The Senate race is shaping up to be a really interesting exercise in line-drawing.
Personally, I don’t see the appeal of Josh Mandel. He seems business as usual despite the rhetoric. He’s been in politics for 15 years and has profited. In 2020 he “earned” $400k serving on corporate boards. That’s the way politics works: serve your time then get rewarded (or, as in Joe Biden’s case, get rewarded all along the way). I don’t find it particularly appealing.
JD Vance comes along and he’s already rich so he has zero interest in that. Perhaps less than zero arguably since he’s burning every bridge to anything resembling a payday from corporate America. He’s gone the path of MTG and Josh Hawley, much to his credit.
Vance and Mandel are outwardly very MAGA. Not a dime’s worth of difference in their rhetoric - or is there? The one “tell” was the Russia/Ukraine war in which Mandel has revealed himself as the typical reflexive war hawk. Looks like he’s been in politics long enough to think NATO is the another name for the holy, Roman Empire. Sacred and inviolable.
Why would a guy like David McIntosh of Club for Growth - an ostensible fellow traveler like Vance in that he was against Trump in ’16 and then found his way to conversion (forced or not) - be resistant to Vance as the candidate? Rather, he’s declared jihad on him and Trump. My suspicion is that Mandel and McIntosh have similarly favorable views of our dysfunctional national security apparatus. Or that someone has something over on both of them, as alluded to by Tucker Carlson.
But the endorsements reveal all. It comes down to warmongers, or the military industrial complex types. Of course:
Vance: Trump, Peter Thiel, Charlie Kirk of “Turning Point”, Gaetz, MTG, OH Sec of State LaRose, Sen. Hawley
Mandel: Gen Flynn, Ted Cruz, Mark Levin
Gibbons: Sen Rand Paul
Mark Levin has apoplectic that we haven’t started bombing Moscow. He thinks Biden has not done nearly enough and says: “We have been incredibly passive in the face of what Putin is doing.” I think Biden’s been over-the-top in working to get us as close to a nuclear war as he can.
Ted Cruz is likewise full cry of the war party, like his buddies Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham. Birds of a feather...flock to Mandel.
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NY Times is a bit obsessed with the race in the Sunday edition:
In Trump’s Shadow, Ohio Republicans Campaign Ahead of Tuesday’s Primary.
The Decline of Ohio and the Rise of J.D. Vance
The Ohio Primary and the Return of the Republican Civil War
The Don Jr. Road Show in Ohio Was No Joke
That's a good sign for Vance. As the cliche goes, he's over the target.
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