DEBATE: Is warming "a hoax," the way Trump says?

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2024

Candidate Vance takes a pass: Did Candidate Vance ever back a national abortion ban?

Yesterday afternoon, we asked that question. This morning, we still aren't sure. 

That said:

In this morning's New York Times, Lisa Lerer discusses that very point in a News Analysis piece. We'll delay our comments on President Lincoln to show you part of what she says:

NEWS ANALYSIS
Vance Smooths Edges to Remake Trump’s Record

[...]

Mr. Vance benefited from moderators who agreed at the start to not spend time correcting false claims uttered on the stage, which allowed him to continue largely unfettered by facts or past positions.

At one point, Mr. Vance falsely claimed he never backed a national abortion restriction, saying he supported “a minimum national standard”—a phrase used by anti-abortion proponents to describe a 15-week federal ban. His comment went unchecked.

Sad! In the statement in question, Vance didn't say that he "never backed a national abortion restriction." He said that he "never supported a national ban"—and no, that's not the same thing.

Lerer is an experienced journalist, but that isn't what Vance really said. For the record, it isn't hard to report what he actually said. CBS News provided this largely accurate transcript, and videotape exists.

Something apparently seized Lerer—or then again, who knows? Maybe her editor adjusted the copy she had composed. Somehow, though, the actual statement got misparaphrased, in a way which reinforced the larger storyline of her piece.

For the record, we agree with Lerer's larger claim about Candidate Vance. We think he did proceed, all through the debate, "largely unfettered by facts."

In our view, it's even worse than that. In our view, Candidate Vance seems to be "an unusually good [misstater]," to borrow from a stronger statement by Senator Bob Kerrey in 1993. 

In yesterday morning's report, we showed you the way Candidate Vance responded when he was asked a direct question by Candidate Walz. Vance offered "a damning non-answer," Walz said. 

We agree with that claim—every word.

We agree with that claim about Vance's refusal to answer. Then too, consider what the gentleman said when he was asked about a famous alleged hoax:

O'DONNELL (10/1/24): Senator [Vance]. I want to give you an opportunity to respond there. The governor mentioned that President Trump has called climate change a hoax. Do you agree? 

VANCE: Well, look, what the President has said is that if the Democrats, in particular, Kamala Harris and her leadership, if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America, and that's not what they're doing. So clearly, Kamala Harris herself doesn't believe her own rhetoric on this. If she did, she would actually agree with Donald Trump's energy policies...

O'Donnell asked a simple question. Candidate Vance took a pass.

He mentioned a different thing "the president has said," but he failed to respond to the important question he'd actually been asked. The candidate continued along from there, having chosen to avoid answering a clearcut question.

At that point, sad! As you can see by reviewing the transcript, O'Donnell didn't pursue the point. Having asked a basic question, she didn't seem to care when her question went unanswered.

Near the end of the session, that candidate's unfettered behavior was even worse. In this case, we're looking at a statement by Vance which we'd score as flatly false:

O'DONNELL: Let's talk about the state of democracy, the top issue for Americans after the economy and inflation...The governors of every state in the nation, Republicans and Democrats, certified the 2020 election results and sent a legal slate of electors to Congress for January 6th. 

Senator Vance, you have said you would not have certified the last presidential election and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal. 

Would you again seek to challenge this year's election results, even if every governor certifies the results? I'll give you two minutes.

VANCE: Well, Norah, first of all, I think that we're focused on the future. We need to figure out how to solve the inflation crisis caused by Kamala Harris's policies. Make housing affordable, make groceries affordable, and that's what we're focused on. But I want to answer your question because you did ask it. 

Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square. And that's all I've said. And that's all that Donald Trump has said.

That's all that Candidate Trump has said? In fact, Candidate Trump has angrily said, again and again, that the last election was rigged, was stolen, was fixed. 

It's a profoundly inflammatory claim. Just for the record, Candidate Trump made the inflammatory statement again last night!

"There were problems in 2020...That's all that Donald Trump has said?" We'd be inclined to score that statement as flatly false—but once again, the statement went unchallenged. At the start of the debate, Margaret Brennan had stated the rules of the road:

The primary role of the moderators is to facilitate the debate between the candidates, enforce the rules, and provide the candidates with the opportunity to fact check claims made by each other. 

For whatever reason, the moderators weren't going to fact-check the candidates! That said, and just for the record, on two occasions, O'Donnell and Brennan pretty much did. 

They did so very clumsily, attempting to work under cover of darkness. In doing so, they provoked fury on the Fox News Channel, "bringing the eternal note of [limited competence] in."

Are we the humans up to the task of maintaining a modern democracy? More specifically, do we possess the types of skills and impulses which let us assemble a respectable national discourse?

Speaking in Gettysburg, President Lincoln wasn't entirely sure. How viable was the American experiment? Here's what the rail-splitter said:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers [sic] brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men [sic] roughj;ly 18.5 million souls. are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Can a nation like ours long endure? That isn't the exact question we're asking, but it's right there in the ballpark.

When Lincoln spoke, things were substantially different. At the time of the 1860 census, we were a nation of roughly 31 million souls. (Roughly four million of those people were enslaved.)

Today, our nation is massively larger. Technology is massively advanced. Today, when we hear America sing, misinformation is spilling out from almost every door.

In our view, Lerer (or her editor) misparaphrased something Vance said. With respect to a different topic, Vance himself flatly misstated what Donald J. Trump has said.

Also, Vance avoided responding to the question about climate change being a hoax. The moderators didn't try to make him answer the question he'd been asked.

Does Vance believe that climate change is a hoax? The candidate wasn't required to answer, and it gets worse than that.

Sad! Last night, viewers of the Fox News Channel were subjected to such prime time garbage as this:

GUTFELD (10/2/24): As usual with these debates, it was a clear three-on-one. Of course, an immediate theme was climate change, which according to all of the polling of U.S. voter concerns ranks somewhere below toenail fungus and right above the WNBA standings. 

But that didn't stop Norah from declaring a global warming consensus:

O'DONNELL (videotape): Governor [Walz], your time is up. The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate. 

GUTFELD: So I guess that decides it, right? Norah has spoken, but still, the implication is utter [BLEEP]. There is no correlation between man-made climate change and extreme weather. In fact, the incidents of hurricanes have gone down, not up, in the past century.

But who cares, right? To expect Norah to know the science is like expecting P. Diddy not to have baby oil.

AUDIENCE: [Laughter, applause]

There is no such correlation! So it went at 10:06 p.m. Eastern [7:06 p.m. Pacific] on this primetime "cable news" show. 

(As we've noted in the past, the furious host of this "cable news" program routinely describes climate change as "a hoax.")

On our scorecard, that statement by O'Donnell was one of the several times when the moderators clumsily tried to smuggle in a lightly disguised fact-check. Instead of asking Vance to speak to the issue, she offered that statement—a statement we regard as accurate—then moved to the next topic.

This gave people like Gutfeld a chance to say that the event was "as usual three-on-one." We return to our original question:

As a species, are we humans up to the task of conducting a respectable public discourse?  Are we humans up to the task of conducting a discourse in a giant continental nation with technologies which put people like Greg Gutfeld on the air before millions of regular people?

Such as it ever was, can the American project long endure? President Lincoln posed that question two years before his death. For today, we'll leave our own question right there. 

In our view, Lerer has misparaphrased Vance. For his part, Vance refused to answer an important question. When he refused to answer, O'Donnell and Brennan took a pre-ordained dive.

The following evening, the Fox News Channel sent in the clown! Is there any reason to believe that we humans, under current arrangements, are actually up to this task?

Tomorrow: A very strange time at the Times