Walz’s Moral Clarity on Abortion Rights. . .

Overall, Walz came off as nervous and overprepared, often cycling through talking points rather than engaging with what Vance was saying or laying out a clear narrative. It wasn’t a disaster for him, but it was a mediocre performance, especially for someone with Walz’s well-deserved reputation for being “good on TV.”

His worst moment came when he was asked about having claimed that he was in Hong Kong “during” the Tiananmen Square protests, when in reality he didn’t show up until a couple of months later. He could have shrugged it off, saying he’d meant to say that he was in Hong Kong in “the aftermath of” the protests. He could have even said that this was thirty-five years ago, and he’d misremembered the exact timeline. If he’d said either of these things, no one would have remembered the exchange by the time the debate was over. Instead, he gave a long stonewalling answer that made him look far worse.

Meanwhile, Vance was smooth and confident, and while he told a few truly jaw-dropping lies, he mostly got away with it. He brazenly claimed, for example, that he’d never supported a national abortion ban.

In fact, the discussion of abortion rights was the one part of the debate where Walz clearly dominated. Vance defended the Trump campaign’s position that this should be a states’ rights issue, and got in a jab or two at Walz’s allegedly “very radical pro-abortion” position, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it. If anything, he seemed to be quite aware that the conservative position on this issue is deeply unpopular, and his priority was to limit the damage.

Walz, meanwhile, went on the attack. He was eloquent. He was well-informed. And he showed every sign of being driven by genuine moral passion.

At one point, Vance said that “we have a big country and it’s diverse” and that California, for example, “has a different viewpoint on this than Georgia.” Why not let both states legislate their own point of view?

Walz shot back with a story about Georgia:

Well, let me tell you about this idea that there’s diverse states. There’s a young woman named Amber Thurmond. She happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state. Because of that, she had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care. Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth.

This wasn’t his first such example. Earlier, he’d talked about Amanda Zurawski, a “young bride in Texas” who had a “complication, a tear in the membrane.” Afraid of the legal consequences, the doctor wouldn’t abort. So Amanda went home, got sepsis, “nearly dies,” and now may be unable to have children. And he brought up Hadley Duvall in Kentucky, who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather. Should she not have been allowed to decide what to do about the pregnancy because of which state she was in?

Walz eloquently summed it all up with a simple question. How, he asked, “can we as a nation say that your life and your rights as basic as the right to control your own body is determined [by] geography?”

. . . and Moral Confusion on War and Peace

The fact that Vance was so lackluster and Walz so good on this topic surely says something about the politics of the moment. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision made it possible for conservative state governments to severely restrict bodily autonomy in a country where the public overwhelmingly disagrees with that position. That makes it a powerful electoral weapon for the pro-choice party.

But it also reflects a more basic political reality. Abortion is an issue where there are clear bright lines between the parties. On many other questions, the differences are more complicated. And on the most important question broached all night, the candidates’ positions were barely distinguishable at all. If, this time next year, American kids are coming back in flag-draped coffins, everyone should remember this part of the debate.

Moderator Margaret Brennan’s first question of the night was, “Would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran?”

Neither candidate ever quite answered. Both of them, though, said enough to make it clear that they would do nothing to discourage Israel from starting an all-out war that could easily see US troops dying in Iran.

Each seemed to be trying to out-hawk the other. Vance accused the Biden-Harris administration of unfreezing Iranian assets (which the United States had illegally seized in the first place). Walz accused Trump of not issuing a tough enough response to Iranian missile strikes during his administration.

Both seemed to think the Israeli/Palestinian conflict started on October 7, and that Hamas’s actions that day came out of nowhere rather than being one link in a very long chain of atrocities and counter-atrocities. Both spoke of Israel’s need to “defend itself” (Walz) and “keep their country safe” (Vance), but neither so much as hinted that Palestinians (or Lebanon, or Iran) had any sort of relevant right to safety or self-defense.

This despite the fact that the Israeli military has expelled literally millions of Palestinians from their homes in the last year and created the world’s largest population of child amputees in tiny Gaza. Everything else — the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel, Israel’s destruction of civilian neighborhoods of Beirut in retaliation, the Iranian missile strikes in relation for that, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that started the night before the debate, and the conflict between Israel and Yemen — is downstream of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

All other parties to the conflict have said again and again that they would stop if there was a cease-fire in Gaza. And it’s not exactly a mystery what would achieve this cease-fire. If the main supplier of arms to Israel, the United States, was willing to cut off the supply, the firing would be a lot more likely to cease. But instead, both tickets seem to be content to sleepwalk into an increasingly chaotic regional war.

The closest either of them came to directly answering the Iran question was Vance saying, “Look, it is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe.” But is it likely that the United States would refrain for long from directly involving itself in an all-out war between Israel and Iran?

The Pro-War Consensus

Vance has, in the past, scored points because of his retroactive opposition to the invasion of Iraq, which happened twenty years before he entered national politics. But a US war in Iran could be disastrous on a scale that would dwarf George W. Bush–era wars in the Middle East. The Taliban never had full control of Afghanistan. Iraq had never been able to rebuild after its devastation in the first Gulf War, and by the time the United States invaded, the country’s defenses were severely degraded from many years of bombing. And both of those countries were deeply diplomatically isolated.

Iran, by contrast, is allied to Russia, and it has a real and functional army as well as various allied forces around the region like Hezbollah. A war with Iran could be a bloodbath. How hard is it to say, “No, I would not support a war with Iran”?

And where’s the moral passion Walz showed on abortion rights here? How many pregnant Palestinian women, for example, have had miscarriages or died because hospital after hospital, up and down Gaza, has been blown up by the Israel Defense Forces? Does Walz know any of their names, the way he can rattle off the names of Amber Thurmond, Amanda Zurawski, and Hadley Duvall?

There are many issues where the two parties are different. On this one, infuriatingly, we might as well only have one.