About half an hour into last night\u2019s vice-presidential debate, the CBS anchor Margaret Brennan turned to Tim Walz and asked a question that the Minnesota governor had to have known would come. \u201cYou said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989,\u201d she said, noting that new reporting suggests Walz didn\u2019t go to Asia until months later. \u201cCan you explain that discrepancy?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLook,\u201d Walz began, \u201cI grew up in small, rural Nebraska, a town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies \u2019til the street lights come on.\u201d He went on to explain how, as a teacher, he\u2019d taken young people on educational visits to China. \u201cI have poured my heart into my community. I\u2019ve tried to do the best I can, but I\u2019ve not been perfect, and I\u2019m a knucklehead at times.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kamala Harris chose Walz, most observers have agreed, for his Everyman aesthetic and fluency in retail politics. And so far, the affable former high-school football coach and hype man for Menards has mostly received glowing reviews. He is much more adept than his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance, at engaging with voters as a regular guy.<\/p>\n
Which is why he should have had a better answer last night. And Walz\u2019s failure to provide a coherent, succinct correction for an entirely predictable inquiry about one of his flubs suggests ill-preparedness for a spotlight that is only going to get brighter\u2014and harsher\u2014in the weeks to come.<\/p>\n
Vance delivered a slick debate performance, though it would be a mistake to call it a \u201cwin\u201d when he engaged in so much sinister revisionist history<\/a>. In what would turn out to be the most striking moment of the night, Vance refused to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. The senator from Ohio also mischaracterized Trump\u2019s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Vance claimed, falsely<\/a>, that he\u2019s never supported a national abortion ban.<\/p>\n Walz, for his part, deployed a few effective jabs. \u201cThat\u2019s a damning nonanswer,\u201d he said simply, after Vance\u2019s election-denial tap dancing<\/a>. Another time, in an exchange about gun-violence prevention and mental-health care, Walz looked right at the camera and said, \u201cSometimes it just is the guns. It\u2019s just the guns.\u201d<\/p>\n But when you\u2019re running a campaign against liars and bloviators, it becomes all the more important not to lie or bloviate. And the Walz fumble on China was sloppy enough\u2014and early enough in the proceedings\u2014to feel significant. After his first answer, CBS\u2019s Brennan gave him another chance to clarify. \u201cAll I said on this was, I got there that summer\u2014and misspoke on this,\u201d Walz said, before taking a long pause. \u201cSo I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.\u201d<\/p>\n The bungled response made the moment worse than it needed to be. And calling himself a \u201cknucklehead\u201d came off more cringeworthy than charming. But it wasn\u2019t the first time Walz has been ensnared by his own nonanswers. In August, a video surfaced on social media in which Walz referred<\/a> to weapons \u201cthat I carried in war\u201d to explain his support for an assault-weapons ban. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, but was never deployed to a combat zone. Asked about it in a sit-down interview, Walz had an exchange with CNN\u2019s Dana Bash that followed a now-familiar pattern.<\/p>\n \u201cYou said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed, actually, in a war zone. A campaign official said that you misspoke. Did you?\u201d Bash asked.<\/p>\n \u201cI speak candidly. I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about our children being shot in schools and around guns. So I think people know me. They know who I am,\u201d Walz said.<\/p>\n Bash pressed. \u201cDid you misspeak, as the campaign has said?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI said we were talking about\u2014in this case, this was after a school shooting\u2014the ideas of carrying these weapons of war,\u201d Walz replied, \u201cand my wife, the English teacher, told me my grammar is not always correct.\u201d<\/p>\n Some Democrats dismiss these fumbles. \u201cSo he had a bad answer to something that happened 35 years ago. Next!\u201d the political strategist James Carville told me. That\u2019s right in the sense that Walz\u2019s remarks seem more slippery than nefarious. He isn\u2019t obfuscating, as Vance is, about the results of the 2020 election.<\/p>\n Still, Walz\u2019s sloppiness highlights a bigger problem with media accessibility and versatility for the Harris campaign. Both Democratic principals have been reticent, seemingly reluctant to engage with the press; lately, Walz especially has been tightly bubble-wrapped. Unlike the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Walz does not regularly appear on cable-news programs or spar with reporters at campaign events<\/a>. He is out of practice, and it shows.<\/p>\n