From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, October 2nd.

So what happened in that kind of awkwardly restrained debate last night? A New York Times analysis is headlined J.D. Vance

strains to sell a softer Donald Trump. A New York Post analysis is headlined Tim Wall staggered

by cool J.D. Vance. A lot of the discussion on MSNBC, and we know where they're coming from, but a lot of

the discussion on MSNBC has been over whether Tim Walls successfully appealed to less-engaged

voters, the remaining swing voters, by being as courteous as he was to Vance, or did Walls miss

an opportunity to call Vance out for being a culture war radical?

Charlie Sykes on MSNBC, that never Trump conservative, said Vance was sanewashing

Donald Trump, sanewashing Donald Trump, and the question is, why didn't Tim Wals be like,

what are you kidding me? More often than he was last night.

Here's an example of that alleged sanewashing or the idea that Vance was straining to sell

a softer Donald Trump. I would just call it a blatant revisionist take on Obamacare,

which Trump tried throughout his presidency to repeal.

Well, look, we currently have laws and regulations in the place right now that protect people

with preexisting conditions. We want to keep those regulations in place, but we also want to

make the health insurance marketplace function a little bit better. So meet the new character and try to believe he's real, Donald Trump, the Obamacare rescuer.

But Wasp was very respectful, gave Vance credit multiple times for actually trying to solve problems.

They both did with each other.

And he never mentioned, you know, childless cat ladies.

He never used the word maga or called

Trump weird like he has in the past. What he did do, what they both did was try to praise each other's

seriousness while discrediting the top of the ticket, Trump or Harris. So, for example, the first

...