Tim Walz’s Homer Simpson schtick melts down under the debate spotlight

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has spent so much of his time in the limelight as Kamala Harris’s running mate that the Democratic vice presidential nominee was hardly recognizable when he showed up to debate Republican running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). Walz was a shadow of the smiling, strutting, Cheshire Cat of a caricature that the public has gotten used to seeing. Instead, his gaze was vacant, his face growing redder, and his expression utterly perplexed.

And then he opened his mouth.

Jesus Christ himself would struggle to defend the disaster that has been Harris’s tenure in the White House, and to his credit, Walz kicked off his first answer, admittedly to a softball typical for the CBS anchors, with a fairly anodyne commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself from the barrage of rockets fired at it from Iranian terrorists. Walz indeed did as well as anyone would expect him to do.

But Walz, an identity politics hire chosen specifically because he was a mediocre Midwestern white male to stand small in contrast to Harris, did as well as anyone would expect of such a self-congratulatory amateurism. He failed to recall the word Gaza and froze up repeatedly throughout the most rehearsed of his answers. He spent Vance’s answers either scribbling over his notepad like the last student struggling over Scantron or gazing desperately as the Ohio senator cooly delivered detailed answers straight into the camera. None of this is to mention when Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell briefly even pushed back on Walz’s pathological lies over his past coziness with the Chinese Communist Party.