Sen. JD Vance has been a candidate for national office for 11 days now, and during that time, Americans have learned quite a bit about the Ohio Republican. The unaccomplished senator, however, hasn’t made an especially good first impression.

Many officials in his own party believe Donald Trump made the wrong choice when picking a new running mate, and Vance is the first vice presidential hopeful in the modern era to have a negative favorability rating the week after his party’s convention.

But amid the avalanche of information voters have received about the 39-year-old lawmaker, three words have come to define his worldview.

Three years ago, during his first campaign for elected office, the then-Senate candidate appeared on Fox News and diagnosed what he saw as a crisis plaguing the United States. The country, Vance told a national television audience, was being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. It’s just a basic fact.”

The future senator specifically included Vice President Kamala Harris — who has step-children, but no biological children of her own — in his societal condemnation.

He’s quite the charmer.

The ugliness of Vance’s rhetoric — rooted in the idea that those without biological children are somehow lesser, unreliable and undeserving of positions of leadership — has not gone unnoticed. On the contrary, it seems to have spread with extraordinary speed this week, drawing sharp rebukes from those who are generally detached from the political discourse.

The GOP’s vice presidential nominee has made plenty of similar comments during his brief tenure in the political arena, but as CNN’s Andy Kaczynski noted this week, the “childless cat ladies” comment was “permeating the culture,” while simultaneously “defining Vance to a lot of people.”

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As part of an apparent attempt to put things right, the Ohioan sat down with SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly today and addressed the controversy, arguing:

“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats. … But look, this is not — people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said, and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true. It is true that we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child.”

I have a hunch this won’t make matters better. For one thing, for Vance to say he has “nothing against cats” suggests he’s under the impression that the controversy is feline-related. It’s not. The underlying question is about whether he has something against women, not something against cats.

For another, his 2021 comments were many things, but they weren’t “sarcastic.” On the contrary, he appears to have doubled down on the comments that sparked the controversy in the first place.

Finally, if Vance has credible evidence of liberals being “anti-child,” he’s kept it well hidden.

I can appreciate why the vice presidential hopeful is trying to clean up his mess, but Vance has had plenty of time to work out a defense, and if “nothing against cats” is the best he can come up with, the Republican’s problem is likely to linger for a while.