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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.
Guys, before we start this week’s episode, we need to share an exciting announcement with our beloved “Matter of Opinion” cultists? Followers?
Sorry, the card says Moops.
Carlos has gotten us into Moops.
This is Seinfeld?
Of course, it’s Seinfeld. It’s the Bubble Boy episode.
No, I know. I know what it is.
Ross.
I’m questioning the wisdom of starting off a discussion that’s fully about 21st century podcasting realities with a “Seinfeld” reference. That’s all.
Well, do you have a better suggestion?
I think Muscovites is what our —
No, we will not —
— people are called.
No, no Muscovites.
Muscovites.
Ross, you want to call them the Movies?
No, I don’t.
All right, well, Moops, Muscovites, we are excited to tell you that “Matter of Opinion” is entering its subscription era.
Starting next week, we will begin offering subscribers exclusive content on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It’s a brand-new way for you to access some special conversations just for you, our beloved Moops.
Muscovites. But that’s right. As a subscriber, you’ll get access to our full back catalog of episodes, all the greatest hits, and also our secret bonus content for the conversations that they won’t let us have on the main feed, which are mostly just me, talking to myself about Catholic empire in North America.
I want you to go undercover inside Area 51. That’s what I’m here for, Ross.
Who’s to say I’m not speaking to you from the Nevada desert right now?
All right, well, dear listeners, do not worry. Our latest episodes will still be free.
Free.
Gratis.
No charge.
Free. But if you want to get this snazzy subscriber-exclusive content and our archives next week, all you have to do is link your “New York Times” account to Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
And if for some unfathomable reason, you don’t already have a “New York Times” subscription, do not fear. You can go to nytimes.com/podcasts and get one.
But what, you may ask, if I’m an audio purist? I don’t care about all the other stuff that a full-time subscription offers.
Carlos, my friend, I am so glad to have the answer to this. “The Times” has created an audio-only subscription for just $6 a month. You can get access to every “New York Times Podcast” and their back archives.
And you’re letting “The New York Times” know that podcasts like ours are worth supporting.
Please do that.
And ours, especially.
So OK, if you’re already a subscriber, all you have to do is plug in your “Times” login to Apple Podcasts and Spotify starting next week.
And if you aren’t yet, you just head over to nytimes.com/podcast, or hit the link in our show notes to get yourself a “Times” subscription or a “Times” audio subscription, and get access to the —
[SIGHS]
Muscovite —
— clubhouse.
Moops. Moops.
Can someone out there send us a better suggestion so I can get these two to stop?
Vladimir Putin has cut me a large check. And we’re going with Muscovite.
For the love of God.
You know what? I think you all may be convincing me to finally subscribe to “The New York Times.”
Oh, my God.
[LAUGHS] Carlos.
From “New York Times Opinion,” I’m Carlos Lozada.
I’m Michelle Cottle.
And I’m Ross Douthat.
And this is “Matter of Opinion,” where in the spirit of JD Vance and Tim Walz, we’re really not that far apart on the issues here. We’re just some well-meaning, folksy types, trying to find common ground.
Just a few people from the heartland of America, having a civil debate about tax policy.
Uh-huh.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
So this week, Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz faced off in the VP debate. And folks seemed really struck by how civil and substantive the debate seemed. Those were the popular words in some of the coverage. Now, that may be true, or it may just be that whenever Trump isn’t on the stage, everything suddenly looks like the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
But regardless, I want us to get substantive on what Walz and Vance accomplished with all that alleged substance and civility they gave us Tuesday night. And we’ll also get into what the two candidates are bringing to their tickets, and what they might mean, if anything, for the future of their parties. Sound like a plan?
I was told there would be no fact checking. But if there is —
You know I’m here, Ross.
I’m ready.
Well, Ross, you are going to start. Tell us who you think won this debate.
I believe that James David Vance won the debate — handily. I think it was the best performance in a national debate by a Republican politician in the last 20 years. I think it eclipsed Mitt Romney’s performance against Barack Obama in 2012.
It’s a low bar, I want to be clear. Republican candidates for president and vice president have not generally distinguished themselves as practiced, successful debaters. But I think Vance was very strong and very strong in ways that I think were particularly effective.
Before the debate, I had written that he needed a little more Ronald Reagan in his pitch, a little less dark, evening in America kind of rhetoric, a little more the future is bright, America is going to be great again, kind of stuff.
I actually think the politician he tried to channel more was Bill Clinton, with a certain degree of personal biography meeting I understand where folks are coming from.
But yeah, I just think it was a very strong performance, overall, and one that was particularly strong, given that when you are the running mate of Donald Trump, you are stuck trying to make Donald Trump sound like a reasonable person. And to the extent that can be done — and we can talk about whether it can be done at all — I think Vance succeeded.
Michelle, how about you?
I totally agree with Ross that he was the much more polished debater. What we saw in the debate was the JD Vance that had made much of the political class fall in love with him, including a lot of more progressive folks. Walz was a much more anxious, flustered debater. I think somebody online said it was like watching your most nervous uncle debate your smuggest cousin over Thanksgiving dinner.
And finally, the liberals are the uncles.
There you go.
How the wheel turns, Michelle?
Yeah, they did not say crazy, unhinged, drunken uncle. He had the heavier lift because he is what people are looking to for what will be the future of his party. Now, they didn’t yell at each other. And it was much more civil.
But Vance in particular, as Ross was alluding to, had the job of sanewashing Trump. And he does that extremely well. To paraphrase the old saying, that boy knows how to polish a poop. And that’s what he was left doing for much of this debate. And by God, he is extremely talented at that.
Is “polish a poop” a saying?
No, but polish a turd is. It’s really —
Michelle was sanewashing the folksy rhetoric of her down home upbringing.
I’m making it more family friendly, Carlos.
OK OK. No, no, I just need to these things.
But Carlos, Carlos, all right, so what did you think?
No, actually, I’m interested in your Romney comparison, Ross. I agree with you on that. One of the reasons Romney won that debate is because he was able to append the image that Democrats have been painting of him for months as this silver spoon, aloof, heartless management consultant who’s going to let venture capitalists steal your job.
And he instead appeared as this empathetic, well-meaning, earnest, super-prepared guy who’s going to do battle for the American people. And I think Vance accomplished a similar turn in the sense that he ran counter to the weird image, the freaky podcast guy talking about cat ladies that Democrats have emphasized.
Now, I have no idea which is the real JD Vance. I do agree that he won this debate. If you’d been hiding under a rock all this time and this debate was all you knew of JD Vance, you would think he’s a thoughtful guy, willing to stake out common ground, even show spontaneous empathy from time to time.
Yes, obsessed with immigrants. Yes, embarrassingly unwilling to speak the truth about 2020. Those are not unusual positions in his party. He needed to make Trump sound reasonable, as you say. He called it just common-sense wisdom. That’s what Trump is, common-sense wisdom. And he had to make himself seem more presidential, especially because Trump is 78. I think he accomplished both those things.
And as for Walz, there’s a reason we talk about debates as a performance. So much is about how they sound and they look. Tim Walz looked nervous, especially early on. He got better as he went along. His best moments were on abortion and health care, January 6, when he point blank asked Vance, who won the election? And Vance couldn’t answer — or declined to answer. But it basically felt like Vance proactively helped himself in the debate, whereas Walz, I think, succeeded to the extent that he did no harm.
Now, I know the snap polls say something different. They say this thing was a tie or close to a tie. Walz’s favorables went up even more than Vance’s. But that’s how I felt, just watching the debate.
Well, I would say about those snap polls, I am not a fan of Tim Walz, based on the Tim Walz that we have seen doing big set-piece speeches and cable-news hits. He’s got the persona of a Midwestern coach, but the politics of Bernie Sanders or something. That leaves me completely cold. It feels like this bizarre performance of this liberal fantasy of Midwestern masculinity. I don’t know. I’m not into it.
I liked Waltz better on the debate stage than I’ve liked him in those more performative environments. The fact that he lost the debate did not make me suddenly dislike him. I thought he came across as a well-meaning machine politician from a Midwestern state. There’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m not surprised that there is a gap between what we in the punditocracy consider a debate win and what America considers a debate performance. Look, we like people who can get up there, make their case, sound good, look slick, very articulate, hyper articulate, even. And that’s not what America is necessarily looking for.
It’s like when George W. Bush and Al Gore were in the spotlight in 2000. Everybody talked about how Gore was smarter and more policy savvy and smoother. And George W. Bush was by far more likable. So you just never know how these things are going to get read.
Right. And well, and I also think Vance, coming in, was an extremely unpopular figure, not just with liberals, but with a set of people who have loosely-held political opinions. For a certain kind of voter, everything they knew about him was a bunch of podcast clips. And God knows. If everything anyone knew about us was a bunch of podcast clips, and then we were put on the national stage —
We would be elected president immediately.
Yes, of course. A triumvirate.
I’d have to sanewash you, Ross.
I get to be Octavian, but you know.
All right, all right, let’s move from the performance to the substance of this substantive debate. I’m wondering if we can compare Vance and Walz to their running mates. Where do you think they make better or worse cases for the policies and positions that the top of the tickets are pushing for?
Well, look, Vance got into some of the touchy issues like abortion and immigration, and put a very gentle, friendly gloss on it, even as he tapped danced around a lot of the things that worry people not in his party. He did not want to discuss those mass deportations that have been promised. He did not want to talk about the abortion restrictions that he has long favored.
He wanted to talk instead, about how women need to be given options, how you need to take care of new mothers and babies, which is great, but is in no way — we’ve seen no sign from this Republican Party that sort of thing is of any interest. So even where he laid out some ideas that were gentle, if you looked at what has happened, they were utter horseshit.
Well no, that’s not true. In fact, that’s absurd.
It’s not absurd.
Because Vance is, in fact, the vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party, and gets a pretty strong say in what the Republican Party actually stands for. And his running mate, Trump, has gone even further than Vance in terms of staking out, there’s got to be exceptions on abortion, we’re leaving it to the states, we’re not doing a national ban. So I think most Republican politicians, unfortunately, are very happy to run away from the abortion issue.
Well, right now they are because they’re worried that they’re going to get their clock cleaned in November. I’m willing to stipulate that JD Vance would love to have a kinder, gentler approach to the women who are not allowed to have abortions. But as you know, the vice president —
Except for —
— cannot unilaterally do that.
Except for — I’ll accept the stipulations and make a different argument, which is that, I think in Vance’s very strong performance, the weakest point, by far, obviously, is any question related to January 6 and the 2020 election.
And the strongest part, by far, is that he was able to do what Trump was unable to do in the debate with Harris, which is just make a straightforward argument that you should elect Donald Trump because the world was more stable when Trump was president, the border was more secure, and the economy was better.
That argument is why Trump is competitive in this election, in spite of all his faults. And Vance made it better than Trump makes it. And I think Walz doesn’t really have a strong comeback to that argument. And that was part of the dynamic of the debate.
So Ross, you mentioned the border. In the debate, Vance comes off as far less unhinged than Trump on those issues. He says, we should deport anyone who committed a crime first. Then he says, the problem with immigration is they drive up housing costs. It’s like a super policy-wonky approach to immigration.
But on that particular front, he cites a Federal Reserve study. So I looked up that Federal Reserve study yesterday. First, it’s not a study. I must confess, I worked in the Federal Reserve in a prior life. This was not a Fed study. It was a brief speech by a member of the Board of Governors. It was basically a “New York Times” column.
Is there something wrong with citing something that’s the length of a “New York Times” column, Carlos? What are you trying to say?
And so Vance cites this speech as alleged support for the notion that immigrants are driving up housing costs. Here’s what the member of the board, what she actually said.
“There is a risk that strong consumer demand for services, increased immigration, and continued labor market tightness could lead to persistently high core-services inflation. Given the current low inventory of affordable housing, the inflow of new immigrants to some geographic areas could result in upward pressure on rents, as additional housing supply may take time to materialize.”
So she’s not saying that this is happening. She’s saying it could happen. She’s talking about risks to the inflation outlook. She says, the presence of immigrants is one potential factor. She doesn’t say the answer is to kick them out. She says, the problem is the low inventory of affordable housing.
And what Vance doesn’t tell you is that earlier in that same speech, she says, one of the reasons for reduced inflation is — wait for it — increases in the number of available workers, due in part, to immigration. So Vance sounds really good in the context of a 90-minute debate. When you dig into what he’s saying, he’s a lot less persuasive. The study he cites says immigration has helped bring down inflation, not raise it.
Yes. Was that a simplification of a more detailed and nuanced policy argument? Yes. Was it a more detail-based commentary than anything that Tim Walz said in the course of the debate?
Tim Walz, in the course of the debate, said things like, what are you talking about, opening federal lands to housing? When that is, in fact, part of his own running mate’s policy. But here you are, picking and picking at JD Vance for only citing part of the argument on Federal Reserve paper. That’s nonsense.
Also, obviously, immigration has an effect on the price of housing. This is the central issue in Canadian politics right now. Can you solve that by building tons and tons of new housing? Theoretically, of course, you can.
Ross, you keep saying things are absurd or nonsense. All I’m saying is that the brief remarks that — that’s what it’s called, brief remarks — that JD Vance is citing, Ross, that the very thing he’s citing says immigration has helped reduce inflation.
Inflation in housing prices?
Inflation overall.
Inflation in other areas, but not inflation in housing prices, which is what he’s talking about.
OK, so Ross is feeling persecuted, here.
I’m not feeling persecuted. I’m feeling goaded. I’m........