It can be dangerous. Look at it now. It's. It's practically like fireflies over the city of Tel Aviv.

When you run for president or vice president of the United States, you've got to be ready to react to whatever is going on in the world. So when Iran launched a barrage of missiles directly at Israel yesterday in response to the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Senator J.D. Vance had to make some adjustments as they prepared for their vice presidential debate hosted by CBS News. Remember, this was the final scheduled debate of any kind this cycle. It may be the last time the campaigns have a chance to make their case to a wide audience. And so for 90 minutes last night, Walz and Vance covered a lot of ground from this major escalation in the Middle East to Hurricane Helene, cleanup back in the U.S. and more. But will any of it actually impact the race? My guest is CNN's senior reporter Edward Isaac Dovere. We're going to break down the major moments and where both campaigns go from here. From CNN, this is one thing. I'm David Wright. Isaac. We just finished watching this vice presidential debate hosted by CBS News. The moderator is Margaret Brennan and Norah o'donnell jumped right into the news of the day at the top with a question about the Middle East. But it kind of strikes me that both of these guys, J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, are both relatively unknown on the national stage in general, and they're not exactly foreign policy mavens. So what stood out to you about how this all got started?

I had an article over the weekend that said that Tim Walz was fighting off nerves going into the debate and that he was worried about how he would do and he knew he was a bad debater. There were people who said when that article published that I was just doing expectation setting or following for the expectation setting that was being done by the Walls aides. I think that what we saw tonight shows that it was actually where things are, that where things were, that Walz was nervous about this.

Governor Walz, if you were the final voice in the Situation Room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran? You have two minutes.

Well, thank you. And thank you for those joining in home tonight. Let's keep in mind where this started. October 7th, Hamas terrorists. Massacred over 1400 Israelis and took prisoners. Iran. Our I. Israel's ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental.

Getting it especially in that first answer, you could see the nerves there. You might forgive that. It's a nationally televised debate. It's a strange thing I'm sure to do. I've never been in a nationally televised debate, but even at other points, when he could have jumped in a little bit more, he was not doing that. You saw with vans some very experienced debating moves.

Sure. Now we talk about what the sequence of events that led us to where we are right now. And you can't ignore October the 7th, which I appreciate Governor Walters bringing up. But when did Iran and Hamas and their proxies attack Israel? It was during the administration of Kamala Harris. So.

For example, he kept using the line, you and I agree on this or we have a lot to agree on here. It's just a difference of how we do it. That that's someone who really knows how to work the rules of rhetoric and all of that. And it paid off for Vance. A lot of points.

Now, you asked about a preemptive strike, Margaret, and I want to answer the question. Look, it is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe. And we should support our allies wherever they are when they're fighting the bad guys. I think that's the right approach to take with the Israel question.

But I think when it comes to the issue of Israel and the Middle East conflict overall and the two people who are at the top of the ticket, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on this issue, among many others. But we're talking about this one. It's hard to believe that either J.D. Vance or Tim Walz would have much of a role in shaping what actually went on.

Right. And that's was my next question, because obviously, vice presidential debates tend to be more about the top of the ticket rather than the actual people on stage. So how did Walz and Vance try to bring former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris into the conversation here?

Well, for Vance, it was trying to make Walz answer for Kamala Harris as essentially the incumbent and the way that he portraying this or a.

Lot of what Kamala Harris proposes to do. And some of it, I'll be honest with you, it even sounds pretty good. Here's what you won't hear, is that Kamala Harris has already done it because she's been the vice president for three and a half years. She had the opportunity to enact all of these great policies. And what she's actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%.

'And it was what Kamala Harris did on the border. What color Harris said about the economy. Well, Harris has not been the president for the last three and a half years. It's obviously the Biden-Harris administration. But she has chafed at the fact that she has not had as much of a role in doing things. Obviously, there are political reasons why Vance would want to do that.

'Senator Vance has said that there's a climate problem in the past. Donald Trump called it a hoax and then joked that these things would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in what we've seen out of the Harris administration. Now, the Biden-Harris administration is we've seen this investment. We've seen four walls.

He was attacking Donald Trump, trying to say that people should remember how bad things were when Trump was president and then to stand up for Harris's record. You did see some of that with fans, too, where he would return a couple of times to talking about the successful economy under Donald Trump. He did not defend Donald Trump on a couple of key things.

Could you be more specific about exactly how this will work? For example, would you deport parents who have entered the US illegally and separate them from any of their children who were born on U.S. soil? You have two.

Minutes. So, first of all, Margaret, before we talk about deportations, we have to stop the bleeding. We have a historic immigration crisis because Kamala Harris started and said that she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump's border policies.

He would not really explain how the mass deportation plan that Trump has talked about would work, for example, and that and he didn't get into the Covid response, which is something that while he took one chip at governor.

Do you want to respond to that? What has Kamala Harris done for the middle class?

Well, Kamala Harris is day one was Donald Trump's failure on Covid that led to the collapse of our economy. We were already before Covid in a in a manufacturing recession, but 10 million people out of work. Largest percentage since the Great Depression. 9 million jobs closed on that. That was day one. Whether it was so.

It was as these things tend to be, vice presidential debates focused on the people at the top of the ticket. There are very few people, if any, who are headed to the voting booth in November or doing early voting in between. And then who are saying, all right, it's really what J.D. Vance is making me think about here. It's really what Tim Walz is making me think about here. And I think that is true in any election. I think, again, especially in this election, given who these characters are at the top of the ticket, it is not something that is going to be driven by what people think about these running mates, which is why they were trying to focus the arguments on the presidential candidates. Both there are running mates and the opposing ones.

Well, it did seem like they were being going out of their way to be civil towards each other, you know, extending olive branches in multiple times. We haven't seen that kind of thing in the debate in quite some time. Is that just Midwest nice or is it debating skills like you say?

I don't think that the Mike Pence Kamala Harris debate in 2020 was particularly vitriolic. I think one, what you're picking up on is what Donald Trump has done to the political conversation himself. And even at the end of the debate, you saw walls and vans having a little chat. Their wives walked out onto stage. They introduced each other to their wives. They then both walked over to the moderator's table, said thank you to them, and shook their hands. That didn't happen when Donald Trump was on stage, either with Kamala Harris or with Joe Biden. That's not what Donald Trump does.

Well, I've enjoyed tonight's debate and I think there was a lot of commonality here. And I'm sympathetic to misspeaking on things. And I think I might have with with the senator. But to me, there's one there's one, though, that but one troubling.

It really is a comment on what has happened to presidential politics and has and as the trickle down effect of that has gone on, that we watch to people who are running for vice president have a civil. At points I strongly disagree with each other, but never shouting at each other, never calling names or saying things that were blatantly made up. Debate that should be what happens, but it's not the way that it has been.

I counted at least 11 distinct policy topics that the moderators touched on here. Did voters learn anything new about the policies that these campaigns are putting forward?

They may have heard some of the holes that are there in the proposals that each campaign has been making. For example, when it came to the mass deportation policy, that has been a central promise of Donald Trump once again. And I say once again, because Trump couldn't defend it or explain it in his debate with Harris, Vance could not explain what that was. He couldn't explain what how that would work. When there were the question about how when they started to drill down about how the housing plans of each of them were talked about would work, neither of them could really explain what what that would mean, how it would be in practice done.

Senator, where are you going to seize the federal lands? Can you clarify?

Well, what Donald Trump has said, as we have a lot of federal lands that aren't being used for anything, they're not being used for national parks, they're not being used. And they could be places where we build a lot of housing. And I do think that we should be opening up building in this country. We have a lot of land that could be used.

But I think that the the conversation about abortion was pretty interesting. You could see that that was a place that Tim Walz had really practiced. What he was going to say, got very into specifics about the women who had been affected and their stories.

This issue is what's on everyone's mind. Donald Trump put this all into motion. He brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturn Roe versus Wade. 52 years of personal autonomy. And then he tells us, we send it to the States. It's a beautiful thing. Amanda Gorski would disagree with you on it's a beautiful thing. A young bride in Texas waiting for their child at 18 weeks. She has a complication, a tear in the membrane. She needs to go in. The medical care at that point needs to be decided by the doctor. And that would have been an abortion. But in Texas, that would have put them in legal jeopardy. She went home, got sepsis, nearly dies. And now she may have difficulty having children.

But he ended up on the back foot about this idea that abortions are allowed into the ninth month of a pregnancy. And Van's pushing this real misconstruing of the facts and the law there. There is an exception in the case of saving a mother's life. But the idea that a child would be killed into the ninth month, or as Donald Trump claimed in the debate with Harris, that it would be killed after it was born, after it was delivered. And that's not what goes on.

Trying to distort the way a law is written to try and make a point. That's not it at all.

What was I wrong about the governor? Please tell me, what was I wrong about?

That is not the way the law is written. Look, I've given how I've given this advice on a lot of things that getting involved, getting you get that's been misread. And it was fact checked at the last debate. But the point.

'But Walz struggled to defend the law, the actual situation there and explain what I just said, which is the facts of it, and made it seem perhaps like there was some extreme situation that he was allowing in for people who are concerned about how far Democrats want to go on abortion. That continues to be the kind of example that Donald Trump and anti-abortion activists bring up all the time.

This one is troubling to me. And I say that because I think we need to tell the story. Donald Trump refused to acknowledge this. And the fact is, is that I don't think we can be the frog in the pot and let the boiling water go up. He was very clear. I mean, he lost this election and he said he didn't.

By the time that Walls got to that answer about January 6th, that was something that you could see had been worked on and worked on in debate prep. And but maybe that's why the nerves that were evident elsewhere in the debate, four walls were not so much there then when.

Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election. That's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage. What I'm concerned about is where is the firewall with Donald Trump?

He came very close to saying something that I had been told and I had reported was being batted around, which was to say something to the effect of what? What did you promise Donald Trump so that he wouldn't send a mob after you to kill you like you did with Mike Pence? But he didn't quite say that he came near it. I'm obviously very critical of what had happened there, but at the moment that probably he was hoping for of that was what he asked fans to say. Donald Trump lost the election and Vance did not.

He is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just outright. Did he lose the 2020 election?

Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?

'That is a damning that is a damning non-answer.

'It's a damning non-answer for you to not talk about censorship, obviously.

'He said I'm focused on the future and was that was one of those moments where he cut in with the microphone live and said that the non-answer was very notable.

Well, finally, Isaac, you said that the vast majority of people are not going to the polls to vote for a vice president. So where does the campaign go from here? Is there any kind of momentum either campaign can take or with a race this close? Is it just going to, you know, full steam ahead until Election Day?

We're in the middle of a weird week for the campaign right then where the attention where five weeks out and the attention this week is largely going to be on the storm recovery in North Carolina and Tennessee and in or wherever we are headed in the Middle East. And I do think that the ironic part of it and I would add in that strike among the port workers to this is that this is actually what the job of being president is dealing with. This sort of thing is dealing with disaster recovery, is dealing with foreign conflicts that spiral out of control in ways that you can't get your hands around. And whatever you think about Barack Obama, he used that line when he was president. You would say every decision that comes to my desk is impossible because if it were not, then it would have been.

Then be on somebody else's desk.

Right. And but but I think more than that, especially when it comes to the disaster recovery and the ports strike, this is what we are electing a president to do, to run the federal government and to run the country and to run America's role in the world. And it maybe is a good reminder to people as we head into this final five weeks here of what it is that we are doing here. And it's not just a personality contest or just about all the things that they're proposing that they might do if they get Congress to agree with them. This is about what these these two people running for president would do and how Walls and Vance as the potential vice presidents would fit into that administration, what they would bring to it, how they would be part of running it and potentially to step in should something happen.

Yeah. And again, this could possibly be the last debate of this cycle. And we say all the time the stakes can be higher. But just like you said, they truly are. Isaac, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. If you're new here, first of all, welcome. And just a reminder to hit the follow button wherever you're listening so you don't miss an episode. We do this twice a week on Wednesday and Sunday, and we'll talk to you then.