Vance Walz debate take II: the tin ear of the elites

Quick: what were the two moments when Walz best helped his ticket?  Spoiler alert:  my wife and I fell asleep after about 75 minutes so there may be others.

No, they weren’t policy statements, or even direct answers to the moderator’s questions.

The first was when Walz said that times had changed from the time he could put a shotgun in his pickup and go pheasant hunting after football practice.   This is exactly why Harris picked him.  To show that a liberal man didn’t have horns and was just like many midwesterners and all rural people.

The second was when Walz described how his 17 year old son Gus was present at a shooting.  Everyone immediately related to it, including Vance, who looked like he’d been shot himself, saying something like “Mercy Jesus, this is awful.”  Walz thanked him, and it was an unrehearsed and powerful moment of shared humanity.

It shows the power of anecdote, and the persuasive weakness of hundreds of studies of gun violence and government statistics.   Medicine needs statistics on which to base treatments, but people aren’t persuaded by them.

For example, there are tons of studies to show that stress worsens migraine, but I could see my patients weren’t really buying it.  Then 5 years into practice, I told them how my wife had her first migraine in 18 months hours after she heard our 12 year old son had a bone tumor needing surgery (it turned out to be benign and he now has kids of his own).  They immediately bought it without a quibble.

While the story of Haitians eating pets was made up out of whole cloth, it had the effect of focusing people’s minds on the fentanyl deaths, rapes murders due in part to massive immigration.

Eventually the mainstream press  wised up to the fact that calling people you wished to persuade dogs by using the term racist dogwhistles wasn’t a good idea.

But Trump has whistles of his own which so far has blown right by elites in the press.  He is always using terms like disgrace and respect, something unknown by elites, but experienced by the working class as part of their daily existence.   And so when their diction, sentence structure etc. are criticized by the press, they assume that Trump and Walz were talking to them when in fact they were talking through them to the working class and the nonCollege educated.

Many people in D.C. have not grown up with people who became cops, self employed carpenters, electricians etc. etc.  There are no loading docks in D.C. and very few in Manhattan.