Getting to Know JD

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Seeing as how cranky old  Joe Biden seems to be more determined than ever to stay in the presidential race, trash his legacy, and hand the Oval Office back over to Donald Trump, I decided that I should start becoming acquainted with the young man who appears destined to be at the center of American politics for years to come:  JD Vance.

Vance, who is currently thirty-nine, will be the youngest Vice-Presidential candidate of a major party since Richard Nixon who was also thirty-nine when he was selected by Eisenhower to be his veep candidate in 1952.  Nixon went on to run on national tickets five times, and was elected to office four of those times, a record only equalled once, by FDR, who was thirty-eight when James M. Cox selected him as his running mate in 1920 on the Democratic ticket that eventually lost to the Republican ticket of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.  FDR went on the win the presidency four times.  (And the moral of that wad of political trivia is that sometimes when candidates hit the national scene at a very young age, they stay around for a long, damned time!)

I first heard the name "JD Vance" seven or eight years ago when National Public Radio (NPR) was airing a review of his book, Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir of the 31-year-old Yale Law School graduate and former Marine who had grown up in a dysfunctional family in America's highly impoverished Appalachian Rust Belt.  His story was compelling, and on impulse I ordered the book.

When the book arrived I skimmed it and then set it aside, meaning to get back to it at some point.  Eventually it got shelved and forgotten.  Today I dragged it back out with a new determination to get the book read.  It is 257 pages of moderately sized and spaced type that I should be able to consume in only a few days, even at my lackadaisical reading pace, and the author seems to write in a manner that is very accessible to us ordinary folk.

The book that I haven'r yet read was apparently made into a movie that I haven't yet seen.   The book is suddenly back at the top of the best seller lists, and the movie is also enjoying a revival.  Political organizations often buy large quantities of books by candidates in order to give them the prestige of being a "best-selling" author, but JD Vance captured that honor on his own,   I'm anxious to get into Hillbilly Elegy and expect that it may provide a few honest insights into who this young man actually is, the person who will be one Big Mac away from running the world's most powerful country.

A brief pass through the internet reveals that Vance has a young family.  His wife, Usha, is a corporate attorney who was his classmate and best friend at Yale Law.  Usha, who is 38, is a first generation Indian American who grew up in San Diego.  She is a practicing Hindu.  She and Vance have two sons, ages six and four, and a daughter who is two.

JD Vance was born James Donald Bowman. but after his mother divorced Mr. Bowman and her ex gave up his parental rights, she changed her son's name to James David and updated his last name to that of her new husband.  James David was called J.D. throughout his early life, and at some point as he was growing up and getting tired of trying to make this last name match that of his mother's current partner, he adopted Vance, his mother's maiden name and the surname of his maternal grandparents - the stability in his life - as his own surname.  Now JD Vance is the candidate's professional name, and he does not set the JD part of with punctuation.  The Associated Press "style" on the name is also JD Vance, without punctuation.

When Trump chose Mike Pence as his first Vice President, he famously did not get the man that he thought he had.  Hopefully, he did not get what he intended this time either.  

I'm anxious to get into Hillbilly Elegy and try to suss out who this Vance character might actually be.