JD Vance, Kamala Harris and Cary Grant
Asked in 2005 which actor should play him, Donald Trump replied: “Well, ideally, Cary Grant reincarnated.” The suave leading lad from Hollywood’s Golden Age was also at the top of Mr. Trump’s mind when searching for a running mate. “Where is my Cary Grant?” he often mused.
Like Grant (1904-86), JD Vance evinces confidence, fluency and versatility. The Ohio senator can convincingly play a polished version of the former president — or any political part. He can reprise the role of a Silicon Valley venture capitalist one day and sound like Huey Long the next.
Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, thinks Mr. Vance was a “brilliant choice.” Mr Popkin was among the few in his profession to understand Mr. Trump’s appeal and electoral viability in 2016. “Vance is smart, very articulate and very adaptable,” he says in an interview.
Usha Vance during her convention speech praised her husband, a “meat and potatoes” guy, for adapting to her vegetarian diet. He has similarly adapted his political views, repudiating his denunciations of Mr. Trump in 2016 and exhortations of individual responsibility in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
“You have to be flexible at this level,” Mr. Popkin says. “It’s a skill making an opportunistic move seem like a righteous change.” Referring to 2016, he says: “I assume he thought like everyone else then that Trump was going to lose” and “the establishment would come back.”
But Mr. Trump’s grip on the GOP proved strong and durable. Seeking the former president’s endorsement for an Ohio U.S. Senate seat in 2022, Mr. Vance suddenly sounded like a MAGA apostle. During his convention speech last week, he blamed trade deals for destroying middle-class jobs and “Wall Street barons” for crashing the economy and causing higher housing prices.
Choosing Mr. Vance as his running mate, Mr. Popkin says, helps Mr. Trump prove that he’s open to a “big tent” and “accepts conversions and surrenders.” He can also point to Mr. Vance as an example of his ability to win over, or subjugate, foes.
Does Mr. Vance believe the Trumpian gospel he’s preaching? “If you listen to a politician, you can usually tell if they are using talking points,” Mr. Popkin says. “I don’t know I can say he believes what he says or doesn’t.” In his view, Mr. Vance is as agile as an acrobat: “He knows just how far you need to go and manages to make it to look like part of the job to take seriously some of the very far-out claims.”
Mr Popkin, who served as a campaign consultant for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, wrote in his 2021 book, “Crackup,” about how divisions in the Republican Party helped give rise to Mr. Trump and made it harder to advance conservative policies (repealing and replacing ObamaCare) and forge bipartisan compromises (immigration reform).
He attributed the fractures in part to campaign-finance reforms that unintentionally reduced the parties’ control over candidates. Political hopefuls can now raise more money from outside their party’s apparatus by using social media to promote their brands. There’s less incentive to be a team player, he says: “It’s easier to inflame people.”
Democrats seem to be experiencing their own crack-up over Israel and the 2024 election, among other things. Mr Popkin says that as House speaker, Nancy Pelosi was “very impressive in her ability to hold the party together.” He points to how in 2020 she helped deny Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee after AOC supported primary challenges to Democratic incumbents.
“The danger point in a party is when factions start going after other factions because they don’t want other factions getting bigger,” he says. Mrs Pelosi was largely able to stop that.
She hasn’t lost her knack as a powerbroker. As Democrats fractured over whether Mr. Biden should bow out, several news outlets reported last week that Mrs. Pelosi privately told him he couldn’t defeat Mr. Trump and would destroy the party’s chances of winning the House. The apparent leak raised the pressure on Mr. Biden to get out of the race.
Mr Biden surrendered on Sunday and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus had urged. This may set the stage for a bigger party crack-up given that many Democrats don’t want Ms. Harris anointed: “They want someone who can win,” Mr. Popkin says. Her 2019 presidential-campaign flop doesn’t inspire confidence.
His intelligence from Democratic insiders suggests that “there’s very few who like Kamala.” She’s not the “obvious” answer to their problem. According to media reports last year, Democrats fretted behind the scenes that she was dragging Mr. Biden down and wanted him to replace her on the ticket. Asked in January 2023 whether Mr. Biden should keep her as his running mate, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren demurred: “I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team.” She reportedly later called Ms. Harris to apologise for what she described as a verbal mistake.
If Democrats think Ms. Harris could beat Mr. Trump, they surely would have pushed Mr. Biden earlier to step aside earlier and “pass the torch.” To beat Mr. Trump, they may need to find their own Cary Grant.
The Wall Street Journal
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