As was the case with the September 10 debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Tuesday’s debate between the vice presidential contenders, Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance and Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, did pretty much nothing to inform voters on energy issues.
In fact, the ridiculous slanting of questions by CBS moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan highlighted the futility of such debates as tools to inform voters about key issues they really care about.
The failure by the moderators to ask a single question focused on the topic of energy was not surprising, though it was disappointing. The only question related to environmental issues came when the CBS hosts used a question ostensibly related to the human tragedy that continues to unfold in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene to invoke the tiresome climate-alarm narrative that seeks to blame every weather event on the trace element of plant food in the atmosphere. (RELATED: DAVID BLACKMON: Harris Doesn’t Want To Talk About EVs — It’s Easy To Understand Why)
Both candidates had to be taken aback by O’Donnell’s and Brennan’s callous disregard for the all-too-real human suffering and desperation taking place in western rural areas of the Tar Heel state. The absurdity of the decision to slant the question in that way becomes even more blatant when one considers that “Dealing with Climate Change” ranked just 18th out of 20 in CBS News’s own recent polling on top issues of public concern.
To his credit, Vance did try to bridge his answers to several questions to at least make mention of the key role energy security plays in the maintenance of real national security and the failures by the Biden-Harris administration to grasp that reality. But he often had to do that in the face of efforts by both O’Donnell and Brennan to shut him down and move onto other matters they believed were more important. Those matters included questions about where Walz really was during the Chinese government’s massacre of innocent civilians at Tiananmen Square, and roughly the 10,000th media question about the events of Jan. 6, an issue that does not even make the public’s Top 20 list in CBS’s own poll.
Truly, the model for these debates is broken. The main wonder is why any Republican would ever agree to do another one until that model is repaired. It is too bad longtime PBS newsman Jim Lehrer, who moderated a number of these debates in a fair and balanced manner, could not go on forever. Now, any GOP candidate knows when going into any such debate that he will be targeted by the moderators, and “fact checked” in often non-factual ways.
Trump frequently promised to blow this failed system up across three election cycles, but always ended up agreeing to repeat the same process over and over, presumably expecting different results. It is the very definition of insanity, a term that accurately describes the system.
Where energy policy is concerned, the public is yet again left largely to its own devices to figure out where the candidates really do stand. This lack of certainty is especially true of Harris, who continues to run away from both her past stances on key matters like fracking and her sponsorship of the Green New Deal. Does she really mean it when she claims to have had a change of heart on such issues, or is she just desperate to win votes in Pennsylvania, the home of the gigantic Marcellus Shale natural gas play? (RELATED: DAVID BLACKMON: The Biden-Harris Energy Policy Is A Mess That Kamala Harris Now Fully Owns)
The answers seem obvious to anyone involved in the energy space on a daily basis. But to ordinary citizens, Harris’s attempts to portray herself as an agent of change in what is clearly a change election cycle can be confusing. Which, of course, is the main goal.
The sad truth about the Vance-Walz debate is that O’Donnell and Brennan obviously came into the event with a plan to help Harris in her effort to keep the public confused. That reality, as much as any other factor, is why it really is time to end this farcical, counterproductive model for political debates. Let the insanity end.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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