They loved him before they loathed him. Media fangirls swooned for JD Vance like disaffected 15-year-olds with unrequited love as they crushed on the "star quarterback." In 2016 JD was everything they wanted in a Republican: 

1. JD was no Trump fan. Orange Man Bad. 
2. Although JD was a straight white man (and therefore an intersectional outlier), he had grown up dirt poor. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, his was a spork from McDonald’s. A real-life, honest-to-goodness hillbilly. 
3. Most of his family influencers were women.
4. He enlisted in the Marine Corps during the global war on terror. 
5. He had risen from his hillbilly origin to attend Yale Law. 
6. He married the daughter of immigrants – a successful “person of color.” 
7. He wrote a best-selling book detailing his life. 
8. And, in 2016, he had no political ambitions. 

The swoon was palpable. Eight years ago, Vance was on his book tour. One interviewer was Joy Reid. Reid was smitten. In a very un-Reid-like discussion, Reid asked questions and even allowed her guest to speak. Megyn Kelly featured that old clip at the 42:30 mark during her own interview with Vance. Reid said:

[W]hat one of the things that's really fascinating about your story, JD, is how similar some of the pathologies you talk about um are to the pathologies that normally people assign to African-Americans, right, that you know these ideas about the way you're raised... You're raised mostly by your grandparents, um, the way that you were able to use opportunity like the military to get a college degree. That's very familiar across racial lines, so why do you suppose there's such a huge gulf and distance ideologically between African-Americans, um, and people from where you uh that like the ones you came from. 

In the eight years since, Joy Reid has lost her hair, lost her swoon, and lost her mind. Since Vance’s elevation to Trump’s VP candidate, Reid said this: 

"They're trying to invalidate women... who don't have children or women who are stepmoms like none of those are valid women to them. Those women don't matter.

They're trying to reinforce this message that the only valid version of America is the America where white women didn't leave the home.

Vance was raised by women. Most of his life has been shaped by women. He's married to a first-generation Indian-American. His wife is a successful attorney in her own right and a mother of three. None of what Reid now claims about Vance is within 1,000 miles of the truth. This isn’t “gaslighting.” It is slander. Reid is a bald-faced liar. She’s a character assassin. She knows she’s lying.  

Joe Scarborough and his empty-headed second wife Mika Brzezinski have ladled on their own version of character assassination. They know their audience and it's comprised of versions of “cat ladies.” From the same clip:

MIKA: My kids are older -- does that make me childless? I want to qualify.

Cat ladies are both women and men. They might own cats. They might be allergic to cats. They are all allergic to the truth. “Cat lady” is a metaphor. It’s a descriptor, not a literal thing. Unless you’re drunk or a Democrat, Vance’s meaning isn’t hard to understand. He was parodying the left’s embrace of “everything but” traditional family.  

Leftists know that when Vance has to explain nuanced metaphors, he’s already on defense. It’s best to treat the attacks like Trump did during his debate with Biden. Whatever the discussion might be, turn the focus around and talk about Biden and Harris. Harris has embraced Biden's administration - let her own that.   

For the next 100 days, every conservative should focus on the Word-Salad Queen and her defense of Biden. The focus must be on her and her full-throated covering for Biden. She claimed that Biden was brilliant. She claimed he ran circles around staff and policy wonks. That was a pernicious lie. She knew that Biden was a cognitive mess. She admits that she met with Biden on an almost daily basis. She hid the undeniable, inescapable fact that Joe Biden was a shell of himself even four years ago. She hid his decline for political profit at the expense of the country. She lied. Repeatedly.  

Next, conservatives must repeat her policy positions. Her policy positions are not moderate, they are a leftist’s wet dream. Harris is not a moderate. She never has been. She is Bernie Sanders in a pantsuit and not nearly as adept at presentation as Bernie.   

And, finally, Kamala Harris is a deer in the headlights without a teleprompter. She will implode when she tries to defend Biden’s record and her own positions. Harris is sentient, but she is stunningly bad at public speaking. Her word salads are albatrosses around her shoulders. The focus must be on Harris, not on Vance or Trump. It’s been often stated that whoever is the focus this November, that person will lose. Biden's administration was a trainwreck. Let that be the talking point. 

"I can imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been.” What has been? Harris was such a bad presidential candidate she dropped out before the first caucus. Her numbers in battleground states are terrible. 

Here are four straight minutes of Kamala Harris being "unburdened" pic.twitter.com/S4X5mfGKRm

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 17, 2023

Harris can imagine whatever she wishes. She can try to unburden herself from the past, but she cannot hide from her left-of-Bernie policy positions. She cannot hide that she speaks in nonsensical word salads and cackles when she's cornered. She can't run from the fact that she lied for three years about Biden's cognitive decline. 

It's about her.