It’s highly unlikely that a vice presidential debate will change the minds of many voters. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen embarrassed Sen. Dan Quayle so badly in 1988 that it became the stuff of political legend. George Bush, who ran with Quayle, still handily beat Michael Dukakis, who ran with Bentsen.
So because two men both appeared smart and articulate, and discussed issues in a civil fashion, most of the news media called the whole thing a draw.
But there were some important takeaways that could make a difference in the next few weeks as ballots arrive in the mail and people start voting.
One of the first, and most remarkable: Neither of the moderators asked any questions about LGBTQ+ issues, an area where there a very sharp differences between the two that reflect on other deep differences that should help define the campaign.
The Advocate quoted Colorado Governor Jared Polis, the nation’s first openly gay governor:
“I was actually surprised that nobody asked about that,” Polis said. “For many Americans who identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community, this is a key issue. This election, our marriages are at stake. Our equal rights are at stake. Anti-discrimination protections are at stake.”
Polis emphasized the stark difference between Walz’s inclusive approach and Vance’s alignment with policies that could roll back LGBTQ+ rights. “There’s an enormous difference between Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have an inclusive view of respecting everybody no matter who they love and who they are, versus Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are taking us back to an era where gay people were forced into the closet,” Polis said.
Making the situation more dramatic, the Trump campaign just released one of the most horrifying ads I’ve seen since Bush attacked Dukakis in the infamous racist Willie Horton ads.
I was watching the 49ers beat the New England Patriots Sunday when the ad came on the TV. It’s so bad I won’t link to it, because I don’t want it to get more page views.
The entire premise is an attack on trans people. It blasts Harris for saying that transgender people in federal prisons should be eligible for gender-affirming surgery. Except it doesn’t use that terminology.
After repeated slurs against trans people, the tagline is (seriously):
“Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.”
Yes, in 2024, Trump is attacking some of the nation’s most vulnerable people to score political points. (Something that also infests our local politics.) It made me sick.
(I also had to wonder: Why did they pay to put this ad on during a San Francisco-New England game, where even by gross male football fan standards, most viewers from those parts of the country were going to be seriously offended?)
The moderators could easily have asked the candidates about that ad. If they asked a reasonable question, it would have been hard for Vance to defend—and would have given Walz a chance to talk about inclusion, not exclusion.
But no: They asked about a total non-issue from decades ago, whether Walz was in China or Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square uprising.
Vance looked pretty slick for the first part of the debate, but fell apart at two points: When the moderators fact-checked him, and he got mad, and when the discussion turned to abortion and the 2020 election, he started to lose it.
Vance refused to admit that Biden won the election, and he refused to say he would oppose a national abortion ban.
Then it got tricky.
When it came to trade policy, specifically Trump’s tariffs, Walz said that the vast majority of the economists who have studied the idea think it’s terrible. You have to listen to the experts, he said; if you need heart surgery, he said, you should talk to a heart surgeon at the Mayo Clinic (which happens to be in Minnesota) and not to Donald Trump.
Vance challenged that, saying that those same experts for 40 years have said that shipping our manufacturing base overseas would make the middle class stronger—and they were wrong.
So here’s the problem:
The North American Free Trade Agreement—negotiated by Democrat Bill Clinton and approved by a Democratic Congress—allowed giant corporations to move manufacturing out of the US and into Mexico, where wages were much lower, helping damage the US labor movement. At the same time, it allowed companies like Monsanto to dump cheap corn in Mexico, wiping out more than 900,000 farming jobs, impoverishing Mexican farmers, and sending many north to try to find subsistence farmworker jobs in the US.
In other words: Bad for the working class in both countries. Good for big US corporations.
In 1999, some 50,000 people converged on Seattle for an anti-globalization protest that helped lay the groundwork for future activism against corporate dominance.
And yet, most of the “expert” economists still said Nafta and globalization were good for everyone. Barack Obama never challenged that concept, and neither did President Joe Biden.
Yes, US consumers got come cheaper goods from China—but that came at a price. We also got a system where Apple can exploit Chinese workers to manufacture iphones at a massive profit, while hiding much of that profit in Ireland so it never gets taxed.
This isn’t just me talking. From The New York Times, which was one of the leading proponents of Nafta:
“Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading,” the World Bank warned in a recent analysis. “The result could be a lost decade in the making — not just for some countries or regions as has occurred in the past — but for the whole world.”
A lot has happened between then and now: A global pandemic hit; war erupted in Europe; tensions between the United States and China boiled. And inflation, thought to be safely stored away with disco album collections, returned with a vengeance.
But as the dust has settled, it has suddenly seemed as if almost everything we thought we knew about the world economy was wrong.
The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago — the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency — look to be running off the rails.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Times notes
Associated economic theories about the ineluctable rise of worldwide free market capitalism took on a similar sheen of invincibility and inevitability. Open markets, hands-off government and the relentless pursuit of efficiency would offer the best route to prosperity.
It was believed that a new world where goods, money and information crisscrossed the globe would essentially sweep away the old order of Cold War conflicts and undemocratic regimes.
Except that:
The job exodus pushed down wages at home and undercut workers’ bargaining power, spurring anti-immigrant sentiments and strengthening hard-right populist leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France.
In advanced industrial giants like the United States, Britain and several European countries, political leaders turned out to be unable or unwilling to more broadly reapportion rewards and burdens.
Not to mention the devastation to the climate—and to developing countries:
“Financial globalization was supposed to usher in an era of robust growth and fiscal stability in the developing world,” said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But “it ended up doing the opposite.”
Economics, whatever its practitioners might say, is not heart surgery. Most economists are trained to accept the concept that free markets are the best way of allocating resources, and anything that constrains those markets can cause problems. (Many academic economists, even liberal ones, oppose rent control.)
But unlike the science of repairing an ailing heart, the “science” of market-based economics often turns out to be wrong.
I think Trump’s tariff would indeed wind up costing middle-class families thousands of dollars a year. (China isn’t going to pay the tariffs, consumers are.) I think the experts are absolutely right about that. Oh, and Trump supported Nafta, and Vance has no credibility on any issues involving the working class, immigrants, or much of anything else.
But I’d be a bit more cautious in saying that economists are as trustworthy as heart surgeons.
