Vance’s pugnacious performance breaks vice presidential norms
It seems like JD Vance is everywhere.
Scolding Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Praise for Charlie Kirk. Babysitting the Middle East peace agreement. He argues disrespectfully. (possible) destruction of drug traffickers by water.
He’s loud, he’s obnoxious, and in a very short time, he’s blazed an unprecedented trail with his tough-faced, dial-it-to-11 approach to the vice presidency. Unlike most White House assistant investigators who effectively disappear like a protected witness, Vance has become the highest-profile, most combative politician in America not named Donald J. Trump.
It’s quite a contrast to its predecessor.
Kamala Harris made her own history as the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to serve as vice president. So he entered office with huge and deeply unrealistic expectations about his reputation and the public role he would play in the Biden administration. When Harris acted as vice presidents normally do, subservient, self-effacing, careful never to divert attention from the CEO, it was viewed as a failure.
At the end of his first year in office, “What happened to Kamala Harris?” It had become a political discourse.
No one asks that about J.D. Vance.
Why? Because President Trump wants it that way.
“The No. 1 rule about the vice presidency is that vice presidents are only as active as their president wants them to be,” said office expert Jody Baumgartner of East Carolina University. “They themselves are irrelevant.”
Consider Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, who has the presence and flavor of day-old mashed potatoes.
“He wasn’t a very strong vice president, but that’s because Donald Trump didn’t want him to be,” said Christopher Devine, a University of Dayton professor who has published four books about the vice presidency. “He wanted him to have very little influence and be more of a background figure to kind of quietly reassure the party’s conservatives that Trump was on the right track. I think he wanted him to be a very active, visible figure, along with J.D. Vance.”
In fact, Trump appears to be grooming Vance as a successor in a way Joe Biden never did to Harris. The 46th president was nearly forced to step aside after a Democratic frenzy over his miserable career-ending debate performance. (Things might have been different for Vance if Trump had been able to override the Constitution and realize his fantasy of running for a third term in the White House.)
There were other circumstances that kept Harris under wraps, especially in the early stages of Biden’s presidency.
One of these was the COVID-19 quarantine. “That meant he wasn’t traveling. He wasn’t attending public events,” said Joel K. Goldstein, another author and vice presidential expert. “A lot of things were being done virtually, which was limiting.”
Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate also required Harris to stay close to Washington and thus cast tie-breaking votes. (The Constitution gives the vice president the power to decide when the Senate is evenly divided. Harris set a record for selecting the most tiebreakers in history in her third year as vice president.)
Their bosses’ personalities also explain why Harris and Vance approached the vice presidency in different ways.
Biden spent nearly half a century in Washington as a senator and vice president under Barack Obama. He was first and foremost a creature of the legislative process, and he viewed Harris, who had served in elected office for nearly two decades, as a (junior) partner in governance.
Trump came to politics through fame. He is a bowler and promoter first and foremost. He saw Vance as a way to turn up the volume.
When Trump chose Vance as his vice president, the Ohio senator had served barely 18 months in his only political position. Devine noted that Vance “really made his mark as a media and cultural figure” with his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which is considered a kind of Rosetta Stone for the anger and resentment that fueled the MAGA movement.
“Trump wanted someone who would be aggressive in pushing the MAGA narrative,” Devine said, “with a lot of media coverage, including some new media venues, podcasts and social media. Vance was someone who could deliver on Trump’s message every day.”
The contrast continued after Harris and Vance took office.
Biden has given his vice president a portfolio of tough, important issues, including addressing the root causes of illegal migration from Central America. (These were “impossible tasks,” in the blunt assessment of Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, in his recent campaign memoirs.)
Trump treated Vance like a kind of heat-seeking rhetorical missile, unleashing him on his critics and acting as if the presidential campaign had never ended.
Vance seems happily compliant. Harris, who has been her own boss for nearly two decades, has had a hard time adjusting to being Biden’s No. 2 man.
“Vance is very effective at playing the role of a backup singer who occasionally takes a solo,” said Jamal Simmons, who served a year as Harris’ vice presidential communications chief. “I don’t think Kamala Harris has ever been as comfortable in this role as Vance has proven himself to be.”
Will Vance’s fighter approach work in 2028? It’s too early to tell. Dismantling the vice-presidential tradition, as Trump has done with the presidency, pleased many in the Republican base. But polls show that, like Trump, Vance is unpopular with many voters.
As for Harris, all he can do is look out from his exile in Brentwood and consider what might have been.
