New York: Republican vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance has said that his wife Usha Chilikuri Vance has a low opinion of politicians, most of whom she thinks are “scumbags” and needs prayers for strength.
“She’s not a political person, she doesn’t like politics,” J. D. Vance said on Wednesday.
“Before I got involved, she said, “Well, I think [in] politics, pretty much everybody’s a scumbag”.
J. D. Vance said that he responded, “And well, honey, you’re right, all but, like five people”.
Speaking at a campaign event inside a church in Mesa, Arizona, he said, “Please pray for strength and courage for my wife”.
Despite her reservations about politics, now that he is running for office, he said, “She’s been such a trooper about this. She’s been going out and doing her interviews.”
He repeated his constant praise of her and her oratory while deprecating himself.
“She’s an unbelievable person. I don’t know if you saw her at the Republican National Committee (RNC). She did a great job,” Vance said.
“I told my team never make me follow my wife again, because, you know, you want to follow somebody worse than you, not better than you,” he said.
“She just did such a good job, and I was so proud of her, but she needs strength,” he added.
He brought his campaign to Arizona, one of the swing states with inordinate electoral power, because of the system where states’ votes in the Electoral College can undo a majority of the national vote.
According to polls aggregation by RealClear Politics. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has a razor-thin lead of 1 per cent in the state, where he lost by under 10,500 votes in 2020.
The town hall-style event was held as a chat with a conservative political organiser, Charlie Kirk, under a banner over the stage, “Chase the Vote”.
Fitting for a church venue, the conversation was peppered with quotations from the Bible.
On foreign policy, Vance tied the deindustrialisation of the US – for which he blamed the Republicans too – to the national security threat from China.
The US imports most of the medicines like the anti-inflammatory drug Ibuprofen and anti-biotics and even weapons the military uses from China, and Trump made it a national security issue, he said.
While Trump was tough and was feared, he believed that it was more advantageous to use diplomacy, Vance said.
He cited the Abraham Accords, agreements Israel reached with the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan with the help of the Trump administration to bring peace to the Middle East, now shattered by violence.
There were no major wars during Trump’s four years in office and “let us bring peace back to the world” – and Trump is the person for it, he asserted.
He said that Israel should be allowed to “finish” Iran and its financing of Hamas so that US can focus on the threat from China.
Vance, who took questions from the public through Kirk, joined him in lampooning Vice President Kamala Harris for not holding news conferences or town halls and using teleprompters for her speeches.
That is because she is running away from her past “radical” positions, he said and joked that she might come to a meeting with a red tie and the Trumpian ‘Make America Great Again’ insignia.
He and Kirk rehashed her statements from her failed bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination by appealing to the party’s left and said she now claims the opposite.
They listed her turn away from a mining method for gas known as fracking, offshore drilling for oil, “open borders” and cutting police budgets.
Vance repeatedly nailed Harris to the policies of President Joe Biden stressing that she was the vice president and could have done three and a half years ago everything she promises now.
He blamed her for the flow of drugs through the borders, especially the deadly narcotic Fentanyl.
Striking a personal note, he recalled that his mother, a drug addict abandoned him to her mother, who raised him.
Ten years ago his mother overdosed on drugs, but could be saved and has been sober for a decade, he said.
But if Fentanyl – which drug smugglers had now flooded the US with – was available then, his mother would have died, he said.
(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed at @arulouis)
–IANS
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