I’VE BEEN ON A SHORT HIATUS, far removed from my home-base in the “Media Capital of the World,”  New York City.  And I have to say, rural Maine offers a perspective not always fully taken into account during mainstream media coverage of our presidential contest.  

The half-dozen traditional states of New England are generally seen as Democrat-blue, but I’d say.Maine is more a middling shade of purple,  Of its United States Senators, one is Republican, though a so-called moderate example of the species, Susan Collins. Moderate maybe, but she’s combative enough to have this week sharply attacked President Biden’s proposals for term limits on the Supreme Court and an enforceable code-of-ethics for its members – on the grounds, she insisted, that the proposals weakened the independence, yes the independence, of the Court, and demonstrated what she called a “lack of respect” to the conservative-weighted bench.

Maine’s other senator is an Independent, Angus King. He’s a former governor who in 2020 angrily critiqued the then-Trump Administration’s handling of Covid, and so promoted Trump himself to describe King as “worse than any Democrat”. More dispassionate assessments tend to call King a centrist, and indeed, while caucusing with Democrats he has also been known to vote with Republicans – as he did to block the Democrats’ “Green New Deal” in the Senate.

In the US House, Maine has only two Representatives, given its rather sparse population compared with its substantial geographic size … and they’re both Democrats. But one of them, Jared Golden (right), felt compelled to vote — along with a tiny handful (five) of his fellow-Democrats from right-leaning districts — in support of a Republican House resolution. It condemned Vice-President Kamala Harris, now of course the presumptive Presidential candidate, for her alleged “failure to secure the United States border.”  And Congressman Golden was last week reported saying he would still “absolutely not” commit to voting for Harris in November.

To account for Golden not toeing his party’s national leadership line, I can perhaps best cite a seasoned political reporter in the Maine state capital, Augusta – who spoke to me off-the-record: “these Maine officials have electorates that are only spasmodically urban – they’re mainly rural … and their man is Trump.” The reporter and I also swapped our separate, similar anecdotes of driving for miles and miles in this state’s network of country roads, and seeing only Trump-supporting placards. Less anecdotally, I should also recall as a matter of public record that Representative Golden’s district — which is Maine’s second district and the more northerly of the two — voted substantially for Trump in 2020, seven percentage points more than Biden.

AMERICA’S URBAN-VERSUS-RURAL DIVIDE inevitably features large in the 2024 electoral race. The Trump campaign is heavily stressing Harris’s identity as a “San Francisco liberal” – that’s when it’s not inevitably dog-whistling about her blackness, her gender and (totally untruthfully) her supposed childlessness. She of course has raised children – and (rather sweetly) her stepdaughters call her “Momala,” as revealed in personal bio stories when she first came to public prominence.

A shade ironically, it’s been the city-slicker from the other coast from ‘Frisco — Trump, a New York real estate dealer at that — who has seemed to be having to redress any potential, overly-citified look for the Republican ticket. That concern played a sizable part in choosing for his running-mate JD Vance, author of the infamous memoir (or tract), Hillbilly Elegy — and nowadays a US Senator for Ohio since writing the book.

But that choice of Trump’s has been rebounding on the campaign somewhat, since the social media cosmos, as well as mainstream media, is echoing again and again with those remarks Vance made in the not so distant past, about his new idol. As we all now know, if we didn’t already, Vance described Trump as variously an “idiot,” “morally reprehensible,” bad for the American working class … and even likened him, reportedly and in private, to Adolf Hitler.

Vance has thus proved to be a splendid target for that busy Harris surrogate, Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttegieg.  The onetime “Mayor Pete” from South Bend, Indiana has gained a joyous reputation among Democrats as their best “Fox News Whisperer” … for his uncanny ability to go on that ultra-partisan network and play it at its own game – and win, too.

It was actually, though, on another network, HBO, that Buttigieg understandably stressed some kinship with Vance, or certainly understanding of him, as a fellow Mid-Westerner … and also pointed out to the host Bill Maher just how deeply venomous Vance’s description was, of Trump as “an opioid”.

First, he said it was a strange way to describe a person, gaining big laughs from the studio audience, but he went to say, piercingly:

“For somebody whose identity is that they’re connected to Appalachia, which has an opioid crisis, that really is the darkest thing you could possibly say about Donald Trump, at least in public.”

In the interests of being fair and balanced, as Fox News itself once upon a time used to say, I should also report Vance’s own apology, if that’s what it was, for having critiqued Trump in that disdainful, damning manner:

“I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy.”

THE SELF-STYLED APPALACHIAN VANCE – albeit since his beginnings gaining a Yale law degree and a stint as a Silicon Valley venture-capitalist – has also described himself, to the Republican National Convention among other audiences, as “a working-class boy born far from the halls of power”.

There wasn’t exactly a log-cabin involved, but that’s quite a label to be brandished by someone aspiring to the No 2 position in the White House. Vice President Harris, by stepping up to nominee for the No 1 position, has of course automatically created a vacancy – for someone to go head-to-head with the purported working-class Vance. Quite a clutch of prospects stepped forward, with several Democratic governors to the fore.

But few possibles seem to have excited as much media interest as US Senator Mark Kelly. He represents a battleground state, Arizona (no mean feat for a Democrat) … he has had a stellar career (in media terms) as a Navy combat pilot (flying thirty-nine missions during operation Desert Storm … and then a NASA Astronaut, along with (fascinatingly enough) his identical bother Scott Kelly. But working-class? Well, consider his parentage. Kelly – a name that’s inevitably, recognizably Irish. And in fact both parents were born Bronx-Irish, and both became police officers in New Jersey. When the twins were growing up their mother, Patti, gained a reputation for breaking up bar fights. She was the first female cop on the West Orange force, working hard to pass the then men-only fitness test. Before that she’d been a prison guard.

Many criss-crossing factors will have played into Vice President Harris’s hurriedly conducted consideration of her choice … but there’s undoubtedly been a surge of support for Kelly. No matter who ends up as the second name on the ticket, everyone is going to know more about him. No media profile published so far has omitted the fact that he’s married to former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

Together the couple recently welcomed into the world their first grandchild, born to Kelly’s elder daughter from his previous marriage. It’s maybe uncomfortable to point out, but it’s very resonant all the same  … that there is among all these biographical details an answer to one of JD Vance’s more specious political attacks — that peculiar condemnation of Democrats who are (in his mind) childless.  Giffords took to social media this week to say directly to Vance:

Vice President Kamala Harris is a proud mom of two remarkable stepchildren —and so am I.

It’s also a measure of our ugly, brutal times that when still a member of Congress, Gabby Giffords – who so far had no children of her own with Kelly – was horribly injured (as we must all remember) by a would-be assassin. So the issues of political violence and parenthood have gotten braided together in a grim and deeply distressing way. As Giffords also said to Vance in her posting:

Mark Kelly and I were trying to have a baby through IVF before I was shot, and that dream was stolen from us. To suggest we are somehow lesser is disgraceful.