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JD Vance: The Male Sarah Palin?

Over the last eight years JD Vance has shown that he has no guiding principles and that he will change supposedly deeply held convictions the blink of an eye if he thinks it will further his political interest.  He has gone from a never Trumper to Trump's VP nominee and in a little more than a week has shown that like Trump he will lie and posture in order to delight the misogynists, sexists and ignorance embracing MAGA base.  His pandering to that base has parallels with Sarah Palin, John McCain's VP pick who likely lost him the presidential election, in that while it thrills to base, it alienates even more voters than it pleases.  Vance's statements on abortion, which families count as real families (i.e. married straight couples with children), and women have sparked a fire storm and could well  help turn women against the Trump/Vance ticket.  And all of this doesn't even begin to factor in the manner in which his anti-Ukraine, pro-Putin statements are falling flat with those left in the Republican Party who support America's leading role in the world and are not ready to hand a large chunk of Europe over to Russia. His alienation of women, however, may his biggest gift to Democrats who already have Trump - who has bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, has been found guilty of sexual abuse, and contemptuous of women - as a big motivator for women to flee the GOP.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Vance's missteps:

Three years ago, well before JD Vance was selected as Donald Trump’s running mate, he suggested in a TV interview that some Democrats including Vice President Harris are “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable.”

Those 2021 comments are resurfacing on social media now that Harris is the likely Democratic nominee, sparking a fresh wave of anger from women who say it’s offensive to those struggling with fertility issues — and inaccurate that people without children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country’s future.

At the same time, many on social media are embracing and owning the “childless cat lady” label as a point of pride, with many even pointing to reported billionaire Taylor Swift as a prime example of a highly successful one — seen even on her 2023 Time “Person of the Year” cover with her fluffy ragdoll wrapped around her neck.

“There’s a movement,” declared Nikki Barnes, a previous member of the Democratic National Committee from Florida, accompanied by a “Childless cat ladies for Harris 2024” image quickly amassing nearly 2 million views. On TikTok, people are snapping up “Cat ladies for Harris 2024” stickers.

The vociferous response to the resurfaced Vance comments — which have been shared widely and amassed nearly 28 million views on an X post shared Monday — only underscores how female reproductive rights including access to abortion, birth control and in vitro fertilization will be a major drivers in the 2024 race. Gender and racial attacks like the ones she [Kamala Harris] experienced as a primary candidate in the 2020 race are poised to accelerate now that she’s the likely nominee.

For the record, Harris, 59, became a stepmom of two when she married Douglas Emhoff in 2014 and has been deeply involved in the lives of stepchildren Ella and Cole. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whom Vance also singled out in his comments describing how “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” became a parent of adopted twins.

[M]any women are reminding Vance that there are plenty of reasons they may not have children.

“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” actress Jennifer Aniston wrote Wednesday, slamming Vance in an Instagram story. “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day,” wrote the “Friends” star.

“I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.” (While Trump has declared support for in vitro fertilization, Senate Republicans last month blocked consideration of a bill to protect IVF access — and the issue erupted in February when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are people and that a person could be liable for destroying them.)

Reproductive health issues, especially conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis can impact women’s ability to conceive and carry a pregnancy. Female fertility declines with age and lack of adequate health-care services or child support services can also be factors influencing the decision to have a child.

‘The View" host Whoopi Goldberg also weighed in on the show Wednesday: “Sir, there are people who have chosen not to have children for whatever reason,” she said.

Meghan McCain, talk show host and daughter of the late GOP senator John McCain of Arizona, posted on X that “I have been trying to warn every conservative man I know — these JD comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends.”

Vance, in his 2021 comments, called out “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Women online blasted the assumption that those who are without children are unhappy.

Vance’s comments came as more Americans are choosing not to have children. A Pew Research Survey in 2021 found that the childless U.S. adults aged 18 to 49 who said they were unlikely to ever have children rose by 7 percentage points in the previous three years to 44 percent. About 56 percent said they did not want children, 19 percent stated a medical reason for not having kids, and financial reasons stopped another 17 percent from becoming a parent.

As some on social media put it: Childless cat ladies vote, too — and some, even, are cultural icons. “It’s bold, for someone seeking votes, to hone in on ‘childless cat ladies’ when the leader of Childless Cat Ladies is TAYLOR SWIFT,” author Caitlin Moran posted. . . . Sure enough, Swifties were entering the chat in droves.

Legal fellow and Lawfare correspondent Anna Bower pointed out on X: “hell hath no fury like a certain childless cat lady who has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.”

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The GOP's Continued Celebration of Ignaorance

It is almost laughable how Republicans - some dumb as bricks themselves - are attacking Kamala Harris as being dumb or a "DEI hire"  (the GOP's current substitute for the n-word) when the Republican Party now celebrates ignorance and attacks those with good academic degrees - or worse yet Ivy League degrees - as "elites" and the enemies of MAGA world.  The Republican Party that once valued education, science, and knowledge is dead and gone.  What makes the current GOP worship of ignorance even more farcical is the lengths that its own members with Ivy League degrees go in order to pretend they are good old boys and girls -think JD Vance - who has changed his name twice - Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz to name a few.   With an ever more competitive world and with rival nations fostering education of their population, the Republicans seemingly are in a race to dumb down the nation.  Then, of course, there is Trump who claims he is "smart" and a "stable genius" even as he speaks at an elementary school level.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the hypocrisy of this worship of ignorance:

Donald Trump loves to show off how smart he is. “I’m, like, a smart person,” he boasted on one occasion. “I went to an Ivy League college, I was a nice student,” he said on another. “I’m a very intelligent person.” And perhaps most memorably, “I’m a very stable genius.”

But the dopey language he chooses, along with his disheveled, unpresidented grammar — both intentional and inadvertent — belie those assertions. It’s impossible to forget that this is the same guy who spells little “liddle’,” capitalizes at random and blunders out the occasional “covfefe.”

Trump is shrewd enough to know that Americans don’t like a guy who acts smart. So if his fumbles are strategic, it’s not entirely dumb. On the left, people think emphasizing intellect and elite schools betrays unfair advantage in a multiple-intelligences, equitable-outcome world. On the right, your average MAGA Joe bristles at anyone who comes across as a coastal elite or too smart for his own good.

In its recent populist incarnation, Republicans downplay any whiff of intellectualism by avoiding big words in favor of Kid Rock fandom and trucker hat slogans. In MAGA world, glorified ignorance actually serves as a qualification for higher office (see: Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene), empowering more effective rage against “the liberal elite” and “the ruling class.”

This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position . . . . In order to stay in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers.

Remember, Ron DeSantis once eagerly joined one of Yale’s secret societies and told classmates he’d dreamed of attending Harvard Law. He founded a tutoring firm offering “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.”

But once in office, he made a show of distancing himself from his academic credentials.

His Ivy League brethren, Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law) and Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), take similar pains to wash off the taint of East Coast academia with good-ol’-boy cred.

This is in sharp contrast to the intellectual pretensions of earlier Republican leaders, who would highlight, say, the “historian” Newt Gingrich’s Ph.D.

The latest standard-bearer for regular-folk Republicans is a down-home J.D., now JD — no periods, dude — who went to Yale Law School only with the help of student loans and side jobs. What’s more, JD Vance first got a humbler degree at Ohio State through the G.I. Bill. At the Republican National Convention, Yale barely came up.

And in one of her very first moves as an aspiring second lady, Usha Vance, who attended Yale as both an undergrad and a law student, made clear she would like to be referred to as Mrs. Vance, rather than Ms. The implication being: dutiful wife first, fancy Ivy League lawyer second.

The Vance who emerged as a MAGA politician is one who, after reaping the benefits and connections of an elite graduate education, turned around and gave a speech in 2021 called “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

“How ridiculous is it that we tell our young people to go to college, to get brainwashed?” he asked the crowd, going on to quote Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.” For Vance, the biggest takeaway from his Ivy League education is the monumental chip on his shoulder.

Politicians have long achieved high office based on ambition, hubris, cunning and a certain degree of ruthlessness more so than on account of their intellect. Nor does an Ivy League degree equate with excellence.

But it’s nonetheless dispiriting to see a major political party give lowbrow boors pride of place over the high-minded. It also puts Republicans in an awkward position vis-à-vis their new national opponent. Should Republicans frame Kamala Harris as some kind of lightweight bungling her words and laughing her way weirdly to the Oval Office, it risks not only playing into racist and sexist stereotypes, it will also further cement the flagrant hypocrisy of their own party.

After all, the Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.

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Biden's Exit From Race Upends Republicans

The last few days have underscored the reality in politics that one should never discount  the possibility of events upending what one thought was a sure thing for campaigns and elections.  With Joe Biden's exit from the reelection race, Republicans' apparent plans to play on Biden's age and cognition as q sure election winner are turned upside down and suddenly Trump's age and failing cognitive abilities will be what is spotlighted. Moreover, with Harris now the likely Democrat standard bearer, less than enthused blacks and women seem to be taking a new interest in the election.  Then there's the surge in Democrat fundraising that has been nothing short of remarkable. The cultists are howling and all kinds of Republican hyperventilating and shrieking is on open display.  Mike Pence who hailed Biden's "right decision" is under attack and the GOP's misogyny is in overdrive as Harris is attacked as a "DEI hire" and Trump resorts to lies and insults.  In short, Republicans don't like the "prosecutor versus the felon" meme and realize that Trump's constant verbal diarrhea and incoherence will be under renewed scrutiny by the media and voters.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at Republican hysteria:

Republicans I spoke with today, some of them still hungover from celebrating what felt to many like a victory-night celebration in Milwaukee, registered shock at the news of Biden’s departure. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaign—one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden—against a new and unknown challenger. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race,” a clearly peeved Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “Now we have to start all over again.”

For months, in talking with Wiles and LaCivita, I was struck by their concern about the potential of a dramatic switch—Democratic leaders pushing out Biden in favor of a younger nominee. They told me that Trump’s campaign was readying contingency plans and studying the weaknesses of would-be alternatives, beginning with Vice President Kamala Harris. By the time of the debate, however, they believed that Democrats’ window had all but closed. . . . . More than anything, Trump’s allies believed that the president’s stubborn Irish ego wouldn’t let him back out of a fight with a man he despised.

But they couldn’t take any chances. Two weeks ago, according to a campaign source who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio went into the field to begin testing the outcomes of a Harris-versus-Trump matchup. These surveys, conducted across several battleground states, represented the most concrete step taken to prepare for the possibility of a new adversary. Still, with the polling a tightly held secret—I couldn’t verify the results—there were no outward signs of Trump’s operation expecting a reset. When convention speakers reached out to the GOP nominee’s campaign, gauging whether to hedge their speeches with attacks on Harris, they were told to keep the focus on Biden.

In many ways, the convention scene was one of a party peaking too early. Campaigns are marathons measured by changes in momentum and narrative, and Republicans in Milwaukee reveled in what felt like a three-week winning streak, dating back to the debate, in which the daily churn of insider gossip focused ever more on Democratic fatalism and Trump’s seeming inevitability.

The president’s abrupt exit dashed any such fantasy. Suddenly, Republicans who had boasted last week about expanding the electoral map—pushing into Minnesota and Virginia and other decidedly blue areas—were fretting about the possibility of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly joining the Democratic ticket, partnering with Harris to put back into play key battlegrounds that just 24 hours earlier seemed to be out of reach.

[T]he essence of what Trump’s campaign believes—that any Democrat who picks up the party’s banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable. Republicans will point to historic inflation, millions of illegal border crossings, and geopolitical chaos from Eastern Europe to the Middle East as evidence that the entire Democratic Party has failed the American people.

It’s true that Harris will struggle to shed some policy-related criticisms; her appointment early in her vice presidency to handle the southern border, in fact, could make her even more vulnerable to immigration-related attacks than Biden was. It’s also true, however, that policy criticisms aren’t what made Biden unelectable in the eyes of most Americans. In an evenly divided and exceedingly polarized nation, Biden lost ground—with his party’s base as well as with independents—because he was perceived to be too old and infirm to serve another four years in office.

Harris is neither of those things. At 59 years old, she is two decades younger than Trump and will have no trouble keeping up with him on the campaign trail or the debate stage. She is also a former prosecutor who, if anything, is known for being too tough on crime.

At the very least, Trump’s lieutenants realize, Harris’s promotion will provide a desperately needed jolt to Democrats nationwide in the form of fundraising, volunteerism, and enthusiasm. Whatever her flaws as a politician—Harris ran a dreadful primary campaign for president in 2020, marked by organizational infighting and awkward sound bites—she does not possess the one flaw that proved insurmountable for Biden.

Trump’s campaign insists that nothing has changed. . . . But they know it’s more than that. They know that from the moment they partnered with Trump, everything they intended for this campaign—the messaging, the advertising, the microtargeting, the ground game, the mail pieces, the digital engagement, the social-media maneuvers—was designed to defeat Joe Biden. Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.

[F]or a campaign that went to bed Saturday believing it would dictate the terms of the election every day until November 5, Sunday brought an unfamiliar feeling of powerlessness. For the first time in a long time, Trump does not control the narrative of 2024.

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