Daily Herald opinion: Vance’s selection emphasizes the importance of the V.P. nominee in this election

Donald Trump's choice of a running mate has been a source of speculation and political game playing for months. Now that the president and the Republican Party have made it clear who they want, it is fair, and necessary, to ask: Who really is this new vice presidential nominee?

It is a particularly pertinent question in the case of Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who has worn many faces, both in his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” and since its emergence as a best-selling societal touchstone.

Is he the product of a hardscrabble Appalachian family dealing with alcohol, drugs and poverty in southern Ohio and eastern Kentucky described in the book? The Marine Corps veteran who overcame vaguely described issues of temper and self-control? The Yale graduate who found himself drawn back to Christian values of his youth? The social commentator who yearned for people to “think beyond Bush and Obama” when forming political and social allegiances?

Or, is there somewhere in his psyche remnants of the Never Trumper who couldn't decide whether Trump was a potentially “useful” version of a disparaged Richard Nixon or a frightening potential “America's Hitler?”

Or, is he a reformed, kinder, gentler version of Trump whose concerns about American corporations, involvement in foreign wars and government aid programs can make him the acceptable face of a new generation of Republicans?

Voters will need to know all this and more, and hopefully Vance will begin getting the scrutiny needed to clarify such questions.

Just as, by the way, Kamala Harris needs to be getting such scrutiny even now.

It is worth noting that while the public has plenty to learn about the capacity of the relatively recent political figure who has become the choice of the GOP for a position that, given Trump's age, could easily find him leading the country, we know almost as little about the person who has in fact been in that post, behind a president whose age is a distinct campaign issue, for four years.

If we have been willing to dismiss Kamala Harris as a typically irrelevant sidekick to Biden in the past, we can do so no longer. That urgency is just as important in the case of JD Vance.

So, given the options, Republicans have reason enough to feel good about Vance's place on the presidential ticket. But Americans of both parties, indeed of any political leaning, have to realize that perhaps more than any election in the past 80 years, the selection voters have to make in 2024 is as much about the No. 2 person on the ballot as the No. 1.