The 2024 vice presidential debate was both a tactical and strategic victory for Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) and the Republican presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The strategic part was a little less obvious to discern at first glance.

At times, this political confrontation appeared to be an episode of The Twilight Zone, with Vance and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) sparring like buddies who enjoy a game of cards and a bottle of bourbon on Saturday nights, what with Vance referring to "Tim" and how he could see how much in common they had on some issues. The level of friendliness seemed too much for Walz at times, who could be seen furtively scrawling notes and darting his head away from the camera to stare at Vance, looking like a caged animal. 

The absolute worst moment of Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate was when moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan treated GOP candidate Vance like a truant school child to be silenced when he tried to respond to a bogus fact check from the obnoxious pair. There weren’t supposed to be any “fact checks” in the debate, since we all know CBS News and much of the mainstream media is in the bag for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and sidekick, Tim Walz.

But there was Brennan delivering one anyway, about how Vance had supposedly misrepresented the good new citizens in the now infamous town of Springfield, OH, suggesting they were illegal immigrants. But here was the fact check: “And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, OH does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status and are temporarily protected.” Vance objected at that point but was quickly disciplined by the school marm, who said, “Thank you, Senator. We have so much to get to.”

When Vance attempted to explain that their “legal status” was based on the Biden-Harris administration’s Cuba-Haiti-Nicaragua-Venezuela (CHNV) parole program, that is replete with fraud, while helping to facilitate trafficking and violent crime that includes "sexual assault, rape, and murder,” he was shut down by Margaret and Norah, who kept insisting the issue was closed. When Walz joined in the conversation, the journalists shut him down too.

“Gentlemen, the audience can't hear you because your mics are cut, we have so much we want to get to. Thank you for explaining the legal process.”

Excuse me, but get a real job! Could someone explain the process of journalism to these two? People did not tune in to listen to you but to the two candidates. Go to hell with your egos. You are nothing in the world of media anymore. CBS News is a shadow of its former self. It is no longer the network of Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace, who actually reveled in moments of free-wheeling political discussion.

But I kept asking myself throughout the debate, why wasn’t Vance going on the attack in this exchange; why did he keep calling his opponent “Tim” and suggesting that the two had so much in agreement? Why was the ideological line blurred between the two, largely because Vance insisted this be the very picture of a civil political debate – something Amerians haven’t seen in decades? Why the transformation?

If you have watched Vance through much of this campaign, he has been a faithful attack dog for former President Donald Trump. What about everything Vance has said about Walz’s stolen valor, that he “lied about his military service for political gain” when he claimed to have served in Iraq, when in fact he resigned from his National Guard battalion after he discovered it was going into a combat zone. There was nothing Tuesday night and Walz walked right into a minefield on several occasions as he spoke about his service with the Guard.

Walz got off easy on repeated claims that the US – which lost energy independence under President Joe Biden – was producing “more oil “ than ever before. That was laughable.

But the worst example of Walz getting a pass from Vance came over immigration. The governor kept insisting that the Republicans like to blame immigrants for everything, especially the lack of housing in America and that’s simply isn’t fair. Vance mentioned the numbers briefly, citing a very conservative figure of 25 million illegals having entered the US under the Biden-Harris watch and Norah and Margaret were constantly inviting Walz to refute the claim that Harris, as border czar, "allowed" these people into the country, but Vance could have gone much further with the hard, cold facts.

He could have cited the numbers of convicted murderers who have entered the US illegally and the number of people with criminal records; he could have noted that as many as 45 million illegals could be in the country and that Biden provided VIP transport service to so many of them, flying them to their preferred destinations from Los Angeles to New York City. Vance could have mentioned the crimes committed by illegals, especially since Walz kept citing cases of women seeking abortions in red states who had to travel to blue states to get the grisly procedure done. The senator might have said that the United States has no claims to sovereignty when it cannot police its own border. But he didn’t say any of this. He kept talking about how he and Tim had so much common ground.

Was there a method to this madness? I was stewing over this pronounced politeness during the first half of the debate, wondering why Vance’s fire and outrage had transformed into a well-mannered English parlor play. Well, it took me a while to get it but the truth finally dawned. Why was Vance insisting this debate be so civil, so friendly, so detached from anything we’ve seen in politics since maybe the era of President Ronald Reagan? This confrontation was for those Democrats and Independents who think Vance is a Neanderthal misogynist who cracks sexist jokes about “cat ladies” who don’t know they should be staying at home and having children. This evening was about showing those Americans who watch nothing but the mainstream media that Vance is a reasonable chap who can treat his political opponents with respect.

Norah and Margaret really missed an opportunity to paint Vance as extreme when they did not ask a single question about the war in Ukraine. Vance has been explicit in his insistence that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not entitled to one more cent of American aid or another bullet of US arms. Trump has been less than equivocal in his position, that has wavered between caving to Ukraine’s demands and suggesting Biden is a fool for allowing this proxy war to move the US ever closer to a nuclear catastrophe and that it is time to close the bank on Zelenskyy. Norah and Margaret could have painted Vance as a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin and resurrected all the tired tales of how he is poised to conquer all of eastern Europe once he finishes with Ukraine. But they left this issue entirely alone and allowed Vance to conduct his course in how to be a gentleman in the blood sport of politics.

I don’t doubt for a moment that Trump was watching this encounter with mounting fury as he saw the limp Walz blissfully walk away from one tiger trap after another. His face must have been turning purple as Walz did not address his state’s infanticide bill. He must have been in a paroxysm of rage as Vance allowed Walz to get away with his truly disgusting legacy of paying obeisance to communist China. Walz may have admitted that he was “a knucklehead” to pretend to be in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre, but that was really a moot point. What about those 30 trips to China when he acted as an acolyte of the communist regime and heaped praise on the regime for its efforts to institute measures of equality that could never exist in the brutally capitalist United States? Nothing about his worship of Mao Zedong, who initiated two of the worst mass extermination programs in history under the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution or about his statement – and so many others – that China has a system where “everyone is the same and everyone shares.”

Nope. Not a literal word. This debate was for people who don’t read The Post Millennial or Human Events; who don’t get their news commentary from social media’s proliferating number of conservative hosts. This was for the people on the other side of the great media divide; for those Americans who still think it isn’t really news or can’t be true if the mainstream media isn’t reporting it.

But they saw it was true Tuesday night. They saw that Vance is an articulate, intelligent, likable man who is capable of reaching out to the other side of the political chasm and refraining from personal attacks for two whole hours of political sparring. That’s what this moment was about and that’s who this debate was for. I’m not sure if Trump thought this was a risk worth taking and I wasn’t sure it was either. But as I write this the morning after, I think this might have been an inspired bit of political strategy. Conservatives already know Vance. We understand that he is tough on crime, on the border, is fiercely pro-life and not given to suffer fools. We comprehend that he is a principled conservative who supports both the First and the Second Amendment – and thankfully Vance’s greatest moment of truth in the debate probably occurred when he passionately defended free speech and opposed the Democratic campaign to censor it.

But last night wasn’t for us. It was for those millions of Americans who think Walz is just some innocuous rube from the backwoods of Minnesota and believe Vance poses an existential threat to their world. You have to anticipate some Democratic cheating in this election and Trump is going to need as many of those undecided votes as he can turn. That’s who Vance was speaking to.