Enemies typically shoot at the weak point. No one said Reagan was boring, they said he was full of it. With J.D. Vance the weak points appear to be 1) he’s a twister who changes his views, 2) he’s a mouthy jackass and spouts off unsavory opinions, and 3) as a guy on your TV, he’s dullsville, a zero, a bean fart. It’s the last one that surprises me.
To draw a difficult distinction: there’s the policymaker and person, and there’s the figure talking on TV. My personal dislocation allows me to feel one way about the first, a different way about the second. To make a necessary point: liking or disliking how somebody comes across on TV isn’t really a big thing.
With the foregoing in mind, I’ll say that I don’t mind J.D. Vance, guy speaking on my TV set. In this I may be alone. Jesse Singal, a liberal journalist but one who sticks it to liberal shibboleths, tweeted, “Vance is just a fairly pathetic speaker and seems to be flubbing everything.” (Characteristically, Singal adds, “I say this as someone who has many doubts about Kamala Harris’s abilities as a compelling speaker once the dust of her announcement settles, though she’s obviously done well so far.”) Others have also commented on Vance’s rampant blahness (Steven Colbert: “No charisma,” Vanity Fair headline: “About as Flat as a Day-Old Diet Mountain Dew,” The New Republic: “practically boring people to tears”).
That’s the consensus among the left and liberals. There’s also the public at large: unless CNN cooked its poll, the Ohio Senator’s the first VP contender to start campaigning with underwater ratings (minus six percent). And there’s the crowd at Vance’s first rally as a VP candidate, held in the high school where he was a student. The people of Middletown, Ohio, sat on their hands while he delivered what sounded to me like a decent stump speech for a right-winger. It included the notorious Mountain Dew joke (“I had a diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist, too”), which appears to have been built on the idea that nowadays anything at all can get called racist. Maybe the folks thought the idea was that somebody actually said diet Mountain Dew was racist, and they were left feeling stumped because nobody has. Stranded by the crowd’s flat response, Vance worsened matters by doing a chuckle and head dip, saying, “I love you guys.” He specified that he meant the people in the front row, saying they’d been wisecracking—which would suggest they’d been having a better time than the people stuck listening to the speaker. All in all, a painful moment.
But I didn’t mind the speech. I didn’t mind the backstage clip where Vance plays identity politics with a tableload of junk food (did he eat that stuff at Yale?). To me he seems like a crisp, poised figure who can talk to a camera with his voice moving up and down the way voices do in regular conversation. That’s a neat trick and for this viewer something of a pleasure to experience. Putting aside his past emails and blog posts and Tucker Carlson appearances, the man on my screen seems just fine. Of course, Hillary Clinton seemed fine to me too, so possibly J.D. Vance is doomed.
