Kamala Harris did so well following my advice before her debate last month with Donald Trump that I thought I'd offer the same service to her running mate Tim Walz for his debate with J.D. Vance this evening.
You may recall that on the day of her debate, I suggested that Harris be mindful of her facial expressions which would be visible on the split/screen during Trump's time on the microphone. Be careful I said to her, not to do what Joe Biden did during his July debate:
Hers should be a look of dismissal rather than of abject horror which lost a lot of points for Joe Biden ten weeks ago.
She took my advice and ran with it, way beyond I could ever imagine. I went on:
We all know that Trump absolutely relishes being thought of as a badass, as a tough guy who takes no prisoners. But brushed off of as irrelevant, that drives him crazy, possibly to the point of spontaneous combustion.
I think her high point in the debate came early on when she emotionally and eloquently argued about how the Supreme Court's Dobbs Decision overruling Roe v. Wade has been an unmitigated disaster which has put the lives of scores of American women in jeopardy, while I might add, not reducing the number of abortions in this country, which I'm assuming is the whole point of the Pro-Life movement.
But the turning point of the debate came when she brought up massive snooze fests, otherwise known as Trump rallies. You can call Trump a thief, a grifter, an adjudicated rapist, a convicted felon, a wannabie dictator, an existential threat to democracy, or a whole slew of other really terrible things, and he doesn't bat an eye. In fact I think Trump takes those accusations as compliments.
But suggest that people are so bored by his stream-of-consciousness ramblings that they leave his rallies in droves while he's still speaking, and he goes apeshit. He may not have spontaneously combusted as I predicted, but he did the next best thing, going off on a diatribe about how immigrants, legal ones at that, are stealing people's pets in Ohio and eating them for supper. When challenged, he doubled down, insisting it's true because he saw it on TV.
If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears, I wouldn't have believed it either.
As has been well established, the pets of Springfield, Ohio are perfectly safe.
That didn't stop Trump's running mate from running with the story of Haitian immigrants dining on the Fidos and Whiskers of Ohio. In his defense, Vance said it was justifiable to report a false story in order to bring home the gravity of the situation of illegal immigration.
But here's my question: if illegal immigration is so bad, why does he have to make up stuff to point that out?
So here's my advice to Tim Walz:
Run with it. Be relentless in pointing out that Trump and Vance are lying to the American public and not even caring enough to hide it.
If they're lying so openly about their strongest issue, what's stopping them from lying about every other issue?
They say that illegal immigrants are causing untold harm to the American people by taking American jobs, that's a lie, they're not.
They say crime is up in the country, mainly because or undocumented immigrants. That's a lie, crime in general is actually down from the days of the Trump administration and all the evidence shows that immigrants commit far fewer crimes (understandably so) than do native born Americans.
They say that the Biden/Harris administration wrecked the U.S. economy. That's a lie, the economy they inherited from Trump caused in large part, but not entirely by the pandemic was in shambles, in danger of slipping into a recession. That did not happen, and the biggest concern about the economy, inflation which was a direct result of the pandemic and is a world-wide problem, has decreased in this country to the point where the Federal Reserve last week deemed it safe to lower interest rates that were implemented in order to help bring down inflation.
These are Trump and Vance's supposedly "strong" issues which when you look closely at them, are based upon garbage information and outright lies. That's not to mention their "weak" issues, lot sof doozies there too.
Tim Walz shouldn't be afraid of confronting these issues, nor should he or Harris be afraid of owning the accomplishments of the Biden/Harris administration, because the other side's portrayal of them as an abject failure, and their "plans" to improve the lives of everyday Americans, is nothing by smoke, mirrors, and a ton of lies.
Naturally, Walz isn't going to win over the base, if Trump told them Joe Biden is currently waging a zombie apocalypse against the United States and has appointed Kamala Harris as its Tzar, they'd believe him.
But if Walz can convince the handful of voters in a small number of states who will ultimately decide this election that there is nothing but bullshit to back up Trump's and Vance's campaign promises, maybe this national nightmare of ours will be over.
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