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Debate preview: Tim Walz’s five biggest lies
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) face off Tuesday in the first and only vice presidential debate of the 2024 cycle. When you live waist-deep in politics, it can be easy to assign outsized importance to vice presidential debates. It’s worth remembering that the people who haven’t yet decided who to vote for are the same kind who will not be spending their Tuesday night watching a governor debate a senator. This reality means these sorts of events more and more resemble a team sport, with different sections cheering for their man rather than watching to learn a little more about the choice.
Of course, this time could be different. The race’s dearth of top-of-ticket debates, Walz and Kamala Harris’ bunker strategy, and the appearance that this is the last debate of the cycle combine to mean more attention than maybe ever before will be paid to the contest.
Walz’s politically calculated lies fly in the face of the folksy 'Coach Walz' reputation Democrats have worked so hard to mint from scratch.
In addition, the Trump campaign has entered popular culture so thoroughly that AI images and techno remixes can carry a contentious line about “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats” to a level of internet fame even those elusive undecideds can’t help but notice. That sort of viral success can work to overcome the reality a paywalled Rasmussen Report exposed: that only 1% of the presidential debate audience had yet to make up their minds.
The reality for Democrats is that Walz has more to lose than Vance. While Democrats across the country have had to answer for presidential policy pronouncements Harris herself refuses to explain, Walz has joined his running mate in the shadows. An Axios analysis published Sept. 19 showed Vance beating Walz on media appearances many times over, on national TV (24-1), local TV (15-1), press conferences (12-0), and national newspapers (8-0).
Worse yet, the man Democrats hoped to portray as a Homer Simpson-esque, all-American dad has repeatedly stumbled over a career spackled with politically calculated lies — just the sort of thing the Vance team will be prepared to remind the country about in the debate. Here are five that might be making an appearance Tuesday evening.
Stolen valor. This is the most obvious line of attack, though the corporate media has done its best to claim it just ain’t so. Most reporters are so far removed from military service that weekends in the National Guard seemed indistinguishable from service in a combat zone. Unfortunately for the Democrats, a decade’s worth of interviews and speeches show Walz making explicit and false claims about his retiring rank, his reasons for resigning, and his nonexistent service in a war zone. His fellow soldiers have the receipts to back it up.
What began as a major Democratic talking point quickly faded to the background. Memories of John Kerry’s swift boat escapades still sting. By the time he sat sheepishly beside his boss for their big Dana Bash interview on CNN, he excused a decade of stolen valor as a grammatical mistake.
Then there’s that time he blamed the mayor of Minneapolis for the deadly rioting in the city. No joke. He went to the torched city, where a police precinct was among dozens of buildings destroyed by a criminal mob, and slammed city officials. When the mayor produced his text messages and phone calls begging for the governor to send in the National Guard, Walz’s people said those don’t count as a formal request. Grammar and formal requests. Truly amazing stuff.
And then there’s the whole IVF thing. In-vitro fertilization is a big part of Walz’s identity. It featured prominently in his Democratic National Convention debut as a personally outraged story to highlight Republicans’ push to outlaw the fertility treatment. Democrat-aligned reporters lapped it up. NBC aired a story about his family’s “seven-year IVF journey.” Taxpayer-funded NPR called Walz “a new kind of reproductive messenger.”
The problem is that the whole thing was a lie. Walz and his wife never used IVF, and none of their children were conceived through it. Further, no Republican of any note has called for outlawing the process. Yet another blatant political lie. Politically helpful lies are a near-constant for Walz.
There’s that time he claimed schoolchildren in Minnesota didn’t miss more than 10 days of school during COVID. In reality, he ordered the schools closed for the rest of the school year.
He also falsely alleged that Trump wants to create a government agency to monitor women’s pregnancies to prevent abortions. Walz said this agency was the brainchild of the conservative Project 2025. Trump has never suggested any such thing. Nor is there any mention of it in Project 2025’s proposals, which, in any case, are not a part of Trump’s campaign and have been repeatedly disavowed by the Republican nominee.
None of these are folksy exaggerations. As the Spectator’s Ben Domenech pointed out in the magazine’s podcast, they bear no resemblance to, say, Joe Biden’s omnipresent yarns. They are all politically calculated lies, and they fly in the face of the folksy “Coach Walz” reputation Democrats and their media friends have worked so hard to mint from scratch.
“If Walz were just claiming he used to wear an onion in his belt (it was the style at the time), his aggressive fictionizing would have a certain charm,” Domenech wrote. “Instead, it reads as a bizarre aspect to a newly nationalized political character, one who tells lies to gain advantage rather than just entertain the bored voter.”
Together, they form a calculated habit. If Vance decides to lean into them Tuesday night, things could get spicy fast.
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