Obama Torches Vance’s “Blood and Soil” Speech: He’s Married to a Daughter of Immigrants
Barack Obama just dismantled JD Vance with a single word: hypocrisy.
Speaking on a podcast with author Malcolm Gladwell, the former president took direct aim at the vice president’s recent speech about American identity, in which Vance declared that America represents “a particular place, with a particular people” and argued that those whose ancestors fought in the Civil War hold a stronger claim to the country than others.
Obama called it exactly what it is.
“At least one of our major parties has been captured by politics that is not that subtle about suggesting that ‘we the people’ means a certain kind of people,” Obama said. “When you have the vice president, the current vice president, making a speech that is basically a blood and soil version of ‘we the people,’ that it matters who your parents were, how long they’ve been here, despite him being married to a daughter of an immigrant himself, that echoes ideas about who can be a citizen, who belongs, who gets to make decisions.”
The contradiction is impossible to miss. Vance’s wife Usha is the daughter of Indian immigrants and gained her citizenship at birth, the very birthright citizenship her husband has aggressively fought to end. Vance backed Trump’s executive order stripping automatic citizenship from children of undocumented and temporarily documented parents, and when the Supreme Court struck it down 6 to 3 last month, reaffirming the 14th Amendment, Vance called the ruling a “major mistake.”
Under the rules Vance champions, the story of his own family might never have happened. He is raising three children with the daughter of immigrants while preaching that ancestry determines who truly belongs in America.
Gladwell observed that a century ago, no vice president could have married an immigrant’s daughter while preaching nativism, calling it a lovely illustration of America moving “from malice to hypocrisy.” Obama’s response was vintage Obama: sharp, calm, and devastating. “Hypocrisy is progress,” he said, “because it means that you feel guilty enough to either lie to yourself or others. And that is better than not even thinking about the idea that maybe you’re doing something wrong.”
Vance built his political brand on deciding who counts as a real American. Obama just reminded the country, with a smile, that the vice president’s own dinner table proves he doesn’t believe a word of it.