The Senate will keep getting dumber

Imagine what J.D. Vance could have been

I can’t think of sadder political story than U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance.

The author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” is an interesting guy and a person with a heart and a brain. His book is the most important book on Appalachia and rural poverty since Michael Harrington’s “The Other America.”

His candidacy should have been a source of debate, enlightenment, compassion and hope.

Instead he has gone full Trumpista. He has concluded, probably rightly, that it is the only way to win the GOP primary in Ohio. And he has had to eat his past words about Mr. Trump.

It is all a tragedy as well as a farce, because Vance had something to say and he might have been an interesting senator. If he gets to the Senate this way he will be locked in to the same robotic self-abasement of many of his colleagues.

So, he has sold himself out as well as selling out the republic.

What if one of two things had happened instead:

1) Imagine Vance running saying this:

“Trump gave voice to a great issue of our time: The loss of industry and work for the laboring class in rural, small town and middle America. But he is the wrong messenger. He has too many personal demons and he is not only not a democrat, he is an anti-democrat — an autocrat. This is proven now.

“He also has no plan for rural or small town America.

“Let’s imagine together Trumpism without Trump — a healthy and democratic populism.

“Let’s describe and delineate that.”

That would have been an interesting and constructive campaign. And maybe a saving way forward for the Republican Party.

It would have been higher risk for Vance, in the political short term. He might well have lost, this time. But it would have been honest and a service to Ohio, the GOP, and the nation.

And, his way, he gives up his Senate career before it begins. He goes to the Senate as a bought and paid for lackey.

Scenario No. 2: What if Vance had run as a Democrat? He could have educated the party about the Trump voter. The Dems have had nothing much to say to that voter since Bobby Kennedy (though Joe Biden used to try). Vance could have given Ohio Democrats a statewide candidate who could win. And he would have won had the Dems sought and nominated him.

Why were the Democrats not interested? And why would Vance so cheapen and debase himself? He didn’t need to.

What the actual Vance candidacy tells us is that the U.S. Senate will continue to fill up with cynics, cranks and frauds. A few senators are all three. (Both parties, but Lindsey Graham takes the triple crown.)

Until we figure out a way to renew our politics and make it at least minimally intellectually honest, the clown show that now is the Senate (once called “the world’s greatest deliberative body”) will get worse. In Pennsylvania the Trump candidate for Senate is Dr. Oz.

But J.D. Vance was not a clown. He was a serious man who has now put on some baggy pants, a false nose, and a false allegiance. He, and we, will be stuck with all three.