Well who knows what his constituent's neighbor's friend's might have posted on Facebook about cats!
I don't know why this strikes me as immediately disqualifying compared to everything else but I'm trying to imagine telling my kids school is canceled because our Senator is chronically online and I'm imagining the look of disdain on the Calabat's face.
heebie, it's okay that you can relate to young JD, since young JD can relate to you (a female) when he cries, even if the overall project is like a diary--only far more masculine. It's something. Norman Mailer never died. You can see why even younger JD worried that preferring the company of men might make him gay in a Top Gun way.
We all have our psychodramas but only some of us get picked out for national greatness in restricting women's access to health care.
I don't understand how those can have the same url and look so different.
jdhamel vs. jdhamel1
4: Lieberman ran for Senate in 2000 and won. If he had been required to resign, he would have been out of the Senate when Gore lost.
Does anyone actually resign as a blogger? I thought people just flickered out over time.
Oh, he'll feel resigned. I've felt that.
The Federalist Papers are essentially blog posts, so I guess it was dumb question.
I'm going to see "Hamilton" tomorrow.
I looked it up before I agreed to go.
Don't states have different rules on whether a sitting politician can stay in office while running for a different office? Or is there a federal rule?
In most states if your term expires in year 3 you can run for a different position in year 1 without resigning, right? Florida possibly an exemption. The main difference by state is whether you can run for two different offices in the same election.
21: We had that issue in CA; Vince Fong filed to run for a state senate seat, then switched to congress when his boss Kevin McCarthy resigned. There were lawsuits during the primary election about his being unable to run for two seats simultaneously. https://www.kcra.com/article/california-appellate-court-ruling-secretary-state-vince-fong-case/60443620
The court eventually allowed him to run for both, in part because ballots had already been printed with him on them.
Right, lots of states (most?) don't allow same ballot but in this case, Vance's senate term isn't up until 2028 so that doesn't apply - except states that have a run-to-resign law, which appear to number five.
I can't relate to JD as a blogger, since I never blogged, but sadly I could relate to him as a failed people person in that video of him at the donut shop.
I feel that it is because he is so naturally inept at being a politician, that he tries to make up for it by working really hard at being Evil.
I feel like there's a nearby possible world version of Vance that I find charming in a nerdy kind of way. If we all thought Hillbilly Elegy was great, would he be a thoughtful centrist?
26: I don't get this. Hillbilly Elegy was a huge success.
If there is a possible world in which Vance is a thoughtful centrist, certainly the key difference would be Clinton winning decisively in 2016.
(expressing strong confidence about an alternate universe is very silly, I concede)
In Neew Jersey, the vanguard of democracy, until a few years ago a politician could run for two offices at the same time, and serve in both positions. My state senator was also mayor of a nearby town for at least 20 years.
27: but it didn't make him Serious with the right people and then tradCath nuttery.
We have a guy who is in both the city council and the state legislature. The ward he represents in the council is also a state legislative district, so his voters are all the same. He was the only one on the ballot for both of those elections, so its hard to complain that he is blocking a spot that would go to someone else.
29: I'm not sure who the "right people" are in your narrative. Hillbilly Elegy was very big in the media and among public intellectuals, including liberals.
So I'm finding 29 and 26 confusing. Vance has fallen out of favor with the leftier public intellectuals, but he hasn't meaningfully changed. He's always been a useless rightwing asshole with a keen understanding of what the marks want to hear.
31 was my understanding as well.
I'm no scholar of Vance-ology, but it seems to me that he's changed marks for his scam.
I'm not sure Vance was ever in favor with leftier public intellectuals: they tore his book apart even at the time. More with center-to-right public intellectuals NYT columnists. He produced the vibe of someone who cared about poor white people without the substance; he was going for "actually answering the questions Trump raised without being a RW loon." I don't think he was ever a non-Republican, but if Trump had flamed out and stepped down in, say, 2017, he could have carved out a niche as a Romney type maybe?
So still bad and right-wing, but a very different performance/audience.
he hasn't meaningfully changed.
I don't agree with this. In 2016 he was a typical never-Trump conservative. Vance attacked Trump for the very same kind of bigoted rhetoric, that Vance has now embraced whole-heartedly.
It's a change, but it's a change 90٪ of the Republican Never-Trumpers made.
OT, but now we know who's still using pagers apart from a dwindling number of hospital staff.
37: Yes, but are they any others that went so far in both directions? I would say that's how JD earned the VP nomination.
I haven't kept track of the various degrees of degradation to which various Republicans have submitted themselves to.
I don't agree with this.
Admittedly the word "meaningfully" does a lot of work in my sentence. But the guy was always a scam artist and always prepared to feed racists tropes. What changed was superficial: He discovered, along with the rest of his party, that dog whistles were no longer necessary.
As 35 says, he changed arguments and found more generous patrons, but he was always crafting a bullshit message and advancing himself thereby. I won't contest it if you find that change meaningful.
26: I sort of had a more negative version of the same reaction -- that Vance doesn't have any fundamental positions or commitments, so he might have ended up on any side of any political divide. He married a woman from a South Asian family; he used to have at least one friend who was a trans woman; xenophobia and transphobia aren't deep parts of his personality. But he's willing to do anything for what he thinks is success -- while he wasn't emotionally committed to being a racist conservative, he thought it was his best odds to get the most he could.
I sort of felt that way about him after I read Hillbilly Elegy: he was completely willing to vilify his own family and their demographic group in a way that really seemed like he had no loyalty to anything. So, yeah, if the Yale Law professor that packaged his clerkship applications for him and encouraged him to write the book had had different connections and affiliations, he might have ended up roughly on our side, politically. I think he probably still would have been trash, though.
I read Hillbilly Elegy
!!!
It was a thing a few years back, and I was curious.
It was indeed a thing. Anything additional to report about the content beyond what you've said already and "Poor white people are to blame for their predicament"? I don't remember you reviewing/commenting on it here.
43. Surely that's not so surprising? It was a #1 New York Times bestseller. As I recall, it was pretty fun to read if you like childhood misery memoirs, but as political/social commentary it was incoherent and internally contradictory.
I went to high school in Appalachia and my mother has roots in eastern KY, and I feel some connection to the area. At the time, I had many people going on about the book so I gave it a read. It's hard to express how much I hated it, but I will say that when Vance was tapped for VP old friends reached out to see how I was taking the news.
One of the more frustrating things about it was that the first chapters could've gone in an interesting direction! He talked about growing up in Ohio but feeling a connection to his grandma and her town in KY. If you are part of an Appalachian (or any) diaspora, it's natural to think about what that means and about how that might have shaped you.
He abandons this super quick and just "explains" Appalachia to his audience. He doesn't need to put any real research in because he knows his real audience has no reason to go to Appalachia so he can just say whatever.
I recommend Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place to friends who want a more honest and more interesting view of the region.
Michael Hobbes's podcast did an episode on it, before he got picked for VP. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hillbilly-elegy/id1651876897?i=1000605525204