That Was One Boring, Instantly Forgettable Debate
A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a group vetting call with a congressional candidate for an organization I’m part of. The candidate is on the DCCC Red-to-Blue list and has been endorsed by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, the New Dems. A shady, Democratic Party-aligned dark money group is spending big money in the race and the candidate has raised big money— millions. More important, the candidate is wicked smart, maybe the smartest candidate we interviewed all cycle. I was impressed! Everyone was. But I saw that smartness as a problem since if it wound up in Congress, it would be smartness deployed against progressive ideas. I don’t think many other people on the committee saw it that way. I voted against an endorsement.
Being stupid and ignorant is never a good thing in an elected official. Being brilliant… well, Jamie Raskin is, arguably, the smartest person in Congress— and among the best members. Other very smart people, are not among the best members. They use their brilliance in the service of— well, if not evil— then less than stellar goals. Although… in the case of J.D. Vance, who has some smarts, evil is certainly the right term. Did you watch Rachel Maddow’s look into that heart of darkness Monday night? Please, please watch; it’s a bit of a mind-blower:
Yeah, this is the one with him on the Jack Murphy (John Goldman) misogynistic (pro-rape), racist, far-right fringe podcast 3 years ago (Sept., 2021) where Murphy baited him into talking about his anti-democracy perspective and admitting he’s a follower of modern-day American fascist thought-leader— and crackpot— Dark Enlightenment leader and monarchist Curtis Yarvin (aka, Mencius Moldbug), Peter Thiel’s guru.
On Fox Nation Tuesday night, Señor T was raising expectations for JD’s debate performance: “He’s going up against a moron. A total moron; how she picked him is unbelievable.” That’s never a good strategy but when has Trump ever been able to offer a disciplined approach to anything?
Walz, who grew up in rural Nebraska, worked on the family farm, played sports and hunted with friends and then went to a state college in Chadron, Nebraska and later a state university in Mankato, Minnesota, is a very American kind of guy in the classic sense, nothing like Vance. Mr. Smarty Pants, known as an agile, pithy debater, was bragging he didn’t need any debate prep. Voters hate Ivy League know-it-alls like Vance. Going into the debate, 45.7% of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Vance and 34.7% were favorably inclined towards him. On the other hand, 40.1% like Walz and 36.4 felt negatively about him.
Many Americans see Ivy League graduates as elitist, privileged and out of touch with the experiences of ordinary people. Also sick, untrustworthy and tricky, like the wolf in the cartoon above. Ironically, the kind of people who do feel more positive towards Ivy Leaguers, who see them as intelligent, hardworking and successful, tend to have other reasons to dislike Vance that override those general positive feelings.
As Jeet Heer put it Monday, “A skilled opportunist who has risen by sheer ambition from genuine poverty to the brink of the White House, JD Vance has spent a lifetime ingratiating himself to the powers that be. He’s been strikingly successful at pleasing centers of influence of various stripes, ranging from his professors at elite institutions to his military commanders to Wall Street employers to anti-Trump centrists, to Hollywood bigwigs, to Silicon Valley plutocrats— and finally Donald Trump and the MAGA movement itself. A cynic might say that Vance is the ultimate apple-polisher, ever ready with the words that other people want to hear, even if they contradict his earlier pronouncements… Vance first sold himself, in his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy (2016), to liberal media elites as the native informer with the lowdown on the white working class, the refugee from Appalachia who could explain all the depraved people who voted for Trump. In this incarnation, Vance offered a mixture of self-help (the other hillbillies just needed to study hard, avoid drugs, and, one presumes, go to an Ivy League school) and warnings of Trump’s dangerous demagoguery.
This was a message designed to please centrist and liberal elites who wanted to keep Trump out of power— but didn’t want to substantially change the economic order. But once it became clear that Trump had remade the GOP in his own image, Vance was shrewd enough to realize that he now had to ingratiate himself with the man he once compared to Hitler. As before, Vance applied his considerable skill at disingenuous flattery.” Many Americans are repulsed by that kind of person. Heer continued, “[E]ven as his skill at pleasing the targets of his ambition was as its pinnacle, Vance discovered that being serially ingratiating was also a good way to become more widely unpopular. At the end of the day, no one likes an apple-polisher. Remaking yourself to please others is a good way to earn distrust. In an age of negative polarization, it’s easy enough for a politician to be hated, but Vance excels at it… Even in Ohio, Walz’s approval is 1 percent higher than Vance’s.”
The Lincoln Project released an ad at around the same time Trump was calling Kamala and Tim Walz dumb… but with a radically different set-up to the debate:
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