Abby Phillip: Vance ‘Landed a Lot of Punches,’ ‘Clear Lack of Preparation’ on Walz’s Part

BASH: “The candidates chatting, their wives came up, chatting. That was not something we saw anything close to in the presidential.”
PHILLIP: “I think we shouldn’t lose track, I think even in the civility, of the fact that J.D. Vance came to this debate to land a bunch of punches, and he did. He landed a lot of punches in between all the niceties and all of that. And the thing that really stood out to me was that Tim Walz did not seem prepared for it. He didn‘t respond to a lot of the criticisms and attacks that Vance put on the table. He allowed some clear falsehoods to just go completely unanswered. He allowed J.D. Vance essentially to dodge on a whole host of issues, on climate change, on the issue of his flip-flopping on Donald Trump. He allowed Vance initially to claim that Trump salvaged the Affordable Care Act. It took him several sentences to get to the part of his answer, Walz‘s answer, where he where he actually responded to that. I mean, I think there was a clear lack of preparation and execution here on Walz’s part.”
BASH: “I think actually it‘s the opposite. I think he had too much preparation.”
PHILLIP: “Maybe, yeah.”
BASH: “He had so many lines that he was clearly trying to say that he didn‘t listen. When J.D. Vance said one of the many, many things he really hit Kamala Harris on, not Tim Walz, but Kamala Harris, he didn‘t respond because he clearly had things in his mind. I think the lack of interviews that he has done with national media, with local media, it showed he needed more reps.”
TAPPER: “Yeah. No, I agree. J.D. Vance is much more experienced at this, at public speaking, at defending himself, at pivoting. You talked about the many times that Walz let Vance get away with saying things that weren‘t true, and you talked about the ObamaCare one, as if Donald Trump actually had tried to save ObamaCare.”
PHILLIP: “Just to be clear, he eventually did address that part of it — “
BASH: “No, he did.”
PHILLIP: “ — but it was after. It took a little winding up. And I think that an experienced debater immediately jumps on something like that, because that‘s a really critical point for a Democrat to make.”