Vance Has Reinvented Himself as Kinder and Gentler. But Is America Buying It?

on Oct 15, 2024

SAN DIEGO -- Whether you like him or not, you have to admit that JD Vance is an interesting guy.

For what it's worth, and I suspect it's not worth much to my MAGA friends, I'm in the "or not" camp. I'm not a fan.

I think the Ohio senator, and 2024 GOP vice presidential nominee, is smug, condescending and not nearly as smart as he likes to think he is -- especially when discussing issues with which he has limited experience, and knows little about, such as immigration.

Recently, Vance discussed the explosive issue with Lulu Garcia Navarro of The New York Times on the podcast "The Interview." He managed to carefully navigate his way through an 11-minute conversation about immigration without acknowledging that Americans are dependent on undocumented migrant labor, that migrants take jobs Americans won't do and that the only enforcement tool that has a prayer of working is to punish employers -- some of whom contribute to Republican candidates.

On a personal level, I also think the quantum leap that represents Vance's escape from one life and forging of another left behind psychological and emotional scar tissue that flares up when he gets angry, as he often does when he is interviewed by journalists who are asking questions that Vance considers unkind or unfair.

Here you have someone who, through hard work and tenacity, turned darkness into light. Vance was dealt a bad hand at first. He was saddled with a working-class upbringing in Middleton, Ohio, that was marred by a broken home, a dysfunctional family, a drug-addicted mother who went to jail and left her son behind to be raised by his grandmother. He turned his life around by enlisting in the U.S. Marines and then making his way to Yale Law School, which he followed up with stints as a venture capitalist, bestselling author, U.S. senator and now Republican vice presidential candidate -- all by the age of 40.

Still, despite that success, I imagine that one never gets over the trauma of having one's family torn apart and feeling abandoned by a parent who gets tangled up in the criminal justice system.

By the way, do you know who likely feels Vance's pain? The millions of Latino migrant children whose lives have been severely damaged in the last 10 years by our nation's dishonest, cruel and nonsensical immigration enforcement policies. Those policies were implemented by three different presidents, all of whom handled immigration clumsily and made a bad situation worse: Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Now, for an encore, Trump the Republican presidential candidate has promised that, if elected, he'll carry out mass deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants.

If that happens, we're going to have a lot more brown-skinned little JD Vance's running around.

I say all this because I'm about to say a few nice things about the Republican vice presidential candidate, and I want to make sure it all balances out.

Vance has shown himself to have a knack for reinvention. In much the same way that he turned around his own life, Vance has also -- over the span of just a few months -- reversed the narrative about whether he is a liability or an asset to the Trump campaign.

It's the latter. Since the vice presidential debate on Oct. 2 -- where Vance demolished his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and presented himself as a real human being -- the Republican has shown that Trump was smart to pick him as his running mate.

Few political observers would have reached that conclusion back in July, when the choice was announced. Vance's earlier comments about how our domestic policy is shaped by "childless cat ladies" surfaced. Polls showed that a majority of voters found Vance to be intensely unlikable. There was even speculation at the time that Trump was having buyer's remorse and might dump Vance.

What a mistake that would have been. The Buckeye is quick on his feet during media interviews, pushing back against anchors and hosts who can't keep up. He doesn't just answer their question but also gives them a mild beating for daring to ask it. Trump supporters love watching the spectacle.

Overall, Vance has smoothed out some of the rough edges and seems to have worked hard to become more personable. As a result, even some of us who don't agree with much of what he stands for may no longer find him so unlikable.

Could "tolerable" be just around the corner? Let's hope.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.