ACTUALLY, DEMOCRATS COULD USE A J.D. VANCE RIGHT NOW

Variety's Marlow Stern thinks Bill Maher got "played" by J.D. Vance on Maher's HBO talk show. What actually happened was that Maher had some genuine criticisms of the Trump/Vance administration, but -- like most American political interviewers -- he gave his interview subject endless time to respond to criticism, and when he did follow-up, it wasn't very pointed.

I know you all think J.D. Vance is a joke, but he's better at this than you realize. It's not just that he has a Yale law degree -- he approaches interviews like a courtroom lawyer. He knows that his job is to present an extremely one-sided case and make it sound reasonable. Repeatedly with Maher, he defended the indefensible in a way that wouldn't be at all convincing to anyone who understood the issue, but really might be convincing to a fence-sitter who wasn't particularly well informed. Or if he couldn't win over the fence-sitters, he at least persuaded some of them that his side isn't completely deranged.

So here's Vance on the Iran negotiations:

“You’re negotiating for America. I’m rooting for America... Why is this different? Why isn’t it bullshit this time?” asked Maher.

According to Vance, his negotiations have been successful because oil is “down to 73 dollars a barrel” and their “nuclear program is destroyed,” adding, “If they’re willing to change, we’re willing to change too; if they’re not willing to change, we still fundamentally have all the cards and I think that’s a good place to be.”

“But their nuclear program isn’t destroyed,” Maher replied.

“What part of it is not destroyed?” questioned Vance. “The thing that you have to destroy is their ability to enrich uranium, which has been destroyed.”

“How do we know that?” shot back Maher. “All the time it was, we gotta get in there and we gotta get the dust. And we didn’t get in there, so how do we get the dust?”

The vice president reiterated that the program was “functionally destroyed” ...

On ICE:

“ICE, all that shit. Too rough. Too mean. Too unnecessary,” offered Maher. “I’m not asking you to apologize... I’m just saying, you’d go a long way toward getting people who [have] just completely shut the door to you and your administration if you guys would just own that — that you guys went too far. You went too far, and you should own that like you owned ‘childless cat ladies.’”

Vance obfuscated, saying, “You can’t do a law enforcement operation like that without having some situations that are recorded like that... I don’t think there was an easy way to do this.”

And on Trump's claim that the 2020 election was rigged:

[Maher said,] “It’s either going to be you or Rubio. Here’s my dealbreaker for your side: Under Trump, you guys have two outcomes that an election can be, either we win or they cheated. That shit has to stop. And that means the person who has to stop it will be you, or Marco. Can you tell me you will do that?” ...

“OK, Bill, so this is where I’m probably going to lose ya here,” offered Vance. “I don’t think we should not concede elections, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on... The biggest criticism I had of the 2020 election is that you had technology companies that were quite literally censoring negative information about the left and promoting negative information about the right.”

Vance knows he's not going to win these arguments with Maher, but his job isn't to win -- it's to persuade at least a few viewers that he and Trump and the rest of their party have a point. His job is to suggest that these issues are gray, not black-and-white.

Maher -- who says he usually votes Democratic, and who's given large amounts of money to Democrats in the past -- told Vance that his presidential "vote is in play" in 2028. The apparent reason is Maher's contempt for one Democrat, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won a House primary in New York's 13th District on Tuesday and who's almost certain to win the general election in the very blue district. Avila Chevalier has expressed some offputting views, which Maher returned to repeatedly throughout the show, ascribing them not only to her but to the two other progessives who won New York primaries the same day, and to all her voters (and the Democratic Party in general).

In his opening monologue, Maher said:

This is big news in this country. I don't know if you saw what happened in New York. There were three candidates for -- these are the primaries, they are going to win the election, so they're going to be three Democrats in Congress. These are Mandami's [sic] people. These are democratic socialists, I think very different than the Democratic Party. What happened is, you know, for years we're asking young people to vote. Well, now young people are voting, and they're voting to abolish the police, abolish prisons, unlimited immigration, so no cops, no prisons, no borders -- proving for sure that eating Tide pods does cause brain damage.

These are the views of Avila Chevalier, not Mayor Mamdani's other two endorsees, Claire Valdez and Brad Lander. She's expressed these views in now-deleted tweets; she recently repeated her opposition to the police and to deportations in an interview with a group of journalists known as the New York Editorial Board.

But she primarily ran on other issues. Here's the "Day 1 Agenda" she posted on her campaign site:

This is all standard-issue progressivism. Some of it -- a path to citizenship for DREAMers, a $15 minimum wage -- is supported even by moderate Democrats.

Without mentioning Avila Chevalier by name, Maher brought her up again in his Vance interview:

“If this is where the Democratic Party is going... this obsession with Israel, with the Jew-hating, with they don’t believe in capitalism, no prisons, if this is where they’re going, my vote is in play,” Maher told Vance.

Maher changed the subject before Vance could reply.

Obviously, there was no opportunity for a Democrat to rebut Maher during his monologue or the Vance interview. But he returned to the subject in a follow-up panel with Larry Willmore, formerly of The Daily Show, and Senator Raphael Warnock. This is where Democrats needed an advocate -- a lawyer for the defense, someone who'd make the best possible case for them, someone who'd do for them what Vance did for Trump.

Maher said to Warnock:

Some of these people who've just got elected as democratic socialists -- and I assume you are not a democratic socialist, that you're more of a Democrat ... they want to abolish prisons. I mean, they say it outright: abolish the police, abolish prisons. I don't know how society could run that way.

Warnock repeated the message of his new book: that we need police and prisons, but that we over-incarcerate in America. But neither he not Willmore told Maher that this is the worldview of only one of the candidates. I don't expect Willmore, who's a comedian, to know this, but if Democrats are in a panic about the wins by the Mamdani candidates, why don't they all have a ready response to questions about them?

Here's what that response should be:

These are the view of one candidate only. She will be one of 435 members of Congress if she wins the general election. Her views on these issues are not representative of the Democratic Party as a whole, and if a bill to abolish the police or prisons or the border came before Congress, Democrats in Congress would oppose it overwhelmingly.

But why does every Democrat have to answer for intemperate statements made by one Democrat? We just had a Republican who posted on Twitter that gay people have "no place in America." We have a Republican candidate for statewide office in Texas who wants to deport 100 million people, which means literally all the immigrant and descendants of immigrants who have come to this country or were even born in this country in the past sixty years -- all of them, including the immigrants who came here legally and followed every rule. There was a Republican gubernatorial candidate a couple of years ago who called himself a "Black Nazi" on a porn site; after we learned about that, he still got more than two million votes on the Republican Party line. If you're going to ask me about Darializa Avila Chevalier, you should ask every Republican who comes on this show about those people.

Avila Chevalier's views will still be offputting to most people, but at least defend the party and call out our politcal double standard. Take your own party's side in the argument.