The vice presidential debate is usually a strange adjunct to the process of Americans electing their president, largely thanks to the nature of the office itself.
John Adams said of his two terms as vice president that the US had “in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived” — while the office is “not worth a quart of warm spit” (or words to that effect), according to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s VP John Nance.
The VP’s role is vague, stuck in the no man’s land between the legislative and executive. The choice of candidate has only been particularly significant in years such as 2008 and 2020, when the visibly advancing age of one or more candidates means one bad cold could lead a VP to the most powerful office in the world.
Things feel a little different for today’s debate between Democrat Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Republican Ohio Senator JD Vance. Both have been utilised as attack dogs by their campaigns (in Vance’s case, that’s a bit of a “hat on a hat” situation) and haven’t shied away from personal attacks, making them higher profile than most VPs.
Here are the jibes Vance and Walz have sent each other’s way on the campaign trail.
‘I’m telling you, these guys are weird’
Walz, before he had been selected, put his case forward during an MSNBC TV appearance with a simple line of attack, one that has dominated Democrat talking points since: the candidates on the Republican ticket are weird.
Perhaps realising that flipping out would not do his argument any favours, Vance’s response was, by his standards, fairly restrained:
I think what it is, is two people, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who aren’t comfortable in their own skin, because they’re uncomfortable with their policy positions for the American people … And so they’re name-calling instead of actually telling the American people how they’re going to make their lives better. I think that’s weird … but look, they can call me whatever they want to.
But the sign that the Democrats were really abandoning the “they go low, we go high” approach — which failed them so completely in 2016 — came during Walz’s unveiling as VP when he announced: “And I got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
This was greeted with howls of laughter, referencing the online joke that Vance had confessed in his pre-politics memoir Hillbilly Elegy to having intimate biblical knowledge of his own couch.
‘Stolen valour garbage’
For all the headlines Vance’s “childless cat ladies” attack prompted, the Ohio senator’s focus on Walz has drawn from a rich tradition in US politics: accusing your opponent of inflating their military service record. Called “Swiftboating“, after a successful campaign against Democrat John Kerry, in this case it concerns Walz’s retirement from a military career of several decades in 2005, which critics have claimed was to avoid deployment to the war in Iraq.
“He has not spent a day in a combat zone,” Vance told reporters at a campaign event in Michigan shortly after Walz was unveiled as Democratic VP candidate.
“Do not pretend to be something that you’re not … I’d be ashamed if I was him and I lied about my military service like he did.”
Incidentally, Trump’s campaign co-manager is Chris LaCivita, who played a key role in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group at the heart of the attack on Kerry 20 years ago.
Further, Vance, who deployed to Iraq as a combat correspondent in the marines but did not experience combat, has also faced questions about his representation of his service.
