It was a weird footnote to the weirdest of American elections. Kamala Harris has been the Democratic candidate for the shortest time and in four brief weeks we’ll know if she’s beaten Donald Trump in his second attempt to reshape the presidency in his image. The polls tell us that if America voted the same way Australia would, Kamala Harris would win by a landslide but there is every reason to think it’s a tight race and the result will depend on a handful of marginal states. And that was the context for the debate between the two putative vice-presidents, J.D. Vance and Tim Walz but the weird thing about the CBS debate was how civil and considerate it was and (in its way) how impressive.
It was that formidable woman Glenda Jackson, the woman who played King Lear in her old age who said, ‘Make America great again? America has never ceased to be great.’ That was the simple thing that needed to be said even as Donald Trump’s bragging and mendacity, his vulgarity and his megalomania worked like a boomerang. Had there ever been a president so far from the moral stature and grace and modesty necessary? That, after all, was why George Brandis, former Coalition Attorney General and Australian representative at the Court of Saint James, said that he would vote for Kamala Harris: never mind that he was a politician of the centre-right and she was one of the centre-left, he had far more in common with her vision of the world than he had with Donald Trump’s.
Well, is it saying too much to say that J.D. Vance and Tim Walz gave us a sense of the fleeting wisp of glory that made John F. Kennedy identify with that echo of Camelot. Vance and Walz were not only an impressive duo they actually had moments of shared perspective and common grounds. Vance would express sympathy for Walz’ experience in dealing with a shooting incident. Walz would say he didn’t like to talk about his faith but then he gave chapter and verse for the moment in Matthew about doing unto others as you would have others do to you. He talked about bipartisanship and praised John McCain and painstaking conservative formulations of policy.
Yes, Vance traded on his working-class background, the girls he had known – one in particular he had been close to who had had a