ItLife is not a spelling bee. Ask my family or friends and they will tell you this is one of my favorite sayings. I came up with it myself several years ago and now I use it all the time. The gold star doesn’t always go to the smartest person in the room. As a journalist over the past three decades, I’ve encountered many lawyers and politicians and even some fellow writers who, while supposedly smart, say and do really stupid things. I’m looking at you. JD Vance, also, the older I get, the more I understand that it’s not what you know that matters, but what you feel. Intelligence doesn’t hurt, but what really takes you far in life is empathy. Let’s call it EQ social skills. It’s the ability to connect with fellow human beings by understanding where they’re coming from. It makes us better people, the kind of people others enjoy being around. It’s really important that we all try to live our lives as expansively as possible. What a tragedy it would be if we all realized at the end of our lives that our experiences here on earth were too limited. We are supposed to do more in the short time we are here than simply care for our relatives, our community, and our fellows, and not show the slightest degree of curiosity or compassion toward others who live outside that circle. See, that’s Donald Trump, the former president who is now once again the Republican presidential nominee. And it’s also Trump’s mini me. JD Vance, the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy who parlayed his fame into a Senate seat for Ohio and then leveraged that seat to the point that he is now the Republican vice presidential nominee. Trump is 78 and Vance is 39. The grumpy old man is literally twice the age of his running mate. Trump grew up wealthy and Vance grew up working class, in poverty, but otherwise they’re the same guy. They’re likable. Fit. Both are white men who grew up with an inferiority complex. Trump because he was from Queens and felt condescended to by the people of Manhattan, Vance because his childhood was so damaged by his mother’s drug addiction that he had to be raised by his grandmother. Both men attended Ivy Lake schools, but they seem to have emerged from that experience with a sense of contempt for the people who attend such schools. Both are arrogant and unable to admit when they are wrong. Trump is a billionaire who lives in New York and Florida, while Vance hangs out with billionaires in Silicon Valley, and yes, as far as the matter at hand is concerned, both men lack empathy. In Trump’s case, that fact is very well known. During his first presidential campaign in 2016 and his first and hopefully last term in the White House, Trump has proven time and time again that he does not care at all about the experiences of others. His own former president, Bill Clinton, however, went around telling people going through a rough time after a national tragedy, “I feel your pain.” The man from Hope, Arkansas, offered his people a sympathetic shoulder after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. Trump, on the other hand, offered paper towels to people whose lives were being destroyed. Not quite the same. Or was he? What surprises me about all this is Vance. Frankly, I expected more depth and more character from someone who had a rough childhood, who grew up basically without parents. Someone like that shouldn’t need training in living more modestly. That should have been taken care of. But it turns out that Vance, who was once a venture capitalist after graduating from Yale Law School, is a rare commodity: a hillbilly snob. He rails against affirmative action and college or corporate initiatives that promote “dei,” or diversity, equity and inclusion. He says migrants are invading the United States and Mexican drug cartels are getting Americans addicted to fentanyl. Look, life is not a spelling bee. Intelligence may count for a lot, but empathy counts for even more, and in this race, Republicans are in last place.
