https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/ ... j-d-vance/
Andy Beshear’s Smear of J. D. Vance
by NOAH ROTHMAN, July 23, 2024
The charge that Vance established a fraudulent charity to prey on unsuspecting donors and abuse their trust is false and staggeringly cynical.
In a scene-chewing audition for the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nomination, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear appeared on CNN last night with the goal of unloading the entire trove of opposition research on J. D. Vance all at once. It did not go well for Beshear.
The governor unleashed a torrent of accusations against Vance at such a rapid-fire clip that each individual allegation probably washed over his audience. Beshear accused Vance of being a fake Kentuckian (the Bluegrass State is where Vance was born and where his family is rooted), of calling the culture from which he hails “lazy,” and of regarding women as little more than incubators designed solely to carry infants to term. Within this fusillade, however, Beshear included one especially scandalous allegation:
“Listen, I’m not a name caller. I believe in moving past a lot of the political rhetoric. But when you have profited off our people in Kentucky, when you have created a phony charity that you claim is going to help on opioids — listen, I sued more opioid companies as attorney general than any other in the country. If I could have found more, I’d have sued them too because I was so mad with what they did to our people.”
The charge of establishing a fraudulent charity only to prey on unsuspecting donors and abuse their trust is a serious one — just ask Donald Trump. But Beshear declined to elaborate on the allegation, leaving his audience to fill in the blanks with their prejudices and priors. He would surely prefer that to the conclusions voters would likely draw from the remarkably thin evidence that supposedly supports his contention.
The charge against Vance was first promulgated by former congressman Tim Ryan’s 2022 Senate campaign. “Vance claimed he moved back to Ohio to help solve the opioid epidemic,” one July 2022 campaign memo read. “He started a fake charity that paid for polling, campaign advisors and travel to launch his political career while illegally taking a tax write off.” Taking its cues from the Democrat’s campaign, as it is wont to do, the Associated Press fleshed out the allegation the following month.
Vance founded Our Ohio Renewal as a 501(c)(4) in 2016, but the organization’s work was paused in the spring of 2022. In the interim, the AP insists, the organization was plagued by controversy. It could claim few tangible success stories. It hired a physician to tour the state who was “tainted by ties” to the pharmaceutical industry — specifically, the OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma. And, ultimately, the outfit appeared to have been designed primarily to help Vance staff his incipient Senate campaign and road test his messages.
The Associated Press asked a lot of leading questions, but it answered few of them — presumably because the answers would not have satisfied the anti-Vance activists leading this charge.
The doctor whom the AP and the Ryan campaign accused of profiting off the very addiction she set out to combat is Sally Satel, a distinguished scholar with the American Enterprise Institute. She described her experience with Vance’s organization working with addicts and addiction specialists in Ohio and Kentucky in a 2021 discussion with her AEI colleagues. Her many insightful comments about this societal epidemic of addiction were, however, overlooked by her critics. Instead, they focused on vilifying her for making objectively true but politically inopportune claims like “people who develop problems with prescription opioids are usually not even the patients that they’re prescribed for,” but “mostly . . . people who abuse drugs.” That’s a complicating fact for those who are invested in the notion that the opioid crisis was imposed on unsuspecting working-class Americans by rapacious capitalists.
This, as well as the fact that AEI had received donations from Purdue Pharma, supposedly substantiated the notion that Satel had ties to the industry whose evil product had consigned otherwise well-adjusted Americans to chemical dependency. But as Satel told AP, AEI’s scholars are walled off from their donors to preserve their independence. And if Purdue’s donations are scandalous in and of themselves, the lack of pressure on Democratic recipients of the firm’s largesse to refund it would suggest otherwise.
As for the charity itself, no less a venue than the New York Times dismissed the claim that it was somehow unusual for a person with political ambitions to use a 501(c) as an “incubator for their next campaigns.” In addition,
the Times could not refute Vance’s claim that the organization ultimately closed shop because tragedy struck its leadership. “In February 2018, Mr. [Jamil] Jivani — the director of law and policy who ran Our Ohio Renewal day to day — was diagnosed with cancer,” its dispatch read. “After that, Our Ohio Renewal seemed to freeze.”
Our Ohio Renewal “raised so little in each of the last three years — less than $50,000 a year — that it wasn’t even required by the IRS to disclose its activities and finances,” Business Insider reported in 2021.
It’s a strange sort of fleecing operation that generates so little revenue it compels its founder to sink $80,000 of his own money into it, contributing to the grand total of $221,000 in donations the organization raised over its lifetime.
These details do not suggest nefarious intent on Vance’s part. The most uncharitable but grounded assessment we could make of the organization is that it was underfunded, poorly managed, and plagued by bad luck. A more generous interpretation of Our Ohio Renewal’s record is that
Vance and his friends and allies tried to do a difficult thing and the project failed when events intervened.
The implication promulgated by the Ryan campaign and reprised by Beshear is that the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee is so unscrupulous that he would even exploit addicts for his own personal gain. That’s an unsupported, staggeringly cynical charge. Indeed, it seems like the only people exploiting addicts for personal advantage are Vance’s Democratic critics.