JD Vance, Josh Mandel Put The Race Into Ohio Senate Race

Betty Klaric, an environmental reporter for The Cleveland Press, on a boat holding a wine glass of Cuyahoga River water in the 1960s. Photo by Cleveland State University, Michael Schwartz Library, Special Collections.

To misquote The Bard, hell is empty and all the devils are running in the Ohio Senate Race in the GOP primary.

Fair warning here: we will be wading fairly deep into the stupid, the prejudiced, the utterly obtuse world of ambition fueled by every bad culture war hot take you can think of here with two highly questionable human beings who have no business being anywhere near elected office. So, gird your loins.

Let us start off with the modern American oligarch wannabe JD Vance.

“Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” JD Vance asks in new Senate ad. pic.twitter.com/Q6z8s0wUdI

— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) April 5, 2022

Not to be out-viraled, Josh Mandel has himself an ad up as well as he continues in this, his third attempt at becoming a senator from the State of Ohio:

Martin Luther King marched right here so skin color wouldn’t matter. pic.twitter.com/kVSU4zKdM1

— Josh Mandel (@JoshMandelOhio) April 5, 2022

Just to drive the point home how much his visit to Selma meant to him, he once again takes a run at Bernice King and explains to her what her father really meant, and telling her to “study your history better”.

There is plenty in both those ads if you want to really dissect them, but JD Vance’s last line of “Because whatever they call us, we will put America first” is as good a place to start as any. “They” vs “we” is the heart of the “America First” sloganeering and the base-instinct pandering on things like race, immigration, and other issues folks who use “America First” as a sort of “abracadabra” to make whatever they said before or after fully justified. The underlying premise isn’t what puts America first, but who gets to define what America is and who is entitled to be an American. It isn’t new, creative, or particularly original.

Vance’s blaming of immigrants for everything up to and including his mother’s own addiction, which he detailed in his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy that is now a major motion picture, would fit right into the anti-immigration sentiments of the late 1800s or early 1900s, or — as Vance proves — today. Illegal immigration is a problem to solve, but why do that when you can blame death, destruction, and Democrat election wins on it instead? “Them” is to blame, don’t you see, and no matter what “them” say we’re the true Americans, don’t you know? No need for accountability, restraint, or anything but the unbridled passionate righteousness of “we” versus the otherized, dehumanized, unAmericanated “them.”

Meanwhile, Josh Mandel went to Selma and learned nothing. The bridge has become a place for politicians and others to come and get a photo op, but what Josh should do is read King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail. That’s not as popular, of course, and not just because there isn’t video of it or landmark that still stands to go and get your picture taken in front of. For Mandel, a candidate who declares over and over again at his target audience he will legislate if elected “With the constitution in one hand and a Bible in the other” there would be real lessons to learn there.

Unlike the oft-quoted “judged by the color of their skin” portion of King’s “I Have A Dream Speech” that Mandel bastardized into “Martin Luther King marched right here so skin color wouldn’t matter” in his ad, Josh isn’t advocating for equality in a segregated country the way King was to a national audience; Mandel is demanding on behalf of his core audience that the problem just go away and not be talked about at the detriment of those who still have legitimate issues to be worked out.

King’s missive from that jail cell, directed at Christian church leaders in the south, holds unlearned lessons for the obstinate ones who use the demand of a “colorblind” society more as insulation from the hard parts of living in a diverse, pluralistic society than a noble goal of humanity. The duplicitous nature of using such a term to end debate and silence legitimate grievances certainly fits King’s assessment of the overtly religious who, on the issue of race, “stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities”.

Come to think of it, “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities” is a pretty good caption to why both JD Vance and Josh Mandel are unfit for office. Both have well documented past statements and views that are contradictory to their latest public personas. The Harvard educated, Silicon Valley enriched Vance and the twice-failed Senate candidate Josh Mandel are trying to surf the current waves of Trumpian sentiment to high office in the state dubbed the “cradle of presidents”. The GOP primary in the Buckeye State has been an utter embarrassment to the people of Ohio, the Republican Party in particular, and the country as a whole. Candidates like Vance and Mandel posing and preening from buzz-worded controversy to viral issue and back again, trying to look more America First than the other. But like the state’s official tree, however you think it looks, every single part of it from flower, to foliage, to the eponymous nut itself, is highly toxic if ingested. Or, in this case, elected.