Usha Vance Is Here To Clean Up Her Husband J.D.’s Mess. But To What End?

Usha Vance is the most likable person even tangentially related to the Republican presidential ticket, and so of course she’s being trotted out to do the most depressing and debasing work assigned to political wives since time immemorial: Cleaning up objectively horrible comments made by her husband, and perhaps humanizing him a little in the process – or at least trying to.

The Vances have reportedly long cast themselves as a Clintonian power couple. And as is often the case when to highly ambitious people marry, the husband’s aspirations move to the front burner while the equally-impressive—and, in this case, arguably more socially and intellectually adept—wife winds up in a series of traditionally feminine roles: cheering him on, telling others about his soft side, papering over his screw-ups. The whole performance is carefully calibrated to send the message that if she loves, accepts, and forgives her man—and of course she does!—then so too should the public.

In this case, though, the comments are repulsively misogynistic and awfully hard to hand-wave away. They include Usha’s husband, J.D. Vance, complaining that the US (and the Democratic establishment in particular) is run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too."

These “childless sociopaths,” he said, have made the country “less mentally stable;” he has also argued that parents should get an extra vote for each child they have.

Voters are understandably angry. Huge numbers of Americans don’t have children, some by choice and others by circumstances. Many others are simply disgusted at the cruelty of suggesting women who have not reproduced are somehow not only less worthy than women who have, but mentally unstable. It’s such a bizarre and extreme set of positions that even Republicans are backing away from it.

So Usha has been brought out to give the whole scandal a gauzier glow. In a gently-lit Fox News interview, she defended her husband’s comments not as correct, but with the logic of unapologetic bullies everywhere: It was just a joke. “The reality is, JD made a quote – I mean, he made a quip, and he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive,” she said.

(One has to wonder: Do the Vances really want people to dig into the substance behind JD’s hostility to women without children?)

She continued: “What he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that (makes) it even harder.”

This is undeniably true: It is really hard to be a parent, and US policies make it uniquely hard. We remain an outlier among developed nations in our lack of paid parental leave—an American woman can deliver a baby on Sunday and be expected back at work on Monday. Despite being one of the world’s richest nations, we have no universal childcare. Our maternal and infant mortality rates remain stunningly high, particularly in conservative states, and it is a perpetual struggle to get adequate funding for maternal and infant health, not to mention the things that help poor families stay afloat: food stamps, cash support, affordable healthcare. And of course all of these policies face far greater opposition from Vance’s Republican Party than from Democrats.

And yet, in all of his opining on cat ladies, Vance didn’t really talk about policy, although in the same period he did voice his support of abortion bans without exceptions for women and children pregnant from rape and incest. Last week, he didn’t even show up to vote on a bill that would have expanded the child tax credit.

There’s little in the way of evidence that Usha is any kind of feminist or someone who has ever advocated for women’s rights, but she seems to have at the very least fit in amongst more progressive classmates and colleagues, and was sometimes perceived by them as a political fellow traveler. She was registered to vote as a Democrat until 2014; she was reportedly disgusted by the Jan 6, 2021 insurrection and by Donald Trump more generally. (She was also a law clerk for conservative justices, however, including Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts.)

Many of those who considered her a friend in graduate school and later don’t describe her as someone driven by a particular ideology, or even as someone who discussed politics much at all. Rather, she seems much more driven by being at the top of her field—and getting ahead.

It’s hard to judge her for that. Ambitious women often face deep skepticism, but there is in fact much to admire in those who want to be the best at what they do. And she’s not in an easy position: Spouses generally want their partners to succeed, and while Usha seems to dislike the limelight, she does seem committed to her husband’s ambitions.

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The problem is that those ambitions have aligned with politics that are shamelessly hostile to women and other people a lot like Usha herself. And yet here she is, not just standing alongside a husband who has decided a man he once deemed as dangerous as heroin should be president of the United States, but standing up for him and trying to make him and his running mate more palatable to the public.

Usha Vance is, without question, a woman who has followed her own path, pursuing excellence in part by a choice to delay having children until she was ready. She has been rewarded—not disparaged—for her achievements. It is depressing to watch a woman who owes her success in large part to the feminists, progressives and yes, the “childless cat ladies” who made professional success not just possible but aspirational, use all she has built in the service of a man who will use make it all the harder for any other woman.

One wonders if, in all this pursuit of power, the female half of the Vance power couple has ever asked herself what, exactly, it should be used for.