AT THE NEW YORK TIMES, J.D. VANCE IS SEEN AS THE MAIN CHARACTER IN TONIGHT'S DEBATE

For several weeks after she entered the presidential race, Kamala Harris did something that no one else has managed to do: she became the main character in a race against Donald Trump. In every other contest -- the 2016 and 2024 primaries, the 2016 general election, even the race he lost in 2020 -- Trump was the main character. He was the candidate everyone talked about. His words and deeds set the terms of every debate. No one ever stole the spotlight from him -- until a woman who hadn't even planned to run deployed her intelligence, her understanding of the media environment, and her charisma to turn Trump into a supporting character. Even if she loses next month, Democrats should study what she did and learn from it.

Unfortunately, Trump is the main character again. He's regained the spotlight with increasingly dark, dishonest, and slanderous pronouncements -- but he's also benefited from the fact that Harris listened to the pundits and changed the focus of her campaign to wonkish policy pronouncements, as well as a trip to the border. Predictably, the media figures who demanded all this of her weren't satisfied. Even in the New York Times endorsement of Harris, there was continued grumbling:

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

I agree with Oliver Willis that Harris can't satisfy the media and was building much more momentum when she was focusing on being a joyous anti-Trump warrior:

... I am in favor of political wonkery. We need policy wonks, we need leaders who either understand the wonky details of how to get things done or surround themselves with nerds who get excited about data and policy and making everything work. I’m not against wonking.

That said, Vice President Kamala Harris has to stop being as wonky as she was the last week of her campaign. If she keeps it up, she is in danger of simmering down the incredible momentum she has had since she became the lead in the presidential campaign.

... She could give a presentation with a mountain of PowerPoint slides and white papers from the world’s most prominent experts (aka what Hillary Clinton did, as well as Elizabeth Warren) and it won’t change the narrative.

... The candidate herself has encapsulated this concept in her statement, “When we fight, we win.” So, fight. Don’t wonk. And win. Please.

*****

It's understandable that Trump regained the spotlight. Getting media attention has been his life's work. But it appears that the media -- or at least the Opinion section of The New York Times -- would like us to regard J.D. Vance as the main character in tonight's vice presidential debate.

Patrick Healy has convened a roundtable of Times opinion columnists -- two conservatives (David Brooks and Ross Douthat), a conservative who doesn't think she's a conservative (Pamela Paul), and a liberal (Tressie McMillan Cottom). After a couple of general questions (for instance, "What are the biggest 'known unknowns' for you on each V.P. candidate?"), Healy begins asking questions about the two candidates individually. It's clear that he's far more interested in Vance than in Tim Walz.

Healy's questions include the following:

Rule No. 1 for vice-presidential debates is “first, do no harm” — don’t say anything that creates problems for the top of the ticket. JD Vance has the bigger burden here, because the moderators are likely to press him on his past criticisms of Donald Trump and his attacks on “childless cat ladies” and false claims about migrants eating neighbors’ pets. Millions of people will be watching. Do you think Vance will help or hurt the ticket by the end of the night?

Ross, you interviewed JD Vance for a long Q. and A. last spring, and you’ve known him for years. In Vance’s comments at rallies and in interviews, have Americans been seeing the “real” Vance, or is this a Trump-campaign-molded version of Vance? Would Vance be talking so much about Haitian migrants in Ohio if he was running with a candidate other than Trump?

David, how do you think Vance will try to take on Walz? Does Vance risk overdoing it?

In interviews and our Times Opinion focus groups, some voters have said they had a pretty positive impression of Vance when Trump picked him in July — mostly from his book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and his Republican convention speech — but their opinions changed for the worse in the last couple of months. What if anything could Vance do to change that tonight? Or is he better off focusing on achieving something else at the debate (and if so, what?).

Can he do anything to help himself in the likability department?

Some of these questions are tough, but there's a subtext: Vance has alienated a lot of voters -- he can turn that around, can't he? You get the feeling that Healy is rooting for Vance to do that.

There's only one Walz-specific question:

Tim Walz has come under attack by Vance and Trump over his experience in the Army National Guard and his strong support for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the rights of parents of transgender children. Republicans have portrayed Walz as a progressive extremist — and lopped in Harris with him. Do you see vulnerabilities for Walz onstage tonight?

Apart from that, Healy doesn't seem interested in Walz.

Douthat is part of this roundtable even though, as Healy says, he has a prior relationship with Vance, which means he can't possibly be objective. And we learn that this is also true of David Brooks:

Brooks: Like Ross, I’ve known Vance for a long time. In 2018, I gathered some friends at my house to help JD think through his life options. This route wasn’t the one we recommended! (And he didn’t think he’d have a career in politics, at least any time soon.)

So Healy is asking someone who served as J.D. Vance's life coach to offer opinions on his character and how he'll do tonight.

Brooks concedes that his mentee can be a tad unpleasant, but it's all liberals' fault:

I think the emergence of the angrier kind of Vance that Ross alludes to occurred when the “Hillbilly Elegy” movie came out. Many critics not only savaged the movie (I thought it was melodramatic, but pretty decent). They also savaged Vance as a man, in snobby and immature ways. I spoke with Vance at the time and understood that anybody would be affected by this coastal condescending scorn. It was a classic red-pill moment. So if Vance returns the nastiness, he is not faking it.

Which tells you everything you need to know about whether this panel can pass judgment on Vance without pro-Vance bias. Brooks even dismisses the questions surrounding Vance's 180 on Trump:

... I don’t think Vance is being totally opportunistic. Yes, he has totally flip-flopped on Trump’s character. But his life mission is pretty much the same: to upend the policies that have favored knowledge workers and, in his view, betrayed other kinds of workers.

So it's cool that he's running with the guy he once referred to as "cultural heroin."

Tressie McMillan Cottom pushes back a bit:

Cottom: I speak to very different people than Ross and David do when it comes to Vance. I speak to people from Appalachia, the very people that Vance supposedly wants to save from coastal scorn. I was in West Virginia and Kentucky this past weekend. The working-class Appalachians I speak to see Vance as a poser and very much a member of the coastal elite that Vance considers himself in opposition to. These working class Appalachians were just as scornful of Vance’s portrayal of them. Many of them reject his political rhetoric and policy approaches. I do not believe Vance is running for those voters. He is running on those voters. The question will be how much more mileage he thinks he can get out of that shtick.

These voters get it -- Vance is "a poser and very much a member of the coastal elite." Not only has he been mentored and bankrolled by half-mad tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, he also pals around with two of the best-known op-ed columnists at The New York Times, who then say nice things about him in print. Which is why the consensus view in this roundtable is that Vance and not the truly non-coastal, truly non-elite Tim Walz is tonight's main character.