THE "LIBERAL" MEDIA IS MEASURING THE WHITE HOUSE DRAPES FOR J.D. VANCE -- AGAIN

Pay no attention to J.D. Vance's vicious, mean-spirited, slanderous, and conspiratorial pronouncements -- he had one good debate performance (emphasis on "performance"), so now he's a future president again, according to the "liberal" media.

Here's Tara Palmeri, writing for Puck:

Not long ago, of course, J.D. Vance was widely considered a drag on the ticket (cat-ladygate, that interminable convention stemwinder, the whole “America’s Hitler” thing) with a bionic billionaire sugar daddy. (It’s hard to imagine Vance’s political rise without Peter Thiel’s checkbook and Tucker Carlson’s lobbying.) But whether or not his nimble debate performance has any impact in the polls, it certainly restored his standing in the premature but inevitable 2028 conversation. “It was a moment for him to come out of Trump’s shadow,” said one Vance ally.

Tuesday night was clearly a reset for Vance. He proved that he’s capable of turning on the folksy charm that eluded him on the campaign trail, and that he could appeal to middle America as a potential leading man against future primary adversaries like Ron DeSantis or Glenn Youngkin. CNN’s snap poll showed his likability shooting up 19 points, from negative 22 points to negative 3—still underwater, but a sign of palatability. “He did himself a lot of good beyond that one night,” said a Republican consultant. “If he can pull off the MAGA banner in a non-offensive style that sells, then he could be the natural heir apparent, and that’s what you’re seeing start to gel here.” Another Republican operative noted the electoral value of Vance’s hybrid, country-club friendly MAGA approach that was once considered DeSantis’ lane. “This is the party. Get on board, or get the fuck out of the way,” this person said. “They think we’re all knuckle draggers and Neanderthals. J.D. Vance can debate any part of the establishment and can whip their ass.”

Debate watchers gave Vance's far worse ratings than Tim Walz, but the East Coast press doesn't care -- one good night and he's a "potential leading man" and a 2028 favorite again. And that's no surprise, because the "liberal" media made Vance, and any pause in its cheerleading for him is only temporary.

Here's an excerpt from a Jamison Foser piece on how The New York Times, in particular, helped make Vance famous. I present it with a comment from Tom Tomorrow:

I don't know if Yale is really the key to all this, but the larger point is correct: the elite media likes Vance because he joined the club. Many strings were pulled for him by Amy Chua, a Yale professor who's also a bestselling author (The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother), Foser writes:

... Chua took [Vance] on as her protégé, and almost single-handedly turned him into a bestselling author: Chua talked Vance into writing a memoir, introduced him to her agent, wrote a blurb for the back cover of his book, and “probably emailed every single television producer and personality in the United States of America” to promote the book, according to Vance. (Chua: “It’s true, I emailed everybody. They were these creepy emails to people like Tom Brokaw.”)

The New York Times raved about the book and eventually put Vance on the payroll:

By September 2016, the New York Times made it official, adding Vance as a “contributing opinion writer”; his first piece in that role an attack on Hillary Clinton over her reference to some Trump supporters as “deplorable.” By March of 2017, Vance was using the platform — and fame — the Times had given him to tout his move back to Ohio as a selfless act of public service, virtue-signaling his intention to found an organization “to combat Ohio’s opioid epidemic.”

That was in 2017, and I wrote a response that I'm proud of. I called Vance's move "relocation as virtue signaling," noted that he wasn't moving to his former hometown of Middletown, or even to Cincinnati, the big city closest to Middletown. Vance moved to a tony neighborhood in Columbus and, as I predicted, became a fake do-gooder.

It should have been obvious that he was doing this to set up a future political career, but the media fell for it. Then, in 2021, when Vance announced that he was runnung for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, he was immediately declared a potential future president by Axios's Mike Allen:

Why he matters: Vance, 36, last week joined a crowded GOP primary field to succeed retiring Sen. Rob Portman. If Vance won the primary (no sure thing), he'd be the favorite to win the seat — and instantly would be talked about as a presidential possibility.

Vance needed Donald Trump's endorsement to make it to the general election ballot, then needed Peter Thiel's money to win as a Republican in a Republican state -- and yet the media saw him as presidential timber from the early days of his campaign.

I know that many of you think that "liberal" news organizations want Donald Trump to win the 2024 election. I think he has some appeal to the journalists covering him, and they're also somewhat appalled by him. I think what they really want is a mythical moderate Republican (or Republican-lite Democrat) who looks like them and talks like them, someone with Ivy League airs. (That's why they love Josh Shapiro, by the way.) They want a candidate who's economically corporatist but (We have gay friends!) socially moderate. They see polished politicians like Vance and Youngkin taking on MAGA positions and think, They can't really believe all that nonsense, can they?

In 2028, the elite media will be rooting for Vance, Youngkin, Nikki Haley, and maybe Ron DeSantis, as well as, on the Democratic side, Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, and Gina Raimondo. They want dull, well-spoken corporatists, and they think Vance will qualify.

In reality, Vance will need to be the slanderer of immigrants and embracer of Marjorie Taylor Greene he pretended not to be on Tuesday night in order to win the nomination. But even if Vance lets his fascist freak flag fly, the media will probably see what it wants to see.