Democrats have hit upon a novel political message, and you can tell they’re in love with it in a deep way because they have come together in a concerted effort to celebrate it. Politicians from Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota to Rep. Eric Swalwell of California to Sen. Brian Schatz have gotten cheers for it. And the Kamala Harris lapdog media is picking it up too. You heard the new message out of the mouths of Biden shill/MSNBC host (but I am being redundant) Jen Psaki and former Democratic senator/MSNBC contributor (again redundant) Claire McCaskill, among many others.
And from Kamala Harris herself. The message: Republicans are “weird.” JD Vance especially is weird. And of course Donald Trump is weird. “You may have noticed Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record,” Harris said. “And some of what he and his running mate are saying, it’s just plain weird.”
In one sense, this “weird” business is a brilliant ploy. J.D. Vance has been on the defensive, and rightly so, I’m afraid, for his blunderbuss words and his equally blunderbuss defenses of his own caricaturish criticisms of childless women and their supposedly dominating role in the Democratic party. His remarks are ugly and seem cruel, particularly since he became famous for writing a book about how destructive a woman (his own mother) with children could be. I’m not sure I’d call it “weird,” but the whole business is off-putting and hard to defend. And since Vance was chosen by Trump in part to appeal to normie voters in the Rust Belt, defining him as a weirdo (if you can succeed at it) is a clever strategy.
As for Trump, I guess it’s weird he likes to joke about being Hannibal Lecter, although it is a joke. His stream-of-consciousness speeches are singular affairs unlike any we’ve ever heard. So, yes, weird, although we’ve had nearly a decade to get used to them. And yes, they lower rather than elevate our national discourse, but objecting to Trump lowering our discourse in 2024 is like objecting to Joe Biden’s ridiculous stories about Cornpop; those ships sailed long ago.
But the media like novelty, and this a new way to attack Republicans, so it’s hot as a pistol. It also has a strategic benefit for a candidate like Harris, given that one of her first major appearances after she became the presumptive nominee was to appear with the ur-drag-queen Ru Paul, who is popular in large part because he’s weird. This comes after years in which liberals have embraced the idea that it’s OK for a 6’2″ male to swim against females and win their trophies because said male has announced he is female —and OK for teenage girls to have to share locker rooms with boys who say they identify as female as they ogle. That’s something a vast majority of Americans think is weird at best and something more malign at worst. It’s what we call a 70 percent issue, and Democrats are on the wrong side of it. So characterizing an anti-trans politician like Vance as a weirdo and getting traction on it (if they do get traction on it) has a double political value.
The problem for Republicans, and the other reason this is a pretty interesting ploy by Democrats, is that in their eagerness to respond that, no, the Democrats are the weird ones, they risk saying stupid and unpleasant and dumb things that will only enhance the attack and make them look crude and unpleasant.
But mostly it’s clever because it’s a broad stroke and there isn’t much time for Harris to get whatever the hell her message is going to be across. She has 99 days to win this election, so forget niceties or subtleties. You know that by the way she’s abandoning vote-killing positions she held with the speed of an Olympic bicyclist zooming by the Place de la Concorde and with the subtlety of a sumo wrestler slamming his leg on the ground.
Each hour yesterday, it seemed, we were told some of her old views were now to be considered inoperative and she should no longer be held to them. She no longer supports an end to fracking (hello, Pennsylvania!) or complete socialized medicine (hello, doctors and patients!). “Fifteen minutes ago, you knew we humans were alone on earth,” Tommy Lee Jones tells Will Smith after he discovers the aliens among us in Men in Black. “Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”
I don’t think we have to wait until tomorrow. We know all we need to know about Harris today: She and her team are is trying to leverage her extraordinary press coverage to do what Mitt Romney press aide Eric Fehrnstrom breezily said his general election campaign would do in the spring of 2012 to get him votes in the general election after he had tacked to the right to win the Republican primaries: Treat any previously stated position as it were a drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch, to be disappeared with a simple shake. (A humiliated Fehrnstrom left politics and went to divinity school after his inadvertently triumphant moment in cynical truth-telling.)
Nor does she have the time to come up with genuinely substantive criticisms of Trump and Vance. For one thing, those attacks really haven’t changed since January 2021, though they have been amplified by events since January 6—threat to democracy, crook, felon, tormentor of women and denier of abortions, white supremacist.
Republicans and Trump supporters fancy that those attacks haven’t worked, but they’re wrong and they continue to be wrong. The anti-Trump line has kept the Democratic party at parity or better with Republicans during the course of one of the most unpopular presidencies in American history, and they kept Democrats from being wiped out in the midterm elections in 2022. The question is whether they’ve had the effect they’re going to have already and have any more juice.
So “weird” it is. And that’s weird. But it shouldn’t be counted out.