Potential Dem VP Pick Comes After JD Vance

We could have a T14 matchup for vice president.
The post Potential Dem VP Pick Comes After JD Vance appeared first on Above the Law.

Well, Joe Biden is out of the 2024 race for president. Dems have seemingly coalesced around Kamala Harris for the top of the ticket, leaving the political speculation to focus on who will be the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate.

There are plenty of qualified options out there, each bringing their own pluses and minuses to the equation. One tantalizing option is Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. Beshear stacks up well against the Republican VP choice, JD Vance, and he’s already fielding questions from mainstream media about that potential. It’d be interesting for lawyerly-types as it’d be a T14 law school matchup, pitting Beshar’s UVA Law versus Vance’s Yale.

But he also neutralizes Vance’s Appalachian appeal. Vance got famous exploiting his family in Hillbilly Elegy, and likes to pretend that makes him a man of the people. Yes, he thinks you can fix the opioid crisis by leaning into Big Pharma, (which very much feels like the wrong takeaway that anyone who truly cared about the devastation prescription narcotics have had on the region — and the nation), but that background is supposed to be part of what he brings to the GOP ticket.

But Kentucky’s native son knows better. His recent appearance on MSNBC gave a preview of the snark that he could expect from a VP debate between Beshear and Vance.

“I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like, because let me just tell you that JD Vance ain’t from here,” Beshear said. “The nerve that he has to call the people of Kentucky, of eastern Kentucky ‘lazy.’ Listen, these are the hard-working coal miners that powered the Industrial Revolution, that created the strongest middle class that the world has ever seen, that powered us through two world wars. We should be thanking them, not calling them lazy. So today was an opportunity to both support the vice president, but also to stand up for my people. Nobody calls us names, especially those that have worked hard for the betterment of this country.”

And the Harris campaign was impressed.

(If you want to read something that’s significantly better than Hillbilly Elegy about how growing up in Appalachia reverberates throughout a legal career, check out Cassie Chambers’s Hill Women.)

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].