Page 61 of 107 Days

The day leading up to Tim’s debate with J. D. Vance had been filled with tension.

In the Situation Room, I monitored the attack.

The Defense Department later shared publicly that our destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean were part of a coordinated response that downed most of the missiles.

The limited damage and few casualties made it less likely that Netanyahu would mount a massive counterstrike and drag the region into full-blown war.

There was more riding on Tim’s debate than there should have been.

Trump’s proposal, back in August, to debate me two more times had been withdrawn.

We wanted another debate, badly. We needed it to shift our stuck polling numbers.

We’d tried everything to goad or cajole Trump into it.

He’d agree and then his team, who was more disciplined than he was, would pull him back.

So that meant Tim would have to be the closer.

It was not a comfortable role for him. He had fretted from the outset that he wasn’t a good debater.

I’d discounted his concerns. He was so quick and pithy in front of the crowds at our rallies, I thought he’d bring those qualities to the podium.

He’d prepared with Pete Buttigieg, a consummate debater, and I thought his big heart and his good humor would counter J. D. Vance’s malice and pessimism.

But J. D. Vance is a shape-shifter. And a shifty guy.

He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency.

Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down.

As Van Jones later remarked, he sane-washed the crazy.

There were no cat ladies, no pet-eating Haitians, no personal insults.

Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach.

When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at J.D.’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, “What is happening?”

I told the television screen: “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.”

There was not supposed to be any on-air fact-checking in this debate, as there had been in mine. But the moderators did correct Vance twice, on the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change and on the legal immigration status of Haitians in Springfield.

“The rules were you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” Vance complained petulantly, in a flash of his more familiar persona.

Tim fell into a pattern of defending his record as a governor.

Then he fumbled his answer when the moderator, predictably, questioned why he had claimed to be in Hong Kong during the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Tim had been on his way to teach in China that summer but hadn’t yet left the United States on the date of the massacre.

Instead of simply stating that he’d gotten his dates mixed up, but that being in China during a period of human rights oppression had profoundly influenced him, he talked about biking in Nebraska.

The following weekend, Saturday Night Live did a sketch in which actors posed as Doug and me, sitting on our couch, watching the debate. While I did not in fact spit out wine, it was otherwise uncanny in its portrait of our evening.

Tim felt bad that he hadn’t done better. I reassured him that the election would not be won or lost on account of that debate, and in fact it had a negligible effect on our polling.

In choosing Tim, I thought that as a second-term governor and twelve-year congressman he would know what he was getting into. In hindsight, how could anyone?

When they’d attacked his National Guard record, I had to talk to him about being resilient.

It’s a challenge when you have kids—Tim had a son still in high school and a young-adult daughter whom I’d come to know to be as bighearted as her dad.

It’s painful for them to hear their father unfairly attacked.

For the candidate, the family that is your source of strength can become your weakness in a presidential campaign.

Tim was outraged by the unfairness: “How dare they? This is BS.” I had to tell him, “Don’t let them get in your head. ”

When I was a newly elected DA, an elderly gentleman in Atlanta pulled me aside with a bit of advice: “Baby, you be sure and don’t make it look too easy.” He knew it was not. And the higher you rise in the political food chain, the harder it gets.

This is not a genteel profession. You must be ready to brawl.