ICYMI: Cincinnati Enquirer’s Jason Williams Shreds Vance’s Campaign: “Disastrous,” “A Creation of Political Consultants,” And “Not Ready For Primetime”
March 2, 2022
Columbus, OH — Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Jason Williams shredded J.D. Vance’s campaign, calling it a “creation of political consultants,” that’s “not going well” and “not ready for primetime,” and urging Vance to salvage whatever dignity he has left (if any) by dropping out of the U.S. Senate race.
Read Williams’ brutal assessment of Vance’s “disastrous” campaign here:
Cincinnati Enquirer: Jason Williams: ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author J.D. Vance should drop out of U.S. Senate race
March 2, 2022
- We’ve seen enough of J.D. Vance on the campaign.
- Ohio’s Fox News-created Republican U.S. Senate candidate is now pissing off Fox News commentators. That should tell you all you need to know about Vance’s disastrous campaign.
- It’s not going well, and it never has. And after the worst week of a weak campaign, Vance needs to drop out. The Cincinnati resident’s poll numbers remain in the single digits. Vance is looking at a best-case scenario of a third-place finish in the May primary.
- Bow out now and Vance could salvage some of the goodwill he’d built up for telling the world his rags-to-riches story in the bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy.”
- The 37-year-old political amateur has proven that he’s not ready for prime-time politics. First, Vance needs a basic civics lesson after repeatedly making callous comments about Ukraine and its people. A United States senator must be adept at foreign policy and diplomacy, especially in times of crisis.
- Never would the late, great Voinovich have said: “I think it’s ridiculous that we’re focused on this border in Ukraine. I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
- But that’s what Vance recently told Steve Bannon for his show on some two-bit cable network called Real America’s Voice.
- In Ohio, we’re used to statesmen holding the seat Vance is so desperately seeking – Rob Portman, George Voinovich, John Glenn, Robert A. Taft.
- Vance then went to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida last weekend and told attendees: “I’m sick of being told that we have to care more about people 6,000 miles away than we do people like my mom and my grandparents and all the kids who are affected by this (U.S.-Mexico border) crisis.”
- You mean, the mom and grandparents who live in the safest nation in the universe and aren’t having their homes bombed by Russians?
- It shouldn’t be an either/or thing. You can simultaneously care about the crises in Ukraine and at the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, it’d be Vance’s job to concern himself with both matters if he were elected.
- The CPAC comments drew sharp criticism from Fox News political analyst Brit Hume.
- “I have rarely lost as much respect for a person in a short a time as I have for J.D. Vance,” Hume tweeted.
- Ouch. That one stings.
- I wrote last summer ahead of Vance launching his campaign that it wouldn’t go well. The national press soon piled on. Vance was a creation of political consultants who thought Ohio voters would know and love him because he goes on Fox News regularly and wrote a bestselling book about overcoming a rough upbringing in Middletown.
- But Vance and the political lab rats who created him didn’t factor in perception, which is critical in a campaign.
- Vance is an outsider all right, but not the one he’s trying to portray. He had spent most of his adult life living on the coasts before returning to Ohio in 2018 and buying a big house overlooking the Ohio River in Cincinnati’s upscale East Walnut Hills neighborhood.
- No wonder Vance told the Wall Street Journal in 2016 that he felt “out of place” in Ohio. He ran with the wine-and-cheese crowd for too long, far removed from Middletown’s ham-and-eggers. I can’t fault a guy for bettering himself. Vance is truly an American success story.
- On the campaign, however, Vance has never pivoted back to show he’s one of us. He’s made things worse for himself by trying to be someone he’s not politically. He’s gone from a principled, Never Trump conservative to licking the former president’s boots.
- It’s not working. Trump is never going to endorse a guy who repeatedly spoke out against him.
- Ohioans, as I predicted, have seen right through it. Vance’s campaign has gained little traction.