In Bed With The Right - Episode 33： The VP Debate

00:00:00.000 Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb, and I'm Moira Donegan, and whether we like it or not, we're in a bit

00:00:19.780 with the right. So Adrian, this is a special emergency episode to hash through the carnival

00:00:28.060 of competing masculinities that was the vice presidential debate that we watched

00:00:33.100 together last night. That's right. So we watched it together. I have my notes here. I know you took

00:00:39.340 copious notes. Your notes have already produced a column, which I have not read. I will read that

00:00:44.140 right after this, but I thought I'd keep myself pure just so that, you know, in case we have some

00:00:49.900 competing um analysis my notes say that i was particularly impressed with i am a naked bat

00:00:57.360 oh wait that was uh river jumping around the first 15 minutes were a bit of a blur to be

00:01:03.640 quite honest before she passed out on the couch um but uh yes we watched together adrian's three

00:01:10.060 year old daughter river uh went around running and uh cavorting and jumping off the couch for

00:01:17.820 the first few minutes of the debate, which was, I got to say, a little more dignified than what

00:01:22.820 was happening on stage. I think so. My first big takeaway was I was shocked by how civil and how

00:01:32.620 substantive it was. And by that, I mean to say that it also drove home for me the absolute

00:01:37.660 hollowness of those categories, right? So that's not overly overtly sort of gender related, but it

00:01:42.920 is of course a gendered category both I think civility and and substantiveness right as opposed

00:01:49.100 to sort of emotional um are are deeply gendered categories they were definitely having the

00:01:55.580 outlines of a far more sort of measured debate but it did make me realize like like are these

00:02:01.780 at all useful categories in this day and age is a candidate really getting into the nitty-gritty

00:02:07.140 of policy positions they have no intention of realizing, right? I'm talking about J.D. Vance,

00:02:12.900 or policy positions they actively oppose, right? Is it, is candidates talking with great empathy

00:02:21.620 about people they couldn't in reality give any less of a shit about? Is that really better than 0.99

00:02:27.340 Trump just like, you know, vomiting out the very, very true grievances that are at the heart of

00:02:33.480 their politics i feel like we get for better or for worse a very genuine sense of who donald trump

00:02:39.240 is including of his of his particular brand of masculinity and it seems to me that what we got

00:02:44.400 with jd vance was a very measured very substantive performance of what a first date with jd vance

00:02:52.400 would be like before before you the red flags start popping up right yeah i mean i think the

00:02:57.580 red flags were there if you knew what you were looking for right and as somebody who covers jd

00:03:01.800 vance and has cultivated i gotta say just a like a curdling hatred for the guy um i felt like i

00:03:11.500 could see his agenda coming through but something that really struck me about jd vance was that he

00:03:17.160 was trying to merge the really kind of like blood and soil populism uh and volkish vision of an

00:03:28.240 American future dominated by a pretty explicit and avowed white patriarchy with the rhetoric

00:03:35.280 of compassionate conservatism that harkens back to like the George W. Bush era and partakes quite

00:03:41.080 a bit of sort of the affect of the Christian right. So this is a vision of what a Trumpism

00:03:52.100 might look like in the future when it has to divorce itself from Trump's id and from his

00:03:59.380 carnival-esque sense of humorous entertainment and become a more coherent political program

00:04:06.540 detached from his personal charisma, right? So I think we're looking at J.D. Vance auditioning

00:04:10.940 for 2028. I was going to say, was this him just standing up being like, I am the oldest boy!

00:04:15.540 trying to do trump's vision of you know hierarchy enforcement yeah uh without trump's personality

00:04:28.060 uh and and the and the humorous vulgarity that propelled trump personally to the center of

00:04:34.740 american politics so that was a really interesting tension to me the other tension i think we have

00:04:39.400 our typology on this podcast and we have our three types yeah you know our typology of conservative

00:04:43.900 masculinities encompasses three types we call the pervert the preacher and the creep uh with a

00:04:51.360 pervert being sort of the dave portnoy hugh hefner version uh of like maximalist domineering sexuality 0.85

00:04:59.660 uh often a vulgarian the preacher as being sort of a mike pence mike huckabee type of uh sexual 0.96

00:05:07.500 control via enforced chastity and like ostentatious moral uprightness uh and then the creep being a

00:05:15.900 sort of wounded masculinity of resentment at perceived social exclusion uh and perceived

00:05:22.980 superiority which is often in the form of like eugenics types pronatalism tend to fall into the

00:05:29.720 creep zone which is a very it's a very popular type of masculinity often emboldened by figures

00:05:36.000 from Silicon Valley, which, of course, J.D. Vance is a creature of our of our local our local creep

00:05:42.920 factory, Silicon Valley. You know, it made me realize that a lot of the creeps we've been

00:05:47.220 talking about, which I think J.D. Vance sort of falls between those between two types, the priest

00:05:52.120 and the creep. It highlighted for me how many of the other creeps we deal with on this podcast

00:05:56.560 and who dominate right wing media and politics, they're carnivalesque, they're a bit self-defeating.

00:06:02.440 and here's a guy uh really delighting in um almost sort of daring i think the political press

00:06:10.180 to to kind of point out that he was advocating for stuff that was where he was advocating for

00:06:15.840 the opposite of it on his website while he was speaking right like it certainly was more finesse

00:06:20.940 than i had seen from any of the other protagonists of of the kind of creep uh explosion on the right

00:06:28.320 Vance's slickness and his dishonest deployment of euphemism and his extremely competent rhetorical performance is why he is going to be said to have won the debate.

00:06:44.520 right which really undermines back to your point about like what does civility mean it under it

00:06:50.800 underlies what we are looking for when we are looking at these debates and what their object

00:06:58.280 is right because when you're debating Donald Trump it is very obvious that what you're doing

00:07:06.860 is not having a conversation you are engaging in a domination exercise right I think Kamala Harris

00:07:13.960 understood that very very well at the september debate right she um baited him as she wounded 1.00

00:07:20.780 his ego yet she attacked his not literal but symbolic virility right she um set out to make

00:07:28.660 him seem foolish and small and petty and she succeeded right i think there's something 0.76

00:07:34.260 of that at play in vance's quote-unquote victory last night right he controlled the conversation 0.99

00:07:43.080 he controlled the room he did a very Trumpy uh sort of subversion of objective truth and

00:07:50.100 controlled what the controlling truth was of the conversation they were having right that was all

00:07:55.940 dictated on his terms uh in fact when the moderators tried to intervene with a more like

00:08:03.840 factually grounded account he sort of protested whining said the rules said you guys weren't

00:08:09.100 put a fact check um right and what he was saying he was like declaring epistemic authority over the

00:08:14.880 entire conversation right and he did that quite successfully and that is a domination exercise in

00:08:20.000 itself right but it's a much more subtle polite kind of domination masculinity yeah than trump

00:08:27.740 just like yelling puppet puppet no puppet they're eating the pets that kind of um like kind of

00:08:32.700 boorish more animalistic version at the same time i do wonder whether whether it ultimately worked

00:08:39.280 right i mean like in some way the the working of the refs and the and the kind of obsessive

00:08:49.440 and absolutely well these kind of compulsive and extremely threadbare uh connections to

00:08:57.560 immigration that he kept trying to sort of create i mean i do wonder what that what that reads like

00:09:02.060 I mean, I understand it's a big country, and there are many people who probably saw a very different debate than what you and I watched in San Francisco, but it does strike me that in some way there is still this kind of threadbare quality to it, and I do wonder to what extent the pettiness of his grievances still came through, and I do wonder to what extent Americans find that relatable, right?

00:09:23.300 the fact that like the number one um threat to democracy that he seems to perceive are people

00:09:29.860 getting kicked off of facebook it's like okay so your nazi friends got banned like i don't know man

00:09:35.140 like i don't know if this connects like i'm sure you know at twitter headquarters you know elon

00:09:42.120 musk is like jumping up and down on his mattress but like i i'm not sure that this is something

00:09:47.500 that that, you know, Florida swing voters will be like, oh, yeah, that's that's that is one of my

00:09:54.220 concerns. Yeah, I do think that January 6th and the violent riot and the deaths of five people

00:10:01.420 and the smearing of feces in the halls of the Capitol and the effective end of the peaceful

00:10:09.640 transfer of power in the US. I do think that's a little more salient than Facebook's moderation

00:10:14.860 policies yeah nick fuentes getting kicked off a social media platform yeah yeah um and that

00:10:21.160 speaks to one problem with jd vance that i do think undermines his performance of you know

00:10:30.140 authoritative competence is that he's so creepy um yeah and that and a lot of the things he said

00:10:36.600 although they were very slickly delivered they didn't quite make sense right so like i wanted

00:10:42.860 to draw attention to the fact that um there was a question about housing policy right and adrian

00:10:48.420 you mentioned that uh jd vance like donald trump has like been trying to redirect every question

00:10:56.780 and every issue back into an immigration issue right so when asked about housing he says well

00:11:04.780 mass deportations will reduce demand right um it's like if we simply round up all your neighbors

00:11:12.460 and commit a huge violent ethnic cleansing operation that will make housing cheaper it's 0.88

00:11:20.760 like jonathan swift's the modest proposal it's like what if we simply eat the irish

00:11:24.320 instead of having to like feed and uplift them um yeah except jonathan swift was writing satire

00:11:31.260 right and jd vance is entirely serious um and that that's right weird to me right it doesn't

00:11:37.860 sound like it makes sense um it partakes of extreme violence and racism as a solution for

00:11:49.520 what are like really kind of like dry economic channels or issues right and everything everything

00:11:55.840 he wants to do every grievance or problem that the american people face goes back to a proposed

00:12:05.240 solution of like racist mass violence and ethnic cleansing right it's a it's it's an over determined

00:12:13.900 concept we might say this mass deportation idea um they're putting a little too much

00:12:20.340 onto the racial grievance that i'm not sure it can actually logically bear that's not to undermine

00:12:26.040 or understate the significance of racial grievance to the american id right i think it's like clearly

00:12:31.920 animating a lot of white voters. The CBS moderators said that their network's internal

00:12:40.640 polling suggested that a little bit more than 50% of American voters did in fact support this

00:12:46.300 mass deportation policy, which is extremely disturbing to me. But I don't know how far

00:12:53.740 it is going to play when offered as a solution to these economic concerns. I didn't find it

00:13:00.940 convincing um but you know jd vance's persona like the fact that we are talking about him

00:13:11.760 more than tim walls indicates to me that he won the debate or that he accomplished what he needed

00:13:18.520 to right he dominated the conversation he dictated the terms of the conversation his lies were

00:13:26.460 delivered very smoothly uh with an appealing presentation and a lot of kind of imprecise

00:13:35.020 language and euphemism that is deployed to kind of try and make it uh obscure the violence of what

00:13:42.680 he's actually talking about he reminded me a lot of like corporate speak you know um it's like oh

00:13:47.700 we are making this new department stronger and going into the new era is what they say when in

00:13:54.860 fact, what they're doing is like mass layoffs, right? Which makes me also wonder about the

00:13:59.640 about the effectiveness of it, frankly, like, at some point, euphemism, like, you know, if nothing

00:14:04.440 else, neoliberalism really loves the euphemism. And people have kind of gotten wise to that

00:14:09.820 language. And I noticed that too, especially around the abortion question, where the record

00:14:14.160 is so obvious, I mean, we don't necessarily have to belabor it, because it's just like, you know,

00:14:19.360 TLDR, for those who didn't watch it, he just was just lying. It was just the opposite of what he

00:14:23.940 wants he said the opposite of who he's concerned with he claimed to be concerned with just basically

00:14:29.160 if you were to put a knot at the end of every sentence you'd get a pretty accurate read of

00:14:33.860 what JD Vance actually believes and wants um and and it I mean I wonder like do do um I think it

00:14:41.200 was I think it was pundit bait I think it's for people like Ross Douthat and and and maybe even

00:14:46.900 David Brooks to sort of hang their hats on I don't know if that's who you're playing for at this

00:14:50.960 point right like i do think that like the people who are coming out in droves to support these

00:14:55.640 uh these measures to enshrine abortion as a as a right in state constitutions whether those people

00:15:02.140 really well i mean if you said it's okay right like clearly they are they are finally attuned

00:15:07.540 uh to how easy it is to take away these rights and how how determined one party and not the other

00:15:14.080 appears to be to do that so i'm kind of wondering whether just straight up he was treating it like

00:15:20.600 a culture war issue which some especially male pundits i think still do but i do think that

00:15:26.240 democratic proposition the democratic party's proposition is ultimately to say i don't think

00:15:31.700 that people are going to be swayed by by cultural hat tips right like oh we obviously believe in and

00:15:39.260 we obviously want to protect like no like we know what you did and we know what you intend to continue

00:15:44.060 to do but i did want to briefly i mean we have been talking really about jd vance and i think 0.98

00:16:08.840 you're right that it's a measure that he dominated which brings me to a question what the fuck was 0.97

00:16:14.500 Tim Walz doing uh like what was was that deliberate or was that a fuck-up I couldn't tell 0.98

00:16:20.420 I have one theory so for those who didn't watch it first of you know you did the right thing second of

00:16:28.340 um Walz was extremely agreeable I mean Minnesota and ice does not begin to cover it you know they

00:16:36.540 They kept emphasizing how much they agreed with each other,

00:16:39.880 which I don't know if you want to go for that

00:16:41.780 if you're talking to certified freak on a leash J.D. Vance.

00:16:45.960 But then I wondered whether the whole thing

00:16:49.160 was a setup for the big line of the night,

00:16:53.520 where basically, which I think was the big line of the night,

00:16:55.860 and then certainly from looking at sort of pundit analysis

00:16:58.740 right afterwards, they seem to have understood it that way too,

00:17:01.240 which was that Walls then turned around and said,

00:17:03.540 look, I think we've agreed on a lot of things here today,

00:17:05.720 But this is one thing where we're miles apart.

00:17:07.620 And this was about January 6th.

00:17:09.460 So I kind of was wondering whether in debate prep

00:17:11.680 that he had assumed that January 6th would come up earlier

00:17:15.220 and that the break would sort of happen 20 minutes in

00:17:18.480 as opposed to an hour and 20 minutes in,

00:17:20.320 which I think is where it occurred,

00:17:21.880 which I think would have made this a lot more effective.

00:17:24.940 I think it was still pretty effective.

00:17:26.940 So this is the exchange where he said, basically,

00:17:29.340 did Donald Trump win or lose the 2020 election?

00:17:32.540 And then when J.D. Vance offered a absolutely feely-mouthed non-answer, he called him out and was like, this is a very informative non-answer and kept sort of hammering on that. I wonder whether basically he misimagined or his handlers misimagined what the overall flow of the questions was going to be.

00:17:51.120 i think you might be overthinking it to be honest with you i mean balls told harris during his own

00:17:57.320 vetting that he was a bad debater he was like if you pick me this is not going to go well this

00:18:03.260 particular media event um and uh jd vance was particularly understood as good a good debater

00:18:12.040 right because he is the slick corporate yale law uh odious creep you know that is his background

00:18:19.240 is being a greasy salesman uh what it says on his cv don't don't write to us that's that's just on 0.70

00:18:24.680 the cv yeah you've been injured in an accident do you want an odious creep representing it

00:18:32.700 call 1-800-JD and Tim Walz's appeal right is that he doesn't do this thing this is part

00:18:41.280 of his pitch I think the Harris campaign has been wildly under utilizing uh Walz's authenticity

00:18:49.040 um and his conspicuous unsavviness on uh in the washington uh you know professionally

00:19:01.820 professional dishonesty style right um tim walls is bad at getting on a debate stage and lying

00:19:11.280 and i think that reflects well on him morally right um it also really goes to what this debate

00:19:19.060 really was to me which was the competing visions of post-trump white masculinity right there is

00:19:25.600 the jd vance style which is incredibly domineering and prescriptive about sexuality uh and about

00:19:30.900 family life yeah uh that is incredibly hostile to women's equality and dignity in the public sphere

00:19:37.000 right um and then there is the walls vision which tries to really position itself

00:19:44.720 as a purveyor of homespun goodwill and common sense right um and so in a way

00:19:51.360 walls being unable to um compete on these terms is kind of a symptom of the other things that

00:20:03.920 he's better at right um i think that they are under utilizing those things that he's good at

00:20:09.840 um i mean i don't think i should say that i don't think before people write to us i don't think he

00:20:14.100 had a bad no in fact i i wanted to push back a little on your characterization because i think

00:20:18.840 he got some really good zingers in particularly on abortion and on health care right because this

00:20:26.420 is where he was excellent at distilling the honest truth or the the reality of what jd vance was like

00:20:36.360 spinning hot air around right he was like look you want to talk about quote-unquote giving women

00:20:42.160 more options uh while you're taking away their options you want to talk about states rights and

00:20:47.580 they're having different standards in different states but states do insane stuff which is why

00:20:52.560 amber thurman died in georgia he said if she was living in minnesota where i'm governor she would

00:20:57.540 be alive and that is true right he said human rights control of your over your own body cannot

00:21:03.660 be dependent on geography right that is a good answer he explained the stakes he called out a

00:21:10.460 real human being as opposed to vance's creepy uh talk about his friend who had an abortion when she

00:21:17.180 was in an abusive relationship um which tried to signal his empathy but also he didn't really

00:21:22.680 explain that the laws he supports and his previous statements about abusive relationships in the past

00:21:28.520 would have both deprived her of that opportunity to have the abortion would have compelled her

00:21:33.620 to carry her abuser's child and if he uh had his druthers would have encouraged her to stay with

00:21:41.260 her abuser not just through the trapping of being tied to him with a kid but by his moral vision

00:21:46.360 of such relationships as having to be permanent, right? He opposes default divorce, for instance,

00:21:52.080 and has previously stated that women in abusive relationships should remain in them.

00:21:58.520 So, you know, he could have gone further. I think Walz could have gotten a lot further on that

00:22:02.640 answer, but he made the stakes very clear. And something else happened on healthcare,

00:22:06.960 where the Trump plan is effectively to reverse the incredibly popular Affordable Care Act. It's

00:22:12.860 one of our the vagaries of our politics that the affordable care act is popular when you call it

00:22:17.740 the affordable care act and unpopular when you call it obamacare um but it's the same thing 0.58

00:22:22.940 you live in the dumbest country in the world um but the trump proposal for health care and in

00:22:30.120 fact what he tried to do when he was the president was overturn the aca and particularly yeah uh get 0.99

00:22:37.480 rid of the ACA's most popular reform, which is say that insurance companies have to cover you

00:22:43.060 even if you have a free existing condition, right? The proposal is to create functionally

00:22:47.460 two separate healthcare markets, one for healthy people and one for sick people that's way more

00:22:51.840 expensive, right? And Walls really distilled that. He made that clear. He's like, if you have asthma,

00:22:56.660 if you're a little older, if you're a woman, all of this means it's going to be dramatically more

00:23:00.660 expensive to you. I thought that was really clear, right? So the advantage of Walls being honest is

00:23:07.100 when he has a good answer for things he can contrast his honest and directness with vance's

00:23:16.540 obfuscation euphemism and bullshit right um i think those moments you're right came a little

00:23:23.800 too late in the debate right because the most most of the people who are watching were sort of

00:23:28.840 tuning out by the second half of the debate which is when waltz really gained a lot more confidence

00:23:33.720 and got a lot of these more um pointed replies in but the good news is that a lot of that stuff's

00:23:40.960 going to be clipped um and like put all over social media and probably in some ads right

00:23:47.920 um so you know it's a lot of it will depend on whether people understand jd vance as

00:23:57.000 a slick personal injury lawyer type like used car salesman who's lying to you

00:24:03.760 or whether they kind of buy it and think his dominance and his sense of self-assurance

00:24:11.120 and his control over the conversation represents the kind of masculinity that they relate to and

00:24:18.160 want to put into positions of leadership. Yeah I mean I think that I think it's worth also

00:24:21.600 thinking about um who exactly was the imagined audience here and and so i should say um i think

00:24:28.440 yesterday we sort of said at the beginning like god this has the exact same trajectory as the as

00:24:32.600 the harris trump debate and that like yeah uh clear nerves clear insecurities at the beginning with

00:24:39.340 the democratic uh with the democratic candidate and then with abortion it sort of turns on a dime

00:24:44.700 Now, Harris was able to sustain that and just kind of clobbered Trump.

00:24:50.320 And Walls just didn't bait J.D. Vance really until that very end when you could tell that he could do it.

00:24:58.220 But at the same time, you're right.

00:25:00.340 The strengths of Walls' performance also always struck me as aimed at guys kind of like him.

00:25:08.560 This was an older pitch.

00:25:10.560 The J.D. Vance pitch was, they're kicking people off Facebook, right?

00:25:13.680 which is like again if you're like 38 and your first wife just left you're like yeah that's a

00:25:18.400 big issue for you right like um but like yeah your diabetes your your retirement your housing

00:25:26.000 the appeal was to people in their 50s and 60s in swing states and that may well be you know the

00:25:32.720 the more effective strategy like i think that there are some republican constituencies where

00:25:37.120 i'm sure vance's stock will be now rising if i was to think about watching this in the villages

00:25:43.440 in Florida, I imagine that Walls might have walked away with it, right? Because as you say,

00:25:48.120 the stuff that people really are fired, that they really care about, he was able to be much

00:25:56.100 stronger on. And I agree with you that on abortion, it just really helps. It's not even how they talk

00:26:04.180 about it. It's the fact that their passion is so obviously genuine. J.D. Kance does not give a shit

00:26:09.260 about these women dying and walls was upset he was upset about school shootings he was upset about 0.99

00:26:15.840 about women dying dying from preventable um diseases during pregnancy because they were

00:26:21.940 being denied access to abortion right like it's hard to fake that and and it is but it's also

00:26:28.400 something that democratic politicians used to fake all the time and i think it's a huge asset

00:26:33.420 that neither of these two people appear to have to fake it they're just they are genuinely incensed

00:26:38.840 they're genuinely upset and so are we and i i do think that's uh that's a really effective thing

00:26:45.000 it's also i think i mean it's a weird thing for a gender scholar to say but a kind of an

00:26:50.500 ungendered category right like this kind of like this isn't right right that kind of that kind of

00:26:56.080 knee-jerk indignation almost right like it can be heavily masculinized it can be you know kind

00:27:02.440 of a care economy more sort of feminized gesture in our society but really it's a place where we

00:27:08.260 can where a lot of people can meet right like a grandfather can have this as much as a 17 year old

00:27:14.000 right like they can meet in that concern and in that immediate like this doesn't feel right so

00:27:18.500 i do wonder whether you know in the end given how big it's you know it's a very divided country but

00:27:23.680 it's also a big country and whether walls with that performance didn't pick up more people that

00:27:29.800 he still needed uh than vance did yeah this is really interesting to me the difference between

00:27:34.620 like morality and moralizing right because yeah moral outrage or uh moralized defense is maybe

00:27:44.400 what i'm really talking about has long been the the the realm of the right right especially on

00:27:49.980 these culture war issues right yeah including on abortion right like it's not a choice it's a child

00:27:55.720 and now the politics have changed because there's a tremendous amount of human suffering right it is

00:28:02.640 the pro-choice side that gets to talk about specific people who are being harmed and is

00:28:08.180 the anti-choice side that has to get on the back foot talking about abstract principle, about

00:28:15.120 states' rights, about trying to give mothers more choices while they are in fact taking those

00:28:20.940 choices away, right? He meant the choice to stay home because all the other choices have been

00:28:27.620 removed from you is what he was talking about right right we have the women who choose to put 0.97

00:28:34.460 on those red gowns and the white hats from that hulu show should get to do that you know there 0.90

00:28:40.680 is like sort of a moral change that has followed Dobbs right the the hurt the outrage um that used

00:28:50.100 to belong entirely to these hypothetical fetuses is now belonging to actual living breathing people

00:28:56.540 with names and sentient experiences of the world

00:29:01.060 and investments and dreams in their lives,

00:29:04.040 a lot like you and me, right?

00:29:05.300 And that is much more powerful, I think,

00:29:07.220 than the abstract fetus.

00:29:09.060 And it is entirely on the Democrat side.

00:29:11.440 The other thing that I'm really interested in about

00:29:13.260 is Waltz's style of masculinity, right?

00:29:15.460 You talk about this as being kind of an ungendered category.

00:29:18.420 Waltz is trying to reclaim a caregiving outrage,

00:29:22.600 an outrage on behalf of the more vulnerable

00:29:25.000 who are being hurt as a style of masculinity, right, as opposed to J.D. Vance's style of

00:29:32.740 masculinity, which is claiming the power to determine whose hurt matters. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:29:37.940 That seems exactly right. And it's a different mode for the Democrats, right? They haven't

00:29:44.860 really been doing this before, and you're not really seeing many models of the wall style

00:29:51.260 masculinity elsewhere right i think it's partly because politics self-selects away from people 0.76

00:29:58.840 who give a shit about anybody else right um this is what makes walls unique and i think this is 0.79

00:30:04.600 virtue for the ticket is in seeming like somebody you know who is kind to you who values the things 0.96

00:30:14.240 you value, who has more experiences like you have, who's not a product of these extraction

00:30:22.620 machines like venture capital and Yale Law, he seems a lot more salt of the earth, a lot

00:30:31.560 more recognizable, and his claim of those values doesn't lend itself to a publicized

00:30:38.400 debate because that is a domination exercise.

00:30:41.220 It's not a shared morality exercise.

00:30:42.500 he tried to change it into a shared morality exercise later in the debate waltz did he had

00:30:47.780 limited success and i think those successes should be milked for all they're worth but i think he'll

00:30:52.500 do better if they just put him out among people put him in non-hostile tv settings you know like

00:30:58.620 have him do more media and be shown being this grandfatherly midwestern figure that can contrast

00:31:08.520 with how, you know, Vance's origin story

00:31:13.680 that he leans into so much

00:31:15.240 and then he told several times

00:31:16.420 on the base stage last night.

00:31:17.940 I know, like three times.

00:31:19.420 It's supposed to ground him.

00:31:20.480 It's like, we get it.

00:31:20.760 You wrote a whole book about it.

00:31:21.900 Well, it's supposed to ground him

00:31:22.700 in the authenticity of his previous poverty, right?

00:31:24.920 But he doesn't have that anymore.

00:31:27.080 He's so much a product of these elite institutions.

00:31:32.620 And he seems culturally very alien

00:31:35.540 in a way that Waltz does not.

00:31:38.400 And I think they should lean into that.

00:31:41.380 Yeah, I thought, so this is an interesting point.

00:31:43.700 I think that there were a couple of,

00:31:45.440 and I'm sorry if I'm trying to sort of over-scrutinize

00:31:49.160 what was happening or what the strategy might've been.

00:31:51.220 I thought there were a couple of places

00:31:52.720 where the aw shucks kind of, as you say, 0.87

00:31:57.780 the kind of reliable care masculinity

00:32:00.700 that Walls was projecting was used,

00:32:04.500 he used it to bait J.D. Vance,

00:32:06.120 but J.D. Vance, to his very limited credit, didn't rise to it, right? I thought that it was

00:32:10.500 a little funny that Walls mentioned his service in the, what is it, the National Guard. I think

00:32:16.860 that was bait to get to basically get J.D. Vance to accuse him of stolen valor.

00:32:21.940 You're not a real man, yeah.

00:32:23.760 Exactly. And to be like, look, I served in the best way I could, right? Like he was setting him 0.56

00:32:28.700 up. There were a couple of moments where I thought he was hoping that J.D. Vance might sort of pick

00:32:32.760 at this and kind of, yeah, and kind of put him in his place in this kind of domination ritual in

00:32:37.440 ways that would be visible to a broader audience. It was, and this is what makes, I think, Vance a

00:32:43.300 more advanced form of the creep. He spotted it and didn't go for it. Yeah, I think there

00:32:48.940 is a degree to which Vance has a lot more self-control than Trump does, right? He is

00:32:55.520 smarter than trump in a lot of ways um trump has a unique sort of teflon quality where the power

00:33:05.380 of his id is seen to give him an authenticity even when he's lying all the time but vance doesn't

00:33:11.680 have that right vance vance's control i think can self-control can make him seem inauthentic he

00:33:19.300 reminds me a little bit of hillary clinton that way actually i was gonna say yeah uh yeah it's

00:33:24.360 funny right like we talked about this when we talked about kamala harris in our um kamala harris

00:33:29.180 in our first episode when when when she when when when biden withdrew um and this is a kind of a

00:33:39.260 this is an undisciplined democratic ticket in all the right ways they had they're both messy people

00:33:46.300 they're both real people and yeah i do wonder what happens when you said send like jd vance

00:33:54.360 noted android into the midst of this right like every the three other people in this context

00:34:00.400 says you mean donald trump kamala harris and tim walls they're just like they're odd they're just

00:34:06.200 like they're they're they're people you recognize they're recognizable types but they're not they're

00:34:11.380 messy they're imperfect i agree with you that that vance might well fall victim to the hillary

00:34:17.580 curse ironically enough that like here we see that there is also such a thing as a man who is

00:34:24.000 the man who is too self-controlled who feels a robotic because he he um is is too deliberate in

00:34:32.600 his in his affect regulation and in his his rhetoric you know i think there are some ways in

00:34:39.120 which that could go wrong you know since through august and september what i think are the um

00:34:46.920 more controlled more polished more risk-averse uh elements of the democratic party have really

00:34:54.840 seeped control of the harris walls ticket and have sort of tamped down on its irreverent

00:35:01.280 messy fun quality that it had in those first few weeks uh i also think that you know as israel 0.83

00:35:08.100 invades and bombs every country in its region uh gender and the salience of masculinity to the role 0.80

00:35:17.940 of commander-in-chief could work against kamala harris um but you know there i think you've got 0.61

00:35:26.360 a point that there is something appealing about their messiness and distrustful about uh jance's

00:35:33.700 Vance's self-control, and we'll just see how it all plays out over these next shockingly few days

00:35:42.040 until this election finally happens. Well, thank you so much for talking me and talking

00:35:47.120 our listeners through this, and people should check out Maura's column, which I have not read,

00:35:52.620 but which I will now read and see what else I missed, but thank you so much, and we'll,

00:36:00.620 As always, we are, whether we like it or not, In Bed with the Right.

00:36:17.720 In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

00:36:22.740 Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

00:36:25.180 Our theme music is by Katie Lau.

00:36:26.860 Our producer is Megan Kalfas.

In Bed With The Right - October 03, 2024

Episode 33： The VP Debate

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