Choose-Your-Fact Debating
Terry H. Schwadron
Oct. 2, 2024
The acerbic Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, was supposed to disagree mightily with a more beatific Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota over what our expectations are for the next occupant of the White House to do while in office.
But what we got was a dispute over the nature of what ails us now. not a choice of paths to follow. And, to a certain degree, despite the tension, it proved a much calmer, straightforward set of disagreements than might have been expected.
The two even found several points where they at least said they might agree on a solution, if only partisan politics, eyerolls and ducking the question were not involved. For once, no one could complain about not having enough policy in the debate; they even gave up some expected personal attack to talk programs.
Clearly, if you can’t agree on the problems, there is no chance to agree on solutions. Worse, if the network correspondents posing the topics and moderating the debate are ordered that they are not supposed to introduce reported fact into the debate, any old answer apparently suffices — regardless of truth. “Winning” the debate then falls to judgments about poise and presence, of whether JD Vance looked as if he were wearing eye shadow and whether Walz’s dad jokes bombed.
If you have no umpire, referee, or, in this case, journalist, the pitcher calls everything a strike and the batter calls each throw high and outside. You can’t have an intelligible game, election or country that way — only an expression of might without right or fact.
So, the whole idea of debate as persuasion or as a useful presentation of different, workable approaches to our country’s most-pressing concerns was cockeyed from the start. Add in the perceived need to call the other guy an idiot, the requirement to try bloody one another with smart aleck one liners, the unspoken command to speak more to their ticket mate than to you and me, and the decision by CBS to order Nora O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan against challenging obvious falsehoods just set up an evening of impolite irrelevance.
Still, the moderators found at least one instance to turn the microphones off after Vance objected to Brennan noting a verifiable fact for clarity. She noted that large number of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are in the country legally.
Making a Choice
By the end of night, we were supposed to have a good idea of what our presidential ticket choice will mean for the nation, for a direction. Did we get that?
Certainly, we were handed very different pictures of what we face. Walz repeatedly jumped on Vance remarks about how much better life was when Trump was president, turning them effectively into attacks. Vance, who was rather smooth in his presentations, tried hard to blame Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for almost anything that makes daily life at all difficult.
If you wanted to believe Vance, we are beset by massive immigration issues — the legalities or complexities of the reasons seemed not to matter to his view — struggling under unrelenting inflation, misled by voting fraud, overly beholden to political correctness that somehow keeps us from speaking truths about our society. His preferred world is heavily white, masculine-dominant, and remarkably isolationist from the rest of the world. His vision about the human condition is, well, dark, and openly invites to a singular monarch to lead us to the light.
Vance found it easy to blame past Congresses for not fully executing Trump plans but would not extend that same claim to Biden and Harris. Vance found it simple to turn Jan. 6 into an expression of peaceful protest, a depiction at odds with anyone who watched it unfold, and Walz wouldn’t let him get away with it. Vance sees the threat to democracy about “censorship” of social media misinformation. Vance was unable to say that Donald Trump had lost the 2020 election.
Walz repeatedly referred to Minnesota issues to depict a broader world in which if people are given a chance to succeed, they will, particularly if they accept compromises, that the role of an activist government is to help level the economics of the playing field rather than protecting an insular wealthy class, that health, voting, housing and reproductive decisions all represent rights in our society rather than burdens. In short, as always, he presents optimism.
The solutions they proposed matched their interpretation of the problems they see. If you think immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, you want to stop immigration. If you think it is a problem that red states are wrongly trying to limit voting or to prosecute women for having medical need for treatments covered by abortion laws, you opt for another view.
For me, someone who worked in fact my whole career, the CBS decision to enforce a fact-free political debate — apparently a sop to Republicans who were upset that Donald Trump got corrected a lot more often than Kamala Harris in their debate — ruined the whole night. Of course, Trump veered from truth more often, just as Vance did on his behalf last night.
Just how often did the candidates make it up? You’d have to listen to the opponent to know, apparently. Would that even come close to changing an undecided voter’s mind? Is violent crime up, while the available numbers say it is down? Is an “opportunity economy” or international tariffs going to bring down supermarket prices — the gold standard apparently governing voting decisions? Is liberal tolerance for transgender transitions truly changing life as we know it for more than tiny minority of student athletes.
Though the questions last night were fine, journalism itself may have been the loser of the debate — the utter, ordered-from-the-top reluctance to keep the candidates honest on behalf of a voting public apparently for fear of licensing threats from Trump.
Which Set of Facts?
How about this, debaters. If you must make up “facts,” I won’t vote for you. Period. There’s plenty of room for two debaters to agree that there are too many immigrants passing into our country by various means, exceeding the available city services. The question, then, is what to do about that. Simply asserting that every problem from housing to schools to crime to voting fraud is the result of immigration, as Vance did, is silly, just as to downplay the rising anti-immigrant anger is.
Also, someone ought to tell Vance that no one will withhold a vote for Walz because he hadn’t finished paperwork to retire from the National Guard after 24 hours just short of the final promotions he had or even that he wasn’t going to join his unit in Iraq after having been elected to Congress. It is much more likely that people like me will indeed withhold a vote for Vance, who regularly and repeatedly insults and attacks the childless and sees the future for women bound to roles last heralded in the 1950s.
This election is one in which Trump now is the old guy, and could well die in office, if elected. That means that the vice-presidential choice is important to the country for once. It also means that a negative judgment about Vance just might be a reason to withhold a vote for Trump, something that could affect predicted close results in battleground states.
There was a pattern, whether the questions were about the Middle East or economics or immigration or guns. For Vance, things have gone far off the rails from what the promises were — as if there were no Covid, no worldwide economic issues, no supply line issues. To him, the Trump years were wonderful — though he had to explain that he didn’t used to think so. It is impossible to see how this might resolve, say, how we serve up health care in this country.
Likewise, Walz sees Harris and himself as serious about what government can do about hurricane relief, climate change issues, border arrangements, health issues and individual rights. Walz’s strongest words were reserved for the apparent need of Vance and Trump to rewrite recent history and to demean immigrants as scapegoats
Once again, we believe that two hours of free television time will make things clear enough for voters to decide what they want for the country. It was hard to tell that last night.
##