) can you name? If you’re part of the demographic that reads anything I write, possibly all of them, I guess. So OK smart guy, how many VP candidates can you name since Nixon vs. Humphrey? The VP picks who lost? Google can tell you, but I can’t.

There’s pretty much just one moment in the modern history of VP debates anyone even remembers—when Lloyd Bentsen roasted Dan Quayle (who’d been comparing himself to JFK on the stump), saying, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Be honest here, did you even remember the guy who delivered that sick burn’s name? I almost needed a power winch to drag it out of my memory hole, and even then, I spelled it “Benson” in the first draft. Also? Bentsen may have absolutely crushed Quayle, but the Dukakis/Bentsen ticket LOST! That VP debate, memorable as the moment may have been, inarguably, empirically, DIDN’T MATTER!

So now that we have that established, the only question left, and it’s a critically important one… Who won?

Who won this debate that will not demonstrably move any needles in any direction? The answer isn’t Vance or Walz, it’s you, the Likely American Voter, and also, was it ever really about winners and losers, or is it about this journey we’ve all been on together?

No, I’m totally kidding. JD Vance won. At least that’s what I’m afraid of.

And why do I think he won? Because Vance understood something I don’t think Walz did. The winner of a debate is the person

who most successfully creates the appearance of being the winner. Vance looked calm, collected, and personable for most of the evening. Sure, his content was a soupy stew of boilerplate bromides and outright lies, but his demeanor was that of a man who was saying reasonable stuff that meant things. Meanwhile, Walz often looked uncomfortable, anxious, and a little perplexed, as people trapped in the same room with JD Vance often seem to.

I know, that’s a harsh pill—but listen: Political debates are not like High School Debate Team debates. You can score them if you want, but it’s pointless. Yes, the participant’s content matters, but just a little, and way, way, WAY less than performance.

JD Vance came into the debate with a crystal-clear idea of the one job he had to do, which was not be JD Vance just about as hard as he could, and he did that. Mostly. He didn’t tell outrageous, transparent lies specifically tailored to get Haitian refugees killed. He deigned to answer questions from not one but two moderators who were of the female persuasion without demanding they provide proof of offspring. His general tone was far less whiny, aggrieved, smug, and superior than it has been pretty consistently from the moment he entered politics until around the first second of the debate. So points for all of that. He almost held it all together—but there was a tell.

You know how professional poker players talk about a “tell?” Some tiny little thing an opponent does that gives them away, lets you know that while they may look cool, they’re bluffing? JD Vance has a tell that lets you know that even when he’s doing his best impression of someone who is not JD Vance, he’s still an asshole.

It’s the tilted head side-eye. He did it over and over. I went through the footage, and the first example I could find came early, less than 10 minutes in. Vance tilts his head to the left, shoots his eyes left, and gives just the tiniest, pert little suggestion of a smile. And it makes NO SENSE! Walz is talking about how when Iran shot down an American aircraft in international air space, Trump tweeted instead of engaging in any sort of official capacity, like, you know, a normal president would. Vance’s facial expression and body language are uninterpretable as a response. He looks like he’s saying, “Aren’t I the naughty little boy? I just took a bite out of the donut you told me not to eat because it would spoil my appetite. But we both knew I was going to take a bite, didn’t we? You watched me do it, I wanted you to see. And you know what? I don’t want my dinner now. Am I not a devilish rascal?”

About a half hour in, Walz is asking the viewers if they think it’s fair that they pay taxes every year while Donald Trump hasn’t paid any federal taxes in more than a decade, and Vance in the split-screen does his coy little pursed-lipped side-eye! Who is that for?! What the hell is over there, JD? What are you trying to convey?

He kept doing it and doing it, at one point in my notes I literally typed, “OK, WHAT THE FUCK IS IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER OF THAT ROOM?!?” And I gotta say, by the ninth or tenth time he side-eyed, I was pretty damn sick of it. So maybe… perhaps I was being too generous giving Vance the win on performance. Or maybe I wasn’t giving the audience enough credit. I mean, the further we got into the debate, the clearer it became that while he might not be coming across as a petulant, incel adjacent, misogynistic, bag-of-lies weenie boy, he was still exactly that guy.

And then, quite late in the game, the last question before closing statements, the line everyone will remember went to Walz, who asked Vance point blank if he believed Donald Trump lost the election in 2020. And JD Vance responded… “Tim,” using his opponent’s first name like it was some kind of power move, “I’m focused on the future.”

It was a moment of spectacular weakness. He won’t answer the question, not because Trump would throw him to his base like a Christian covered in steak sauce to a Colosseum full of lions, but because he’s… you know… focused. On the future.

“That,” Walz obliged, “is a damning non-answer.” He didn’t add “Cowardly.” He didn’t need to.

So maybe Vance didn’t “win.” Maybe his smirking side-eye pissed off a lot of viewers and not just me, maybe that “damning non-answer” smack down left people thinking, “Hey! Walz is right! That was a non-answer! Maybe most of what Vance said all evening was the exact same kind of non-answer. Maybe the debate was a draw. Or maybe viewers could see that while Walz was less polished than Vance, he wasn’t just performing a piece about being a decent, normal human being.

I don’t know who won. How the hell would I know?

And I stand by my statement that nobody cares much at all about Vice Presidents and their debates. And I said right out the gate that the key question was, “Does this debate matter?”

I’ll tell you what I would have counseled Tim Walz to do in the debate, and maybe it’s a stupid idea but it’s what I think every surrogate in the Democratic party should be talking about every damn day until the election.

Donald Trump is 78 years old. If elected, he would be the oldest President ever on Day One. The average life expectancy for white, American males is around 74.5. That orange leather sack of narcissism and bile is three and one-half years beyond his sell-by date. It is simply an actuarial, statistical likelihood that, if elected, he will expire or become incapacitated in office, leaving James David Vance with the nuclear codes and a SCOTUS-granted license to commit any crime imaginable.

If that doesn’t scare you enough to matter… well, it’s no surprise since. After all, the main purpose of having Vice Presidents has been the same throughout American history and we don’t seem to have caught on yet. And until 1804, at least Vice Presidents were the people who got the second largest number of votes and not bitter misogynists plucked by presidential contenders from whatever social media bro-tubs they’d been marinating in like angry, wrinkled balls of off-white, tainted mozzarella. Because that’s what JD Vance is, and no single nice-ish, normal-ish debate performance can change that.

This is me, hoping against hope that lots of people saw what I saw. This is me, hoping against hope that this time, a vice-presidential debate mattered.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Chelsea Community News welcomes back clever columnist, dyspeptic pundit, and pants fancier Max Burbank, whose My CoviDiary column (published with startling regularity in 2020 and the early months of 2021) looked at the pandemic in all of its forms and functions and, as time went on, as a blunt weapon wielded by then-President Trump. Click here for December 2020 content. Click here for the November entries. Click here for the October entries. Click here for the September entries. Click here for the August entries.  Click here for the July entries.  Click here for the June entries. Click here for the May entries. Click here for the April entries. Click here for all March entries . My CoviDiary is reprinted, with the author’s permission, from its original publication via maxburbank.wordpress.com. Oh, and by the by, spicy language abounds, should you choose to proceed ahead.

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