Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the GOP vice presidential nominee, on Monday invoked a new campaign attack line against Vice President Kamala Harris by accusing the Democrat of speaking about America “not with appreciation but with condemnation.”
“When I see her give a speech and she talks about the history of this country not with appreciation but with condemnation — and look, of course, every country just like every family, certainly mine, has its pockmarks, right?” Vance said at a campaign rally . “Not everything's perfect. It's never going to be. But if you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it. You should feel a sense of gratitude, and I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.”
Vance’s remarks, made at his first solo rally since joining the ticket with former President Donald Trump in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, offered the latest window into the Trump campaign’s strategy against Harris following President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.
“No politician is perfect, certainly not me,” Vance continued. “But you deserve to be led by people who are grateful, who are grateful for the community they came from, who are grateful for this country and its boundless opportunities, who are grateful for the service of our vets, and the people who put their lives on the lines from police and firemen on down.”
Harris spokesman Joseph Costello suggested Vance's comments were hypocritical.
“That’s rich coming from extremist JD Vance, who is bought and paid for by Elon Musk and Silicon Valley, and has promised to raise taxes on working families and give handouts to corporations and billionaires," Costello told the Washington Examiner.
Speaking from Middletown High School, where Vance graduated from in 2003, the 39-year-old millennial reflected on his middle-class upbringing in the small town that’s home to just over 50,000 people.
“A lot of you know the story of my family. A lot of you — I mean, hell, a lot of you are my family, actually,” Vance joked. “If you count fourth and fifth cousins, half of you are probably related to me in this room.”
Vance took aim at Harris on several policy fronts, including energy, immigration, trade, and the economy. When advocating stricter voting ID laws, he accused Democrats of being quick to bemoan ideas that they don't agree with as racist.
"It is the weirdest thing to me. Democrats say that it is racist to believe — well, they say it's racist to do anything. I had Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today. I'm sure they're going to call that racist, too," Vance said. "Here's the very simple thing. We believe that we want to make more of our own stuff, and we believe that we want to have secure elections, and we believe we want to have schools that don't indoctrinate our children. That's not racist, ladies and gentlemen, it is common American Middletown sense."
Further previewing his campaign strategy in the coming months, Vance sought to strike a chord in the key battleground state with voters in Middletown and other cities like it that are “forgotten communities."
“We really have been forgotten in Middletown, Ohio,” he said. “They think that we're backwards. They think that we're bad people. They think that we don't know how to do anything, and we do. Ladies and gentlemen, this is where things are made. This is the source of America's greatness.”
Biden’s abrupt exit on Sunday tossed the 2024 presidential race into further uncertainty after weeks of defiance that he was the only person who could defeat Trump in the face of mounting calls from fellow Democrats to bow out.
It also gave way to another new attack line from Republicans: Democrats are the ones who are the “threat to democracy” for forcing Biden out after primary voters chose him. The rhetoric used by Vance sought to flip the script on Democrats, who accuse Trump of being a “threat to democracy.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“The idea of selecting the Democrat Party's nominee because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard, that is not how it works,” Vance said. “That is the threat to democracy, not the Republican Party, which is fighting for democracy every single day.”
The messaging was reminiscent of the strategy that Senate Republicans' campaign arm advised GOP candidates to use in a memo on Monday when speaking about "San Francisco radical Kamala Harris."
Local Middletown, OH
Most Popular
Comments / 0