The consensus agrees that J.D. Vance trounced Timmy Walz in the VP debate (all except for CBS itself, which insists that it was a tie.) But all of them (including Ben Shapiro) also agree that it “doesn’t mean anything” and “won’t make a difference.”

Au contraire, mon playmates. It will make a difference – in fact, it already has.

The point is that Little Timmy Walz failed in his primary mission: to humanize Mrs. Kamala Harris and seal the deal with America’s voters.

Harris has manifestly failed to do anything of the sort since her appointment as candidate. Her aloofness, coldness, and overall uncanny valley weirdness (the infiltrator from planet Zor masquerading as a human female thing) have stymied all such efforts: the hand-waving and eye-rolling during the presidential debate (you’d think they’d have learned after the Gore 2000 debacle, but no), the fake hood accent that’s about as convincing as Hillary’s, the complete indifference shown to the victims of Hurricane Helene, to mention only a few. Even Oprah, who could conceivably humanize a Nazi war criminal, was unable to do anything for Harris. Her team is well aware of this, as we witnessed in their pleading for a second debate, as if that would work any better than the first.

So it was Walz’s duty to go in and deploy his Minnesota niceness and goofy Fargo charm to make the sale, to get through where Harris had fumbled. We all know what happened instead. Walz came across as even stranger than Harris – if that’s possible. Walz presented as a mass of contradictory and unfathomable emotional cues. Consider the key moment of the debate: his answer to the CBS fact-checker in the pink jacket (sorry – don’t know her name) when she asked about the Hong Kong/Tiananmen lie. Walz’s answer was evasive boilerplate – he’s just a small-town feller, y’know, just a regular Joe, but sometimes, goldarn it, he just gets ahead of himself – spoken with his eyes half-bugged out of his head in abject terror.

Now, Walz and his handlers had to know that this question was coming, but not only could they not come up with a convincing answer, they couldn’t instill enough self-control in Walz to enable him to overcome the dread that the question generates in him. As to why this should be, I have no idea -- though it’s clear that there’s a lot more to the matter than we’ve so far heard. (This incipient terror, the “the velociraptors have broken in” response to just about everything – every event, every question – has become commonplace among male Democrats. You find it also in Mayorkas and Blinken. It’s extremely unsettling to see this in mature males. I’m sure that most of the country -- apart from the hard lefties and the moron vote, who would cheer on a human-sized paramecium if that’s what they were ordered to do -- feel the same.)

Vance, for his part, wisely stood back and allowed Walz to defeat himself, only stepping in to give Timmy a little nudge when appropriate.

Thus, Walz took the fall. So where do they go from here? I don’t see an answer. It’s awful late in the game. They’ve thrown in Oprah, Taylor Swift, everybody but Pope Francis, and they’ve still got a cackling female cyborg and a balding, fearful little shopkeeper as their standard-bearers. I’m sure the DNC is having second, third, and fourth thoughts. The rest of the country is no doubt doing the same.

Image: AT via Magic Studio