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The Republican nominee for vice president was born James Donald Bowman. After his mother's third husband, Bob Hamel, adopted him, his name became James Donald Hamel. After he got married in 2014, he changed it to James David Vance (Vance is his mother's maiden name). Maybe now that he is all in MAGA, he could change it again, to James Donald Vance. He hasn't used that one yet. Who is this guy, anyway?
There have been many stories about him in the media, mostly based on his Senate voting records and some speeches he has made. One interesting profile is in Politico Magazine, written by Ian Ward, who interviewed Vance in depth earlier this year.
To start with, as we've noted numerous times, Vance's hillbilly shtick is phony. Yes, he was raised in poverty in Middletown, OH, which is halfway in between Dayton and Cincinnati. But after graduating from high school, he joined the Marine Corps and was deployed to Iraq. The Corps got his life in gear. After serving for 4 years, he left the Marines as a corporal and went to Ohio State University, graduating summa cum laude in political science. Then he got a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the law journal.
When Ward interviewed Vance, the Senator enjoyed debating Ward and discussing ideas on an intellectual level. Ward was struck by the breadth and depth of Vance's knowledge and interests. He could talk about the nuances of railway tank cars and their relevance to rail safety legislation, different approaches to collective bargaining, the "materialistic" and "culturalist" approaches to political economy, the memory of the French resistance to the Vichy regime, and why using GDP as an indicator of progress is wrong. Think: a modern William F. Buckley Jr.
He fits into the loose New Far Right. He sees an expanding global economy, technological innovation and a relaxation of traditional social mores as engines of civilization collapse. Two years ago, this stuff would have been seen as a weird, but minor, intellectual fad. Now Vance is seen as the future of the Republican Party and the frontrunner for the 2028 GOP nomination.
Like all politicians, Vance has strengths and weaknesses. He's no good on the stump (although his speech at the RNC was decent, if not great). He strains too much, like a high school thespian trying to wring every last drop of emotion out of the script. He's not a natural like Trump and can't channel Trump's locker room bellicosity. He's much better at adversarial interviews on TV with smart people—say, someone like Chuck Todd. Unfortunately, nobody watches those. Ward says that Vance is smarter, more intellectual, and more bookish than the average elected official. A hillbilly he is definitely not. Whether being the smartest guy on the ballot is a plus remains to be seen. With Trump's base, the smartest guy on the ticket is as popular as the smartest kid in the class is in middle school. So Vance has to keep voters thinking about his life as a poor kid, not his life as an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
If you want a list of 55 factoids about Vance, here you are. The one that is likely to get the most play is a now-public message he sent to a friend in Feb. 2016: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler." (V)