When labor champion Theodore Roosevelt became president after William McKinley succumbed to an assassin’s bullets, establishment kingmakers such as Sen. Mark Hanna, R-Ohio, went into shock. Equally threatened when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, the monied class suffered another coronary after the former president named Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, his running mate three weeks ago, sealing his commitment to remake the GOP into a working-class coalition.
Fearful of losing their grip on the party, the editors of The Wall Street Journal (along with anonymous GOP-establishment backbiters) joined the corporate media and Kamala Harris’ desperate campaign in smearing Ohio’s junior senator the last two weeks. The latter two manufactured chattering-class outrage over his 2021 observation that certain high-profile Democratic officeholders, whom he deemed “childless cat ladies,” did not have a direct physical stake in the country, claiming the remark offended American women.
The Journal admonished the combat Marine for disrespecting “people who make different life choices,” even as his admitted sarcasm was limited to a few Democrats currently running the country, surely fair game during election season. Indeed, as Vance explicitly clarified in another venue at the same time, he was not disparaging childless women in general, including those who may not long to wed and bear children, or those who struggle to conceive.
Yet Vance’s real offense, per the Wall Street-K Street axis of power: his belief that the tax burden should be lighter on young parents but relatively heavier on their peers who are not rearing the
