Brooks: What the wannaveeps are telling America about Minnesota, Ohio

If you want to know how well a vice presidential candidate will represent America, watch how they represent their home states.

Tuesday night’s debate pits Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota against U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Two guys from the two states where I’ve spent most of my life, vying for your vote.

Listen to what they say about Minnesota and Ohio. It should tell you something about how they see the rest of America.

In the blue corner, we find Walz, strolling through sun-dappled Minnehaha Off-Leash Dog Park with his good dog Scout, granting a long-awaited one-on-one interview to … the We Rate Dogs guy. Nowhere to be found were the in-depth policy conversations that journalists, national and local, have been dying to have with the candidate. But Scout earned a coveted rating of 14 on a We Rate Dogs scale of 10, and viewers got to hear what the governor sees when he looks around the rambling off-leash park along the Mississippi River.

“You get to see a lot of great people down here and meet a lot of great dogs,” said Walz, as Secret Service agents glided through the trees behind him, and Scout tried and failed to catch many tennis balls.

On the campaign trail, Walz enthusiastically compares almost every state he visits to Minnesota, just with less ice and more Super Bowl rings. The Minnesota he shows the world is a place where we care about our neighbors, push each other out of snowbanks and work to make sure no child goes hungry at school.

The stories JD Vance tells about Ohio are different. His Ohio is a grim, scary land. They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. The hometown he describes in his book — middle-class Middletown, nestled between Cincinnati and Dayton — was “little more than a relic of American industrial glory,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.”

JD Vance told lies about Ohio. Stories, he called them. Stories he admits made up so everyone would see Springfield, Ohio, the way he sees Springfield. Where Springfield saw hardworking neighbors who came legally from Haiti to work vital factory jobs and revitalize the town’s economy, Vance told a story about illegal criminals snacking on housecats. If you repeat a lie like that enough times, your followers start making bomb threats to Springfield elementary schools, apparently.

Now, I grew up in the part of Ohio that’s actually Appalachia. Zanesville, home of the Y Bridge, where you can only hope a stranger comes along asking for directions, so you can tell them to go to the middle of the bridge and turn right. My first home in Ohio was a little house built in the backyard of another house, up the hill from a soon-to-be-shuttered Armco plant.

It was a great place to grow up. How many towns have weathered not one but two tiger escape events? Tons of kids in the neighborhood. Considerate steel plant workers who swerved out of the way when we careened down the hill, out of control, butt-first on a skateboard. By dint of avoiding both car wheels and the foamy orange runoff that spilled out of the factory and into the creek where we played as kids, I am here to tell you: Ohio is pretty great. It would not kill JD Vance to say something nice about Ohio in general and Zanesville in particular.

Lord knows he’s not going to say anything nice about Minnesota. The Minnesota he and his running mate, former President Donald Trump, describe in their speeches is a crater still smoldering from 2020′s mask mandates and the murder of George Floyd. They burned Minneapolis to the ground, they lie. They burned Minneapolis to the ground.

While Vance embroidered his stories and instigated one awkward restaurant interaction after another, Walz continued his low-stakes chat with Matthew Nelson of We Rate Dogs.

Walz advised not lying. Not to your dog, when it’s time to go to the vet. Not to your parents, if you’re a kid making the case for a family pet. Tell the truth. Dad is probably going to be the one emptying the litter box, but you can promise to love that cat with all your heart. The dog is going to the vet, not the dog park, but you can go for a pup cone afterward, promise.

Dogs, Walz said, bring out the best in us.

“I think our politics,” he added, “can sometimes bring out the worst.”