The $28 million effort to fumigate J.D. Vance’s reputation might not be large enough.
There’s a whole lot of stench oozing from the candidacy of the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate who, through little doing of his own, eked out a narrow win in his party’s May primary election for the seat held by retiring Sen. Rob Portman. As a candidate, Vance has awful political instincts, not an ounce of class and a tendency to embrace views parroted by political maggots he considers friends.
History is replete with names of honorable Republicans who served their state and country with distinction, men and women named Grant, Garfield, McKinley, Davidson, Taft, Voinovich and others. If voters in red-state Ohio reward Vance’s breathtaking unfitness with a win over Democratic nominee Tim Ryan on Nov. 8, they’ll be making a monumental mistake.
Vance is one of a handful of trashy Senate candidates who won their Republican Party primary elections only because they were endorsed by former President Donald Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already signaled it will be difficult to win back control of the Senate in November, largely because he’s saddled with a bunch of pitiful candidates handed him by a former president he rightfully despises.
“Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome (of Senate races),” McConnell acknowledged recently.
To salvage Vance’s campaign, a McConnell-linked super-PAC will pour $28 million into Ohio, flooding airwaves with attack ads against Ryan, who — despite running a mistake-free campaign — is vulnerable because of Ohio’s lurch to the right. That massive infusion will more than offset the impact of all the deep-pocketed GOP donors in Ohio who are saying “no” to the candidate’s fundraising requests.
And it might be enough to drag Vance across the finish line first. If Republicans can win with this guy, they can win in Ohio with just about anyone. And in two years, they’ll be coming for three-term Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Win or lose, there’s a lot that disqualifies Vance from holding high office in this or any other state. Let’s review:
• Because women find him so unlikeable, the Vance campaign is trying to soften his image with ads featuring his wife, Usha, depicting him as a loving family man. But in remarks from last September that Vice.com surfaced in late July — and that Vance now repudiates — he suggested that women with children should stay in marriages with violent abusers for the sake of the kids.
Vance made the remarks during an appearance in California, where he seems to spend a lot of time.
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” Vance then said to a Christian high school group, “which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”
“And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads,” he added, “though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”
Vance has said his remarks were taken out of context. Good luck selling that story to informed females.
• Vance’s choice of friends argues persuasively that he lacks both judgment and character.
Right-wing conspiracy theorist and Sandy Hook school-massacre denier Alex Jones is the nation’s most vile public figure. A Texas jury earlier this month ordered Jones to pay more than $49.3 million in defamation damages to families of one of the 20 children killed in the 2012 slaughter. The jury should have added another zero.
Nevertheless, last September Vance tweeted that Jones was being “censored by the regime” and argued, “Alex Jones is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.”
Vance and his wife should travel to Connecticut and explain to the Sandy Hook parents why he’s such a great family man.
I attempted to ask Vance about his admiration for Jones, but an interview request went unanswered. Vance seems to view the news media as part of the same “regime” that’s out to get Alex Jones. This column is unlikely to change that.
Other Vance pals include Tucker Carlson and U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. When Greene spoke to a white nationalist group in January, Vance said of his bigoted pal, “She’s my friend, and she did nothing wrong.”
• Vance has argued against the need for rape and incest exceptions to abortion, claiming, “two wrongs don’t make a right.” He’s also said, “There’s something comparable between abortion and slavery.”
• Days before Russia began slaughtering tens of thousands of men, women and children in Ukraine, Vance said on a podcast, “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
• Then there’s the prerequisite for all Trump endorsements — a fact-free claim the 2020 election was stolen. It’s a lie Vance has been all too willing to peddle, to a base where the truth doesn’t matter.
The centerpiece of Vance’s twisted election fraud tale, offered without a shred of evidence, is that Mark Zuckerberg engineered a conspiracy to swing the vote to Joe Biden.
“I think we’ve got to investigate (the 2020 results) as much as possible,” Vance told Steve Bannon in May 2021. “But, you know, I think at a basic level we already mostly know what happened.”
We do, indeed.
Meanwhile, in Ryan, Democrats have nominated an imperfect, 10-term member of the U.S. House running a perfect statewide campaign. Ryan is great with a crowd, a natural talent. But his political resume is hardly pristine. Prior to the 2020 election, the Youngstown-area lawmaker spent time in Iowa, hoping to run for president. Democrats there weren’t interested. In 2016, he challenged Nancy Pelosi for House minority leader. She crushed him like a grape. Two or three times, Ryan floated his name as a possible candidate for governor but never followed through.
Walking to our cars after former U.S. Rep. Steve LaTourette’s funeral in August 2016, I asked Ryan if Hillary Clinton would run well against Trump in the Mahoning Valley. He said she would. She didn’t.
An upset win in the U.S. Senate race would elevate Ryan to national stardom. As a candidate, he is immeasurably more qualified than his opponent. But in off-year elections, in a problematic environment for Democrats, Ohio can be an uninviting place.
Ryan has a chance. But to win, he’ll need more help from his recklessly dangerous opponent.
Brent Larkin was The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009. His column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Lima News editorial board or AIM Media, owner of The Lima News.
