It says something about the enduring power of the USA, and of its politics as spectator sport, that JD Vance can go from being little known outside Ohio and Washington to immediate global profile and recognition, purely because he was picked as a vice-presidential running mate by Republican nominee Donald J Whatsisname.
The moment it happened, I clearly wasn’t alone in ordering his 2017 book, Hillbilly Elegy, to help me work out what the fuss was about. Indeed, the bestselling memoir of his remarkable upbringing and the political views it helped shape went straight to the top of the Amazon charts, in the UK as well as the US, within days of Trump anointing him.
So his publisher will be happy even if plenty of Americans – including perhaps Trump himself, given the reaction to his pick so far – are less so.
Trump is famously not a reader. It is widely assumed he didn’t read, let alone write, the book that helped make him famous, The Art of the Deal.
We can be confident he did not read Hillbilly Elegy, because if Vance seemed an odd choice anyway, it seems even odder if you read his memoir. In one passage he bemoans the fact that so many Americans bought into the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama – or Barack Hussein Obama as Trump invariably calls him – was not born in America.
Vance comes over as being both bemused and offended at this. Reading it today, seven years after it was published, this reader couldn’t prevent himself from shouting at the page: “Who do you think was responsible for that then, J-effing-D Vance?”
I don’t often shout at books, honestly – TV is more my thing – but what a journey… from the sometimes sensitive soul of Hillbilly Elegy to running mate of the man who wilfully spread that falsehood about Obama, along with many others, which this one-time Nevertrumper now happily regurgitates. This all underlines what David Frum, who I got to know when he was George W Bush’s speechwriter, calls Vance’s “moral flexibility”.
When Vance was at law school, he wrote for the conservative website Frum was running, but did so under a pseudonym. Odd, for someone wanting to build a political profile.
But it seems he didn’t want his liberal friends at Yale to know just how conservative his conservative views really were. Moral flexibility indeed.
It was unfortunate for Vance – or maybe just more bad politics – that the row over his musing that people with children should have more votes than the childless coincided with World IVF Day. He will have offended plenty with that one.
And it must have delivered a frisson of campaign PTSD to former Tory leadership contender Andrea Leadsom (I know, those words sound even more ridiculous today than they did at the time). But if you cast your minds back, you may remember that Leadsom’s campaign imploded because she tried to suggest that her rival Theresa May was less well qualified to be prime minister because she had no children. At least Leadsom apologised, whereas Vance is following the Trump approach – when in doubt, double down.
Mind you, there was a time when I was in favour of a little weighted voting myself. For the EU membership referendum, I floated this idea – 18-35, three votes; 35-60, two votes; 60 and over, one vote.
More votes for the young, rather than purely for those who breed them… so much better than Vance’s idea, I’m sure you’ll agree.
My partner’s best friend, Suzanne, an American who has known Fiona for even longer than the 45 years we have been together, has been over from the States, arriving just as the world was getting used to the idea that Kamala Harris would be facing Trump in the November 5 election.
“I just can’t stop smiling,” she said. Now partly that is because the Democrats are so clearly back in a race they feared was going one way, in a very bad direction. But it is also because Harris emanates a sense of optimism and, well, being a nice human being.
Joe Biden is also a nice human being, but all his positive qualities were being lost in the post-TV debate debate about his age and health. His stepping aside seems to have unleashed an energy that was in danger of draining from the Democrats, and Harris has emerged as the right person to tap into it.
Elections are often fights between hope and fear, positive and negative. We know where Trump will go. Hope is back in with a shout against hate… that is what has put a smile on so many faces.
I do wish people could lighten up a bit. When researching Kamala Harris for The Rest Is Politics, I was surprised to read that she was five feet two inches tall.
It was not remotely the most important point in the long discussion I had with Rory Stewart, but I went on the general journalistic rule that if I found something interesting, that was new to me, then others might find it interesting too.
So I looked into the issue more generally, and discovered that more than two thirds of presidential elections had been won by the taller candidate. Again, not the most important point, but worth raising along the way.
Yet in poured comments that I was belittling vice-president Harris, or objectifying her, simply by making a factual observation about her height. “What next, bust size?” asked one angry listener.
Well, no. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to compare her bust size with Donald Trump’s moobs.
If Harris becomes president, as I hope she will, every aspect of her life will be the stuff of history. And being the shortest-ever candidate will make her the shortest-ever president, two inches shorter than James Madison (president from 1809-1817).
To say so, far from belittling her, shows once more what a truly remarkable woman she is.
There was a moment, during the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony in Paris, when I wondered whether it might be time to wheel out a recent campaign slogan you may recall from the Tory days: STOP. THE. BOATS.
But once the Eiffel Tour lights show was under way, it was clear we were watching something very, very special.
Céline Dion singing Piaf… wow; the oldest surviving French Olympic medallist passing the torch from his wheelchair to the two French athletes who would light the flame… tearjerking; the flame itself rising in a balloon into the Parisian sky, where it will stay for the rest of the Games… one of those images that will now be part of Olympic imagery for ever.
But even if my UK bias says Danny Boyle remains the best Olympics opening ceremony maestro of modern times, that final hour ran him pretty close.
London 2012 was one of the happiest times of my life, perhaps the last time the UK really felt both united, and a real power in the world, before the Tories managed to generate the polar opposite of the Olympic spirit. Whether these Games can repair the tensions tearing French politics apart right now remains to be seen, but they ought to help, rain or shine.
