Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz talked a huge game during his first appearance with Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democrat running mate. “I can’t wait to debate the guy,” he said of Sen. J.D. Vance, his Republican opponent from Ohio. “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

Walz’s tune has changed so dramatically now that it’s unrecognizable. “Tim Walz is telling people he’s just as nervous about facing JD Vance as he was the Sunday afternoon in August when he warned Kamala Harris in his running mate interview that he was a bad debater,” said CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere. A dozen Walz operatives report the governor is absolutely terrified of “letting Harris down.” His constant mockery of Vance for rising from poverty in Appalachia to graduating from Yale Law School is reframed as a “glimpse into his anxiety” about going up against Vance’s superior intellect.

Other media outlets are also trying to lower expectations for Walz, reminding anyone who will listen that vice presidential debates rarely move the needle.

But Walz was picked precisely because he was supposed to move the needle with an important demographic Democrats are struggling to win over: men. And he was going to do it with a form of masculinity that the media claimed was so effective that it was terrifying for Republicans.

“Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans,” Bloomberg wrote in August. The New York Times said Walz exemplifies “a kind of healthy masculine confidence,” citing his ease speaking about his difficulties impregnating his wife, his desire to be the faculty advisor of a gay club for children, and his decision to put tampons in boys’ restrooms. (It should perhaps be noted that Walz either lied about or was deeply confused about the circumstances of his children’s conceptions.)

Axios said Walz — and Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff — offered a new vision of masculinity, one that emphasizes “tenderness” over “toughness.” (Emhoff, for what it’s worth, caused the end of his first marriage by reportedly impregnating his children’s nanny. It is unclear if the child survived or not.) Both men were praised by Axios for “embracing their second-fiddle roles.”

In The Atlantic, Mark Leibovich wrote with confusion about why Walz — who he described as a “convincing beta figure” — isn’t being used as a media surrogate more. “It’s a bit of a mystery why Walz has largely stopped doing national media, especially given how effective he was over the summer. The campaign seems to have trapped him in the same hyper-protective Bubble Wrap it has placed around Harris,” Leibovich wondered, apparently witnessing a different campaign than the rest of the country.

It’s a real mystery, Mark Leibovich. In his one national interview with sympathetic CNN activist Dana Bash, he said the reason why he lied about his military service was because he struggled with grammar.

The lies are a real problem. Walz overstated the rank at which he retired from the National Guard, and people under his command soon told the story of how he quit rather than face an overseas deployment. That was also different than the story he’d repeatedly told while in Congress. More recently we learned he lied about how many times he’d been to China — he had claimed during a congressional hearing that he’d been there 30 times while it was closer to a still-high 15 occasions. And he even lied about whether or not he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The media keep asserting without evidence that Harris made a good pick with Walz. Of J.D. Vance, who takes on media propagandists all day every day, the media say he was a bad pick. It’s not Walz’s sole fault that his boss lady is struggling, but he’s certainly not helping Harris with what he was supposed to. National and state-based polls vary but Harris has routinely run five to ten points behind Biden at this point in the 2020 race.

Walz was supposed to help with white men who were leaving the Democrat Party in droves. Instead, the problem is growing. Trump is doing better than ever with Latino voters. He’s getting record high support among black men. He has more working class support than ever.

Rather than pick Gov. Josh Shapiro, a competent governor from the must-win state of Pennsylvania, Harris chose Walz, who is a middling governor from a state so blue that it even voted Democrat in 1984. Walz’s alleged midwestern appeal isn’t yielding the desired results in Michigan, where Rep. Elissa Slotkin was caught telling donors that Harris is currently losing. It didn’t have to be Shapiro. Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina or Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona would have been also been an asset and come from states Harris would like to win.

The only argument for picking Walz is that Harris is so insecure about her own weaknesses that she didn’t want to pick someone smarter or more competent than she is.

“Walz is a buffoon. I’m sorry. This guy, he’s the only schoolteacher in America who brags that none of his students can get into an Ivy League school. He’s had one consequential press interaction with our Dana Bash, who asked him about the fabrications in his own resume. And his answer was essentially, ‘Me no understand words good.’ I mean, he is a buffoon,” said Scott Jennings. “They don’t let him talk to the press for a reason.”

During the Oct. 1 debate, Americans who watch will see whether the media characterizations of Vance and Walz are true or not. Expect the media to come out of it looking like liars, again.