Why Kamala Harris laughs at J.D. Vance

With his former vice president sidelined by that near-death experience on Jan. 6, former President Donald Trump had to name a new running mate at the recent Republican National Convention. But his campaign had scarcely announced the selection of J.D. Vance, the very junior senator from Ohio, before they began to feel pangs of regret.

Not only did Vance embody certain of the most unattractive aspects of MAGA -- the Trump pseudo-ideology that highlights the bigotry and misogyny of its standard-bearer -- but he instantly found ways to display his ugliest impulses.

For instance, despite whispered entreaties from campaign advisers, Vance simply couldn't resist the urge to personally disparage Vice President Kamala Harris, soon to become the Democratic presidential nominee. Having previously mocked her as a "childless cat lady" with no personal stake in America's future, he now says she doesn't love our country -- much as the right used to insult former first lady Michelle Obama, who resembles Harris in a couple of obvious ways. (Someone might remind Vance that like Harris, George Washington had no natural offspring but was instead the stepfather of his wife Martha's children.)

The sinister muttering doesn't stop there. Like many other Republicans, Vance has hinted that the vice president is unqualified to serve in the nation's highest office because she is merely a "diversity, equity and inclusion hire," meaning she was chosen for her race and gender rather than her ability and achievements.

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Coming from a fledgling politician who has barely served a year in the Senate -- and accomplished nothing in public service -- Vance's criticism reeks of unearned arrogance. Leaving aside her role in the Biden-Harris administration, with its long list of legislative and diplomatic accomplishments, the vice president has served as a big-city district attorney, attorney general of the most populous state in the union, and U.S. senator. She has compiled a real record of action at every level. Were she a white male, there would be no question about her qualifications for the presidency.

But Vance isn't the only Republican who should think twice before raising the "DEI" canard against Harris. For anyone with a functioning memory, their hypocrisy is ludicrous.

As noted in my new book "The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism," the most obviously unqualified nominee put forward by a major party, before Trump's rise, was that Republican phenomenon and MAGA favorite, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. It was the feckless nomination of Palin that drove the Republican right toward the vacuous populism and conspiratorial paranoia that became Trump's far-right cult.

Nobody doubted in 2008 that Republican nominee John McCain's campaign team picked Palin because she was a right-wing woman. She lacked the minimum knowledge to perform her job as governor, let alone vice president or, heaven forbid, commander-in-chief. What McCain's campaign team learned during their backward selection process -- naming her first and vetting her later -- blew their minds. Her mental cupboard didn't just have a few empty shelves. Her brain was a dark and terrifying vacuum, almost wholly devoid of useful content for a major party candidate. She had vaulted from small-town mayor to governor without acquiring a basic grasp of history and government. She required emergency tutoring on the two world wars, the two Koreas and the Federal Reserve System.

Yet she scorned knowledge and expertise, placing far higher value on her own overrated "common sense," the same bluster that Trump would echo a decade later.

As the first woman chosen for a national ticket by the Republican Party, Palin's novelty obscured the glaring fact that she was not their first deeply underqualified nominee. A dismal precedent dating back two decades existed in the person of Dan Quayle, the young Indiana senator whose surprise elevation onto the 1988 GOP ticket with George H. W. Bush discarded any consideration of competence for the youthful appeal of a blond frat boy.

Quayle was also a version of a "DEI" candidate, intended to attract women voters. But while Quayle seemed to deserve pity more than mockery, Palin projected a bullying assurance that only "elitists" would ever insist on actual command of facts and policy.

The same conservatives who had depicted themselves for decades as the last line of resistance to the "dumbing down" of American culture, standing up heroically against affirmative action for women and minorities to preserve standards, rushed to Palin's defense. They brushed aside her lack of experience and intellect, confident that qualifications and merit no longer mattered to the "real Americans" whom Palin claimed to represent. Nor did they worry that she was the ultimate token, representing exactly what Republicans had always claimed to scorn as quota politics and political correctness.

If anything, Vance has even less useful experience in government than Palin did. Whatever motivated the Trump team to choose him, it surely was not that he is prepared or qualified to sit a heartbeat from the world's ultimate responsibility. That was their decision, which they may already regard as a mistake. But when the Ohio senator and his gang of far-right Republicans spew their snotty insults at Harris, the only proper answer is laughter.

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