On the Monday PBS News Hour, NPR White House reporter and PBS pundit Tamara Keith ripped into Sen. J.D. Vance having a "really terrible, no-good week" as the pro-Biden media endlessly rehash his 2021 comments to Tucker Carlson.
Anchor Geoff Bennett began: "J.D. Vance is getting a lot of scrutiny now for his controversial comments about women without children. He called them childless cat ladies, said they're miserable with their own lives....he has not disavowed the comments, and he said in a podcast just the other day that he stands by the substance of what he said. There are lots of Democrats now who are more than happy to target J.D. Vance."
Then he ran a soundbite from Sen. Charles Schumer: "Vance seems to be more erratic and more extreme than President Trump, and I will bet President Trump is sitting there scratching his head and wondering, why did I pick this guy? The choice may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats."
Bennett asked Keith: "Has J.D. Vance become a liability for Republicans?" Keith replied:
He has had a really terrible, no good week. He has somehow galvanized people who own cats.
At the — I went to — I covered Harris at this fund-raiser she went to. There were people outside of her fund-raiser holding up signs that said "Cat Ladies for Kamala Harris." This is after he — essentially, he has a long file of things that he has said back when it didn't matter what he said, because he wasn't going to be vice president.
He was the author of a book and a guy running for the Senate in a Republican primary. And so at one point, he had said that people who — I think he called Harris, a woman without children, a cat lady, and others who don't have children, who should somehow have less political power than those who do. And that just set people off....
And what Trump now has is voters, everyone, the media, very focused on Vice President Harris and this huge amount of fund-raising she had, and then all the remaining oxygen is going to his vice presidential pick and his very bad, no good week and all the crazy things he's saying or said five years ago that have now become memes.
You have to shake your head at "wow, Vance is so bad the pro-Kamala media is laser-focused on pro-Kamala messaging." The media love to think they allocate the "oxygen" of political attention.
Bennett then turned to political analyst Amy Walter to confirm the problem: "And it allows Democrats to settle on this new messaging, where it's not just offensive, it's also really weird. We keep hearing like the Democrats like Tim Walz and Brian Schatz and even Vice President Kamala Harris have said on the stump that the things that Trump and Vance and other Republicans have said are just weird. Dissect that as a strategy."
Walter gave a conventional analysis, that the Vance pick doesn't go after some demographic Trump hasn't captured, he's more of a doubling-down on Trump's appeal. "So of course he's turned off swing voters, because he was never brought on to appeal to swing voters, and he's never had to [in Ohio]."
This segment is a classic episode in political analysis. The framing was "What do Democrats need to do to win?" They don't want to focus on any political weakness for Democrats unless it's to address how do the Democrats get around this obstacle? It's like a sports show with a home team.
