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Andy Beshear Is Shredding J.D. Vance in the Virtual VP Debate [1]
['John Nichols', 'Joan Walsh', 'Chris Lehmann', 'Jeet Heer', 'Steve Brodner', 'Dave Zirin', 'Jules Boykoff', 'The Nation', 'Mychal Denzel Smith']
Date: 2024-07-24 13:21:01+00:00
Politics / Andy Beshear Is Shredding J.D. Vance in the Virtual VP Debate The Kentucky governor is doing exactly what a vice presidential pick is supposed to. Kamala Harris is surely watching.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear speaks during an interview at the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky, on Monday, July 22, 2024. (Timothy D. Easley / AP)
There is a good case to be made that the best way to defeat Donald Trump and J.D. Vance is to simply let Vance keep talking. The Republican vice presidential nominee has a way of expressing himself that could charitably be defined as “cringeworthy.”
Consider the recently resurfaced 2021 interview Vance did with Tucker Carlson, in which the man who is now Trump’s running mate expressed his view that the problem facing America is elected leaders who have not given birth—including the woman who is now the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party: Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance argued. “It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it.”
That statement was wrong, and offensive, on so many levels that it would take the rest of the 2024 campaign to fully unpack it. But now that Harris has replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she needs to pick a deputy of her own. And that Democratic nominee for vice president will have to be prepared to counter Vance in what will probably be a 90-minute debate—or, hopefully, many 90-minute debates.
The question of who will take that debate stage with Vance is a live one, and it will matter. One of the stand-out moments of the 2020 campaign was Harris’s shredding of Vice President Mike Pence in a debate where the former district attorney and state attorney general aggressively prosecuted Pence for his many failures as the bumbling and bizarrely disengaged chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. It was precisely the sort of boost a vice presidential running-mate is supposed to provide for the ticket, and Harris did the job brilliantly.
This year, the list of prospects for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination is long. By most measures, it includes Governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Tim Walz of Minnesota, as well as Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona—all of whom are reportedly being vetted by the Harris campaign. I’d like to think that the list could be expanded to include some additional contenders—such as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, who has emerged as a vital progressive voice in his native Texas and nationally; such as United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, whose blunt fury with Trump and the billionaire class would play well in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania; and such as Michigan US Representative Debbie Dingell, a savvy strategist and able campaigner who would help in a battleground state and who shares former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s skill for getting things together on Capitol Hill.
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[1] Url:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/andy-beshear-jd-vance-vice-president/
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