[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]

Gov. Tim Walz may not have been in Tiananmen Square, but tonight he got hit by a tank.

Walz lost on issues, to which the Harris-Walz campaign has a congenital allergy, he lost on style, defaulting to word salads about being a regular guy from a small town whenever a question (like lying about Tiananmen Square when he was befriending members of China’s Bureau of Foreign Affairs) made him uncomfortable, but he lost on television.

Kamala had gotten rid of one confused old white man only to replace him with another.

Not since the Kennedy vs. Nixon matchup has there been a candidate who performed so much worse when people could see his face. And Walz’s bugged-out eyes, quivering apple pie chin, and the profile of a decaying jack o’lantern lost the debate more eloquently than any words 

They say that the radio audience that listened to Nixon and Kennedy debate had a different impression of who won than viewers who caught the black-and-white show. Unfortunately for the governor, few people are listening to a radio vice presidential debate once the sun goes down in Minneapolis. Or are doing much of anything except locking themselves in their homes with a loaded shotgun and a map of the quickest way out past the zombie hordes.

That is to say Gov. Walz performed badly. He performed badly according to CNN, Frank Luntz’s focus group of random schlubs eager to appear on cable news at 9 PM and the major media which quickly pivoted to discussing something, anything else, while pretending nothing happened. Only MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called the debate for Walz on account of her conviction that J.D. Vance was really a Russian spy named Sergey trying to seduce her.

Walz need not have really shown up. The talented moderating team of Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell put in their late bid for the presidency and vice presidency by debating Vance more effectively than Walz had. It helped that they had control of the microphones.

Brennan and O’Donnell, whose greatest previous taste of power had been yelling at CBS News interns for bringing them the wrong kind of coffee, joyfully smirked at the power to win a losing argument by announcing that Vance’s microphone had been cut off.

CBS News had agreed not to fact-check the candidates. Since they’re a mainstream media outlet, it was obvious that they were lying. You can’t blame network news since lying all the time becomes a habit and its execs even lie in their sleep. Network newsmen have all the credibility of car salesmen and death row inmates finding religion in time for their last appeals. 

Days before the debate, CBS News went ahead and violated the agreement by announcing that it would put up QR codes linking to fact checks on its own website. Since no one outside of concert stadiums uses QR codes or visits CBS News, this wasn’t much of an issue. But it didn’t take long for Brennan and O’Donnell to make the most of their 15 minutes by intervening to falsely claim that global warming will doom us all and that illegal invaders aren’t a problem.

And then cutting off Vance’s microphone when he successfully fact-checked their fact checks.

But the gross interventions by America’s leading wine aunts were mild compared to a debate structured around issues that no one cares about outside D.C., NYC, and USC, and in which Vance was being constantly pressed to defend something while Walz was mostly given free rein to tell everyone that he was just a small town boy who loved to ride Huffy bikes to China.

Unfortunately for Walz, O’Donnell, and Brennan, J.D. Vance was up for it. 

CBS News has brought in two female moderators with the game plan of doubling down on the Harris-Walz campaign strategy of attacking Vance as an anti-woman abortion extremist. 

That strategy failed. So did all the other ones except cutting off Vance’s microphone. And when you can only win a debate by cutting off your opponent’s microphone, you’ve already lost.

Walz might have lost more decisively if he had actually shown up. Along the way he did manage to explain that he lied about Tiananmen Square because he came from a small town, and, more significantly, endorsed censorship and taxing people if they can’t afford ObamaCare.

Most people don’t care that much about where Tim was when his bosses were driving tanks with red stars over democracy protesters, but the last thing they want is to be taxed, fined, or otherwise robbed for not paying for a worthless policy, and they like their speech… free.

“You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater,” Walz, whose knowledge of jurisprudence comes from old episodes of Night Court, falsely yelled. “That’s the test, that’s the Supreme Court test!” 

O’Donnell and Brennan didn’t fact-check him on a claim so wrong that it comes from over a century ago because either they’re as dumb as him or slightly less dumb but more crooked. 

The good news for Walz is that’s it. After this he can go back to avoiding the press and making up more stuff about his past that never happened. Considering that he lied about his military service, his career as an educator, the start of his political career, he risks running out of things to lie about. But he doesn’t have to worry about being in an actual debate this election cycle.

The bad news for America is that there were elements of a meaningful debate here that were smothered by CBS News which was once again performing the mainstream media’s sacred duty of election interference by making sure few public concerns would get an airing, and that the conversation would be dominated by vital issues like abortion and protecting democracy.

This wasn’t Lincoln debating Douglas because if it had been the moderators would have spent the entire debate interrupting Lincoln to claim that the Democrats don’t actually support slavery. It wasn’t even any debate from before the Obama era where the moderators generally confined themselves to asking questions slightly less loaded than “have you stopped beating the climate yet” and asked questions rather than speaking over the debaters to give the ‘right’ answers.

In a better world, Vance would have actually debated Walz instead of trying to shove past the referees in their cute matching power suits to actually try and discuss the issues at stake. And in a better world, Walz would have replied to questions about China and Israel with something other than claiming to be a small-town boy who happened to spend much of his life in politics.

America needed that debate, but maybe we didn’t deserve it. Instead, we got the slop we learned to expect and will keep on getting as long as the media feels entitled to decide elections and as long as both parties keep letting the media, rather than the campaigns, control debates.