Given what I've heard of his book is essentially "my lazy, good for nothing kin need to stop fornicating and get pulling on their bootstraps," I don't think he's as potent a candidate as DC Conservative worms think he his.
The first half of the book is terrific as are the 1-2 pages where he talks about why folks in Appalachia tended to have such a fierce dislike of Obama (he's everything they're not: flourishes in meritocratic society, a good father with a loving and stable family, articulate, a minority, intellectual, from a big city, etc, etc), why they resent successful recent immigrants more than almost anyone else (essentially "It's my country and you're doing it better than me; how dare you!"
My words, not his), how fake news has gotten completely out of control (even as early as 2010) due to the complete lack of trust in the media. However, the second half (aside from the two pages I mentioned) is increasingly terrible (it starts getting bad once he joins the army). It shifts to boilerplate right-wing "lazy poor people don't work hard, all I had to do in order to pull myself out was be a genius, go to Yale Law School, and pursue a career that paid really well" talking-points. I also want to note the particularly cringe-worthy moment where he was asked why he wants to work in the field of law he ended up choosing during a job interview and replied "Well, the pay's pretty good, right?" (paraphrasing, I forget the exact words, but it was gross). And naturally, he allows no room for even the possibility that corporate America just might also be contributing to some of the problems afflicting the white working-class through the positions they lobby for. I read an editorial in either The New Republic or The Atlantic (I forget which) calling Vance "the false prophet of blue America," and I think that's spot on. All he really does in the second half of the book is repackage the same old non-sense about mythical hordes of welfare queens, "gee whiz, all it takes is a little hard work, don't ya know
," "government can only make things worse," etc. The first half is a fascinating and empathetic look at Appalachia, but the book doesn't offer any serious solutions and devolves into a pretty generic ideologically self-serving conservative Coffee Table Book™ in the second half (albeit one that's still far more coherent and better written than most). I get why Peter Thiel liked the book so much
I also get why Vance has the perspective he does given his life experiences. To be fair, it can be incredibly tempting to say "I pulled myself out of the hole so why can't these people," but he should also know better than most that it is nowhere near that simple. This is a recurring issue in the book, btw: over-simplification of things that are inconvenient for his worldview. For example, when he argues child services and social workers are generally extremely bad for families and do more harm than good, my thought is "okay, I agree the foster care system in this country is a joke. That said, say we get rid of child services and you have kids being sexually abused by their parents or kids like you who had at least one parent who 1) was threatening murder-suicide to their >12 year-old while speeding on the highway and 2) was so physically abusive that the child often lived with their grandparents, and 3) harassed their own child for a clean urine sample b/c everyone else in the family was using drugs. What if the kid isn't smart enough to get into an Ivy League law school or even a college of any sort? Is the government really wrong to say 'okay, some of these situations may require outside intervention for the child's safety or at least an investigation to determine whether this is the case?'" For obvious reasons, Vance has no interest in having that discussion.).
Another example is when he argues people sometimes throw away low-paying jobs through a lack of commitment/aversion to hard work and there are certainly some folks like that. I've even met one or two. However, Vance conveniently ignores the fact that if you want to attract a higher quality employee, you as an employer might want to offer better compensation than a minimum wage that's so low that it isn't even a livable wage. You simply are not gonna get the same applicant pool if you pay someone minimum wage with crappy benefits as you would if you paid them even $15 an hour (still not great) and/or offered really good healthcare benefits. And again, minimum wage in most (if not all) states is not a livable wage. It certainly isn't in Ohio; I can tell you that much. I realize that it's not always possible to pay employees more (especially in lower-level positions or for more menial work), but if that's the case then there is a piece of this that is also the employer making a trade-off whether they realize it or not. It may or may not be fair, but it is a reality and ignoring it the way Vance does strikes me as willful over-simplification. These are just two small examples; I could probably find much better ones if hadn't returned the book to the library a few weeks ago.
As for Vance running for office, the more I think about it, the more I think it sounds like he's suffering delusions of grandeur (or at least that the book's reception went to his head, assuming he actually does run for office). No one knows who he is and he'd be a terrible fit. Here's how folks will see him: "Hey guys, so I left Ohio to go to an Ivy League law school and went to go work for some Silicon Valley rich dude (Peter Thiel). I wanna run for office, so I moved back to Ohio to run for office. I wrote a book about poor white people; liberals love it! Did I mention that I wrote a book?" He'll get destroyed if he runs in a heavily WWC area and/or one that is part of greater Appalachia.
I guess I could *maybe* see him winning an open state house seat due to a clown-car primary in a district like HD-52 or HD-54, but those won't be open this cycle and don't he'd come anywhere close to winning a primary against an incumbent. SD-7 recently opened up, but that vacancy was already filled and I don't see Vance winning a primary there either (certainly not against an incumbent). Maybe he's just gonna run for city council or something *shrug* If he runs statewide, he'll be the Jon Huntsman of OH politics this cycle, to the extent that anyone even pays attention to him at all.
