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He’s Just Weird

So JD Vance is supposed to be the salt of the earth guy from Appalachia who dragged himself up by his tattered bootstraps to go to Yale, write a book and become a silicon valley sweetheart and senator. A true All-American icon.

Well, he’s actually a true weirdo, even aside from his shape shifting politics which are dizzying. Even when it comes to his own name he’s a real oddball:

The senator from Ohio introduced himself to the world in 2016 when he published his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” under the name J.D. Vance — “like jay-dot-dee-dot,” he wrote, short for James David. In the book, he explained that this was not the first iteration of his name. Nor would it be the last.

Over the course of his 39 years, Vance’s first, middle and last names have all been altered in one way or another. As Vance is being introduced to voters across the country as Donald Trump’s new running mate, his name has been the source of both curiosity and questions — including why he no longer uses periods in JD.

He was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1984, his middle and last names the same as his biological father, Donald Bowman. His parents split up “around the time I started walking,” he writes. When he was about 6, his mother, Beverly, married for the third time. He was adopted by his new stepfather, Robert Hamel, and his mother renamed him James David Hamel.

When his mother erased Donald Bowman from his and her lives, the adoption process also erased the name James Donald Bowman from the public record. The only birth certificate for Vance on file at Ohio’s vital statistics office reads James David Hamel, according to information provided by the state. Beverly kept the boy’s initials the same, since he went universally by J.D., Vance explains in the book. He didn’t buy his mother’s story that he was named for his uncle David, though. “Any old D name would have done, so long as it wasn’t Donald,” he wrote.

Vance spent more than two decades as James David “J.D.” Hamel. It’s the name by which he graduated from Middletown High School, served in Iraq as a U.S. Marine (officially, Cpl. James D. Hamel), earned a political science degree at The Ohio State University and blogged his ruminations as a 26-year-old student at Yale Law School. Those facts are borne out in documentation provided by those entities upon request, or otherwise publicly available, and were confirmed by campaign spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk.

But the situation gnawed at him, particularly after his mother and adoptive father divorced.“I shared a name with no one I really cared about (which bothered me already), and with Bob gone, explaining why my name was J.D. Hamel would require a few additional awkward moments,” he writes in “Hillbilly Elegy.” “Yeah, my legal father’s last name is Hamel. You haven’t met him because I don’t see him. No, I don’t know why I don’t see him. Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures.”

So he decided to change his name again, to Vance — the last name of his beloved Mamaw, the grandmother who raised him.It didn’t happen on his wedding day in 2014, as the book implies, but in April 2013, as he was about to graduate from Yale, Van Kirk said. It felt right to take the name of the woman who raised him before dying in 2005, as he was putting the struggles of his early life behind him and launching into this new phase.

“Throughout his tumultuous childhood, Mamaw — or Bonnie Blanton Vance — raised JD and was always his north star,” Van Kirk said in a statement. “It only felt right to him to take Vance as his last name.”Claiming the Vance name also served to tie JD more clearly to what he writes was “hillbilly royalty” on his grandfather’s side not long before he would release a book opining on hillbilly culture. A distant cousin to his Papaw, also named James Vance, married into the McCoy-hating Hatfield family and committed a murder that “kicked off one of the most famous family feuds in American history,” Vance wrote in his book,

I don’t believe a word of his excuses for all this ID changing. It’s obvious that this is a guy who is changing his identity like most people change their socks. He is a troubled person with some kind of burning ambition to be something other than what he is.

When you combine this with his other weird habits he seems like like a salt of the earth All-American boy that the Trump people thought they were getting and more like well … them. The whole Trump family is a bunch of phony, insecure narcissistic headcases. Also known as weirdos.

Making Politics Fun Again

The NY Times today has a nice piece about the “Kamala vibe shift” showing how people are getting excited about politics again. (How weird to have them speaking to non-Trump voters for a change.)

“It’s gone from the dread election to the hope election, overnight,” said Amanda Litman, who runs a group that recruits progressives to run for office.

Campaigns are not won and lost on vibes alone. But they can encourage voters to open their wallets and volunteer their time — and right now, the buoyant mood among Democrats is translating into early signs of strength for the campaign.

The Harris for President campaign has raised $130 million from mostly small donors in just a matter of days, while the high-dollar fund-raising world whirls to life. Democratic organizers are reporting a surge of interest from volunteers. And, yes, there are the memes, a sign of organic interest that the Biden campaign never mustered.

Kamala hype TikToks abound (which the Republicans are saying is nothing but Chinese propaganda) but the memes are everywhere. I don’t think I’ve seen this level of Democratic fun since 2008. And then there was still a lot of lingering resentment from the close primary. There’s none of that present in this one.

It’s tempting to be dismissive of all this as very, very uncool but as Jill Filipovic remains us in her great newsletter today, most Americans are uncool so don’t rain on their parade.

I hope she doesn’t mind that I post the whole thing because I think it’s important:

There’s a ton of energy around Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, and at least some of what’s happening, is, to borrow from the kids, cringe. It’s cheesy or awkward or goofy or earnest. It’s thoroughly uncool. It’s things like a family band singing about JD Vance to the tune of an ABBA song. It’s an affinity-group call for white women where donations are solicited by imploring participants to “use your privilege for good.” It’s homemade coconut glasses at Harris rallies.Subscribe

Some of it is entirely bonkers, and a lot is extremely silly. Some of it is just imperfect (see, e.g., JD Vance saying that people without kids shouldn’t be able to vote, and then people who have faced fertility struggles speaking about how painful it is to hear that, and then people correcting them that actually it’s bad to restrict votes from non-parents no matter what the reason). It is only going to get cringier.

But here is the task: If we want to beat Trump, it has to be all hands on deck — and hands off the cynicism and cool-teen posturing and one-upmanship that so often characterizes Democratic infighting, and made Democratic politics so insufferable and toxic in 2016.

Because you know who is extremely cringe and very not cool? The average American voter.

And you know who really wants to vote for Kamala Harris? Black voters, and Black women in particular. Latino voters, and Latinas in particular. MSNBC moms and dads, and the moms in particular. Idealistic young people, and young women in particular. Women who cried when Hillary lost and wore pussy hats to the Women’s March.

When people are this hyped up about something, they’re going to express it in ways that may not appeal to a too-online 27-year-old in Bushwick or a gender studies PhD candidate in Berkeley or to me personally. I don’t mean that to denigrate too-online Brooklyn 20-somethings (of which I have been one) or gender students PhD candidates (of which I could have been one). I do mean it to say that it’s actually good if political campaigns appeal to normal people, and it’s bad to shame normal people for liking normie things. It’s also good to remember that not everything is for everyone; just because a particular argument or frame or response doesn’t speak to you, or leaves you out, doesn’t mean it doesn’t appeal to some constituency of voters.

In other words, keep the snark to the group chat.

And certainly resist the temptation to use someone else’s well-meaning but imperfect organizing or commentary as a platform to boost your own ego or demonstrate that you are actually a person who Gets It. Ask yourself: Why am I doing this? What point am I making? Is the person I’m criticizing actually doing any harm, or are they generally doing good, just in a way that doesn’t really appeal to me or is missing something? Does anyone else remember that much-photographed sign held up at the Women’s March that said something like, “Don’t Forget: White Women Voted for Trump”? Don’t be that person. I am sure that person felt very good about themselves. But the reality is that the white ladies of the Women’s March were not Trump voters. Neither are the MSNBC moms donating to Harris, or the college-educated feminists living in big American cities, or the Boomer dads texting their kids the anti-Vance ABBA parody. The Bernie Bros who loved to roll their eyes at the middle-aged wine moms may have made their podcast subscribers laugh, but they weren’t making any converts.

Shaming people out of organizing, or even out of their enthusiasm, does not help any cause. If you want to keep Trump out of the White House, it’s worth asking what you can add and where you can contribute — and whether picking apart what other people are doing is really a good use of your time.

(Be as critical as you want on text, we all have to vent).

Trump voters have shown that there’s power in political fun. I don’t understand their particular version of it with the weird clothes and the cheering for mass deportation but I guess that’s just their jam. I think Democrats should be able to have fun with politics too or least be allowed to be earnest about them without being slammed by their own allies. It’s a big country. Let people fly their freak flags with joyful abandon if that’s what it takes to defeat fascism.

And personally, I think that family band JD Vance sen-up is one of the most droll things I’ve seen in a long time. Lol.

Kryptonite To MAGA’s Hate

Maybe misogyny doesn’t sell?

Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast:

In recent days, Donald Trump and MAGA media figures have ramped up the attacks on Kamala Harris’s laugh, her personality, and her temperament. That’s vile stuff, but MAGA’s strategy also suggests an inability to entertain a remarkable possibility: What if Harris’s laugh and energy are actually well suited to this moment in American politics? Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, co-founder of the progressive strategy group Way to Win, has been advising Democrats to respond aggressively to racist and sexist attacks on Harris. We talked to Ancona about whether Harris’s temperament might prove to be kryptonite to MAGA’s negativity and hate. Listen to this episode here.

Ancona moderated a panel at Netroots-Baltimore this month: Amplify: Getting Louder to Win in 2024 (video). One finding to note: to get more young people to turn out, younger candidates need to be prominent in our interactions with voters. They need to see younger faces reflected in the Democrats’ 2024 slates.

Several of NC’s statewide candidates fit that bill. These three are all roughly 40.

NC Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs is running to retain her seat on the GOP-dominated court. She’s just over 40.

Make sure younger voters know Democrats are advancing candidates who look like them, including the youngest state chair in the country. Anderson Clayton is 26.

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Fighting for the future

Is our Democrats learning?

If you haven’t seen the first Kamala Harris ad that dropped Thursday, here ’tis.

Both with the Beyoncé soundtrack and her “fighting for the future” framing, Harris is defining freedom our way while reclaiming it from conservatives who wrap themselves in it while stomping on the freedoms of everyone not in their MAGA tribe.

Claiming freedom, that all-American value, is a move on which Anat Shenker-Osorio has insisted for years. It’s finally sinking in.

Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink observes:

Harris frames the election as the freedom to choose a future — following the advice messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio has been talking to us about all year. This isn’t about the narrow notion of freedom that’s gotten currency on the right, the sort of freedom that’s about retreating from public life and obligations, even if it is wrapped in the flag. It’s about coming together to work for a bigger, broader sense of freedom that includes all of us — the idea that the flag actually should stand for.

Harris needs to brand herself before Republicans have a chance to “but her emails” her, so this ad is an important first salvo.

The contrast with Trump and Vance is an important feature here. For Democrats to be the good guys, there must be bad guys. And, brother, are these some bad guys.

Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka on Kamala Harris on July 9: “She’s a DEI hire, right? She’s a woman. She’s colored.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz (D) describes them “weird” and Gorka as “a Bond villain” out of Central Casting.

Trump and #Project2025 plan “to return America to a dark past.” But Gorka demonstrates that they don’t want to take America back to the 1950s. They never left.

Guess what? We’re not going back!

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Cincinnatus and Catiline

David Frum with a bit of the classics explaining Biden and Trump. It’s good:

Two political myths inspired the dreams and haunted the nightmares of the Founders of the American republic. Both these foundational myths were learned from the history and literature of the ancient Romans.

Cincinnatus was the name of a man who, the story went, accepted supreme power in the state to meet a temporary emergency and then relinquished that power to return to his farm when the emergency passed. George Washington modeled his public image on the legend of Cincinnatus, and so he was depicted in contemporary art and literature—“the Cincinnatus of the West,” as Lord Byron praised him in a famous poem of the day.

Against the bright legacy of Cincinnatus, the Founders contrasted the sinister character of Catiline: a man of depraved sexual appetites who reached almost the pinnacle of power and then exploited populist passions to overthrow the constitution, gain wealth, and pay his desperately pressing debts. Alexander Hamilton invoked Catiline to inveigh against his detested political adversary, Aaron Burr:

He is bankrupt beyond redemption except by the plunder of his country. His public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandisement … If he can, he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure to himself permanent power and with it wealth … He is truly the Cataline of America.

President Joe Biden’s speech last night adapted the story of Cincinnatus: “Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy,” he said. “That includes personal ambition.” By presenting the next election as a stark choice between, on the one side, “honesty, decency, respect, freedom, justice, and democracy” and, on the other side, the opposites of those things, Biden cast his chief political adversary in the ancient role of Catiline.

Biden’s act of renunciation gives power to his words of denunciation. By demonstrating that he cared about something higher than personal ambition, the president became more credible when he accused his chief opponent of caring for nothing other than personal ambition. By surrendering the power that he’d once hoped to keep, Biden condemned by contrast the predecessor who clung to the power he’d lost. Biden’s July 24 rebuked Trump’s January 6.

The names and stories of Cincinnatus and Catiline are no longer well remembered. But their symbolism survives even after the details have blurred: self first versus country first; appetite versus conscience; ego versus law.

Indeed they do.

The founders are screaming from the graves. Let’s hope this country hears them.

The Nephew Speaks

The NY Times got hold of the new book by Trump’s nephew. It’s exactly what you would expect:

In 2020, a few months before the last election, former President Donald J. Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, published a book about her uncle and how awful and psychologically warped she found him to be. At the time, her brother, Fred C. Trump III, put out a statement slamming his sister for such treachery.

Now, he’s wielding the knife. Next week, he will publish “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got to Be This Way,” a tell-all that puts the former president in a harsh light. The New York Times obtained a copy.

Fred isn’t like his sister Mary. He was upset about her hostility and remained fairly close to his uncle even visiting from time to time at the White House where Trump would brag about how he killed terrorists.

But the relationship soured because of this:

Fred Trump’s son was born with a rare medical condition that led to developmental and intellectual disabilities. His care had been paid for in part with help from the family. After Mr. Trump was elected, Fred Trump wanted to use his connection to the White House for good. With the help of Ivanka Trump, his cousin, and Ben Carson, at the time the housing and urban development secretary, he was able to convene a group of advocates for a meeting with his uncle. The president “seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members,” he writes.

After the meeting, Fred Trump claims, his uncle pulled him aside and said, “maybe those kinds of people should just die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.”

The remark wasn’t a one-off, according to Fred Trump. A couple of years later, when he called his uncle for help because the medical fund that paid for his son’s care was running out of money, Fred Trump claims his uncle said: “I don’t know. He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”

That’s the least surprising story about Trump I’ve ever heard. As is the fact that he used the “N” word. Of course that’s who he is.

This is important:

One thing the book makes clear is that, in the Trump family, score-settling and feuding is a way of life. “Blood went only so far in this family,” he writes, “as far as the dollar signs.”

Fred Trump’s account retreads the well-documented fight that occurred after his uncle teamed up with two of his siblings to cut him and his sister out of their grandfather’s will. The legal battle that ensued was vicious and public, chronicled in the pages of the city’s tabloids.

And yet, once it was all settled, Fred writes that his uncle invited him to go golfing. “We’re through, right?” he asked him. When his nephew said they were, the elder Mr. Trump gave him a hug. (Then, according to the book, he stepped away and added, “Your lawyer never should have said that thing about your grandfather’s toupee.”)

Fergawdsakes. Trump tried to steal the family fortune to pay for his massive business losses and largely succeeded. I guess Fred thought he could get something out of him in the end if he sucked up. But I guess he had his limits. Trump wanted him to let his son die. He is the most indecent man on the planet.

In one peculiar scene at the end of the book, he recounts going to see his uncle after he had left the White House, because he was having trouble finding work. (Fred worked in commercial real estate, but not for the Trump Organization.) He told his uncle that their family’s name was now too “toxic,” and the former president “gave a small jolt” at hearing that.

As he turned to walk out, he claims his uncle admonished him: “Don’t ever say that the Trump name is toxic. Never say that.”

The Trump name is toxic. There’s only one other name that I can think of that’s equally so and it starts with an H.

Freedom!

This is good. Judging from the reaction on Tik Tok the youts really like this. Which is good.

I’ve long pushed the idea of Democrats using freedom as a rallying cry. The idea that these authoritarian right wingers, of all people, promote freedom as their brand is ludicrous.

Calling All White Women

Youtube

The last time women organized in opposition to Trump they showed up by the millions and created the Resistance that helped lead the Democrats to win in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Just saying.

Sunday night, 44,000 women gathered with Win with Black Women to support Kamala Harris, and they raised over $1 million. ​

White women, it’s our turn to show up.

JOIN US!!!  All are welcome, please share with your people.

Thursday, July 25 | Virtual meeting | 8:30 p.m. ET

Here’s the link to sign up and/or donate.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen any Democratic activism aimed specifically at white women before and it’s a little weird to see it in print. But considering there are so many women of all races and ethnicities who are thrilled at the prospect of the first Black, Asian women president, any form of organizing to help get her elected seems pretty positive to me.

He Knows From Coups

Joe Biden gave a moving speech from the Oval Office last night explaining his decision to withdraw from the race. He pointedly said, “In this sacred space, I’m surrounded by portraits of extraordinary American presidents. Thomas Jefferson wrote the immortal words that guide this nation. George Washington showed us presidents are not kings.” He asked if the character of the president still matters and tasked voters to question whether Trump (to whom he did not refer by name) would uphold the sanctity of democracy and the presidency.

Biden questioned, notably, if the character of a president still matters, and without naming Donald Trump, asked voters to question whether the Republican nominee would uphold the sanctity of the presidency or US democracy. [No, definitely not.] He said, “This sacred task of perfecting our union is not about me, it’s about you,” 

That is true. Are there enough of us out there willing to step up and fight back this fascist MAGA movement that’s led by a cretinous imbecile? We’re about to find out.

Meanwhile, here’s Trump this morning on Fox News, always that classy statesman:

“I think it was a coup. They didn’t want him running. He was way down in the polls, and they thought he was going to lose. They went to him and they said, you can’t win the race, which I think is true, unless I did something very foolish, which I wasn’t going to do, and I think he was so far down and they said, ‘You’re not going to win, and you’re not in great shape, and you did poorly in the debate.’ I think the debate started everything.”

“I know a lot of people on the other side, too, that they went, and they forced him out between Pelosi and Obama and some others that you see on television. It was interesting. I’d watch them on television and they act so nice. ‘Oh, yes, we loved you. We loved you behind the scenes.’ I know for a fact they were brutal.”

“It was like a terrible speech and terrible delivery. He looked like he was having problems, and yet you watch the other networks and you would think he was Ronald Reagan in his prime, Winston Churchill in his prime, and he wasn’t. It was not good… It was not a good speech.”

“It’s so phony what’s going on. The press is so – it’s so fake. Anybody can see it was a problem.”

He is incapable of grace or decency. And I know it’s not politic to blame his legions of supporters but I cannot understand how anyone could admire such a man, much less worship him. It’s like worshiping a small, evil child. It’s inexplicable to me. If the Democrats manage to pull out yet another win in November and we get past the inevitable hysteria that will follow I honestly don’t see how we can ever put this country back together with some sort of reckoning with how this happened.

We’re Not Going Back!

In case of emergency, break glass ceiling

To Donald Trump’s backward-looking “Make America Great Again” movement, Vice President Kamala Harris says forcefully, “We’re not going back.” Her rally crowds now chant it.

@dailymail Kamala Harris said ‘we’re not going back!’ to ‘failed economic policies,’ which prompted chants from the crowd. #kamala #kamalaharris #vicepresident #president #trump #election #politics #usa #wisconsin #brat ♬ original sound – frankiepolari

“So here’s the thing about breaking barriers,” Harris told the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies in Wasghington, D.C. on Monday. She’s broken a few. “Breaking barriers does not mean you start on one side of the barrier and you end up on the other side. There’s breaking involved. And when you break things, you get cut. And you may bleed. And it is worth it every time, every time.”

This campaign to push back the fascist urges of the MAGA Republican Party’s Christian nationalists will not be pretty. Their once racist and sexist dog whistles now are fog horns. The metaphorical “cutting” Harris mentioned will be involved in the breaking ahead. People who once were and still are being hurt in this “land of the free” know their freedoms, their families, and their futures are at stake in this election. Yours as well.

Much went on yesterday (Wednesday), including Joe Biden’s speech to the nation from the Oval Office. But if you missed it, do yourself a favor and watch Maya Wiley, former Assistant U.S. Attorney, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, deliver her emotional rebuttal to Republican efforts to turn back the clock on America to a time when women and minorities knew their place.

Attempts to repeal the last 60+ years of progress toward equity in this country comes from “a certain group of people who [feel] victimized by fairness, victimized by competition from the competent, who are upset because for so long they’ve gotten to be mediocre and rise.”

Dear Leader is the patron saint of mediocre. And he doesn’t even rise to that level.

We’re not going back.

Updated: Added more clips that capture Wiley’s passion.

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