If you want to know how well a vice presidential candidate will represent America, watch how they represent their home states.
Tuesday night’s debate pits Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota against U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Two guys from the two states where I’ve spent most of my life, vying for your vote.
Listen to what they say about Minnesota and Ohio. It should tell you something about how they see the rest of America.
In the blue corner, we find Walz, strolling through sun-dappled Minnehaha Off-Leash Dog Park with his good dog Scout, granting a long-awaited one-on-one interview to … the We Rate Dogs guy. Nowhere to be found were the in-depth policy conversations that journalists, national and local, have been dying to have with the candidate. But Scout earned a coveted rating of 14 on a We Rate Dogs scale of 10, and viewers got to hear what the governor sees when he looks around the rambling off-leash park along the Mississippi River.
“You get to see a lot of great people down here and meet a lot of great dogs,” said Walz, as Secret Service agents glided through the trees behind him, and Scout tried and failed to catch many tennis balls.
On the campaign trail, Walz enthusiastically compares almost every state he visits to Minnesota, just with less ice and more Super Bowl rings. The Minnesota he shows the world is a place where we care about our neighbors, push each other out of snowbanks and work to make sure no child goes hungry at school.
The stories JD Vance tells about Ohio are different. His Ohio is a grim, scary land. They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. The hometown he describes in his book — middle-class Middletown, nestled between Cincinnati and Dayton — was “little more than a relic of American industrial glory,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.”
JD Vance told lies about Ohio. Stories, he called them. Stories he admits made up so everyone would see Springfield, Ohio, the way he sees Springfield. Where Springfield saw hardworking neighbors who came legally from Haiti to work vital factory jobs and revitalize the town’s economy, Vance told a story about illegal criminals snacking on housecats. If you repeat a lie like that enough times, your followers start making bomb threats to Springfield elementary schools, apparently.
