Weird vs. Stupid
The City of Austin, Texas, would like word. What does the latest banality coming from the weird world of politics mean? Normal is now weird. Welcome to American politics.
Watching Americans “try on” political candidates is much like watching women shop for clothes.
No, I’m not being sexist. I’m not being critical. Just observant.
Plenty of spouses head to their favorite clothing stores when they’re bored, often alone, especially when their husbands are focused on MLB, NFL, or NHL games. I get it. As a husband who has occasionally shopped with his wife for 40 years (admittedly, I’m not very helpful), I’ve observed a few things.
I find it interesting how few husbands shop with their wives and how many women shop alone. Watching them look for clothes (without me appearing creepy or invasive) is instructive. During college in the mid-1970s, I used to work at “The Dixie Store” in Chickasha, Oklahoma, as I was earning my way through college. The wonderful Miller family, a Russian Jewish immigrant family, owned the clothing store and hired me, even though I can’t remember how I learned of or got the job. Their customers taught me a lot. It was a memorable, humbling, and character-shaping experience (selling women’s shoes, especially, will do that). Fifty years later, I look back on it very fondly. The Dixie Store is now the Grady County Historical Society Museum. Seems appropriate.
It reminds me of the way voters select their political candidates. They might get excited about the first dress or blouse, but they want to be sure. Besides, I’m told you never want to buy the first clothing you love. Just because.
Women, unlike most men, take their time and browse. I was taught to shadow customers and offer assistance. Women, especially, always shooed me away unless they couldn’t find something specific they were looking for. They tried many shoes and clothes and, not infrequently, were a bit delusional about their shoe size.
What brought them to the store? Usually, a specific need, or perhaps sometimes just out of curiosity. Maybe they saw something in an advertisement and wanted to check out the latest trend. Or, they were just bored. Some of my busiest times at the Dixie Store were Saturday afternoons during University of Oklahoma Sooners football games.
I’m persuaded that people generally love to “try on” candidates. One need only harken back to the 2016 Republican primary for a great example. Trump was just one of several candidates that cycle and wasn’t always ahead in the polling. Former Florida Gov. Jeb! Bush was the early front-runner; some thought he would clear the field. The estimable neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson led for a while. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker ascended for his 15 minutes. Others, such as Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), made splashes. The rest is history. GOP voters tried them all on and settled on the unexpected. Voters can do that sometimes. Thus is real democracy. Donors and insiders didn’t choose Donald Trump. Voters, the rank and file, did.
Democrats should try that sometime.
I don’t know what the old Soviet clothing stores looked like. I remember an old Wendy’s ad about the “choices” in a Soviet “fashion show” while touting fresh food choices and options. The founder of Wendy’s, the late Dave Thomas, was a brilliant marketer.
It was very funny. I was reminded of it as I pondered the “choices” Democratic voters were offered this primary and election season.
They were told to “wear” Biden, whether they liked him or not. “Store owners” saw the rejection and brought a new fashionista, Kamala Harris, but none other. Democrats, bless their hearts, are trying to be excited about their new and more exciting “choice.” They are trying it on for much of August. On the surface, she sure seemed more exciting than old, drab Joe. Young(er)! Woman of color! Progressive!
The funny thing is Democratic voters tried her on in 2019. She was popular when she launched her campaign and even called herself a “top-tier” candidate. After the first debate, they found her so unappealing that she dropped out weeks before the first ballots were cast—even before the 2020 calendar year began.
Now, suddenly, they’re supposed to embrace this new model. Is this new candidate suddenly going to wear much better despite her earlier rejection? Will rebranding this old cloth work? Do mirrors lie?
As we predicted, more people are dropping out of contention to be her running mate than offering themselves—or so it seems. This new “Kamala” model is being tried on for much of August, at least through their Chicago convention, and voters are envisioning her as their nominee, even as their President. Can they “wear” this for four years? And what kind of accessories will the Kamala model choose to accompany it as her running mate? Will the suit match the shoes and purse?
Some media are trying to sell the new Kamala Harris as the new Barack Obama. “The numbers suggest Harris has a shot at reassembling the voter coalition that propelled President Barack Obama to the White House — and a clearer path to victory than Biden, who’d struggled to galvanize the Democratic base,” Bloomberg News Service breathlessly wrote.
We’ll find out, probably around the time of the first debate, whenever that is (maybe September 10). But one of the ways voters “try on” a candidate is to see if they can identify with them. Will they say, “This fits me perfectly!” Or will we hear, “This doesn’t look very good on me. This isn’t me.” Or, the dreaded “this makes me look fat.” They won’t have a choice this time, as they did in 2019. It’s her or the highway. Very democratic.
The Kamala model is trotting out lots of marketing, from saying, “I’m not like the last time you tried me on; I’m new and improved!” to changing her views faster than the weather, like on “fracking,” a significant issue in must-win Pennsylvania, or gaslighting us into believing that she was never the “border czar.”
That seems to be the focus of her new $50 million ad campaign to “reintroduce” her brand. She also contrasted and compared herself to The Other Model, including Donald Trump and US Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). He’s just “weird,” Kamala says. Kamala mentioned Trump’s “wild lies about my record and some of what he and his running mate are saying, it is just plain weird.”
The thing is, not many people pay attention to politics, especially political commercials, during the height of the vacation season in August before school starts.
The various mouthpieces for Democrats echo the weirdness theme as if a memo went out. They include US Senators Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Christopher Murphy (D-CT) and another of Kamala’s “suitors,” failed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. This is their retort to something Vance said several years ago about the Democratic party’s anti-child and anti-family policies, using the term “childless cat ladies.” Oops, a lot of Democratic women saw that as an insult, and even a pair of white dudes saw their opportunity.
Here’s a little more context on what JD Vance actually said about “cat ladies” or giving more votes to parents of young children. I suspect you have already made up your mind, one way or the other.
I don’t think Democrats have thought this through, this “weird” moniker. It’s not the negative they think it is. And a lot of families with children don’t find Vance or his comments weird at all. Instead, they’re realizing that Democrats are calling them weird. After all, US birth rates have fallen below “replacement” - women aren’t giving enough births to “replace” the population.
Not exactly a smart way to sell your brand.
Take, for example, the heavily Democratic Capitol City of Texas, Austin. For some twenty years, the city has adopted “Keep Austin Weird” as its unofficial (some say official) motto. Being non-conformist (or, in this case, keeping “big box” stores away from Austin to project smaller independent businesses) is a feature, not a bug of life in one of Texas’s largest cities which, unlike most of the rest of Texas, is reliably Democratic. Maybe that’s what truly makes Austin weird.
The Democratic party seems to have embraced and is now enforcing conformity as part of its increasingly collective mindset (see Wendy’s commercial above). They eschewed and even castigated Biden’s putative challenges, including US Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), a wealthy Talenti frozen yogurt magnate (he sold out to Dutch-based Unilever). They’re repeating the same mistake by force-feeding Harris as their party’s choice. Take it, or else. Just like the Soviet fashion show in the Wendy’s commercial.
We saw plenty of this mindset during the pandemic when people walking outdoors for exercise would insist on wearing masks while telling passersby, “I protect you, you protect me,” and especially how they treated people who resisted ineffective vaccines (after first trashing them as “Trump’s vaccine”).
I would know. I personally experienced it. You may have as well.
Many journalists and genuine experts were censored, viciously attacked, and marginalized. They look very smart now, from author Alex Berenson to Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Much is also true about how “climate science” has evolved in the US, a topic that several scientists and climatologists have exposed in recent years, including Dr. Roger Pielke at the American Enterprise Institute, a terrific think tank in Washington, DC. He’s hardly alone.
Maybe they were just too weird, too nonconformist, for the collective. And besides, voters might choose “weird” over stupid regarding policies. My friend Marc Thiessen recently summarized Harris’s record in a Washington Post column:
And unlike Biden, who at least had the veneer of moderation, she (Kamala Harris) is an unabashed leftist. She has supported the Democratic socialist agenda, from the Green New Deal to Medicare-for-all. In her 2019 campaign, she proposed a mind-boggling $45.5 trillion in new spending, according to Manhattan Institute budget expert Brian Riedl. She pledged to ban fracking (which won’t go over well in must-win Pennsylvania) and promised to decriminalize illegal border crossings and provide taxpayer-funded health care for illegal migrants (which might explain her catastrophic failure as Biden’s border czar). She is an abortion zealot who became the first vice president to campaign at an abortion clinic and has suggested that a Catholic who belongs to the Knights of Columbus was unfit to serve as a federal judge. She raised money for a bail fund that helped put people accused and later convicted of violent crimes back on the streets, and she supports giving former prisoners, including rapists and murderers, the right to vote.
Or perhaps you missed this little gambit this week, which raised a reported $4 million for the Harris/whoever campaign, the estrogen-laced “White Dudes for Harris.” The Harris campaign reportedly sent Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to represent them. But, Trump-Vance supporter, you’re the weirdo.
Today’s Democratic “weird” is yesterday’s basket of deplorables, with a nod to Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign. How did that work out for her? It’s not a playbook I would revisit, but the Harris campaign can’t seem to resist. Maybe if she had just said,
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Oh, wait, that was Barack Obama in 2012.
Given a choice between the aforementioned policies, which many Americans reject, or “weird,” they might adopt Austin’s slogan as their own, uninterested or repulsed by the mandated conformity that the Harris brand increasingly represents.
“Weird” looks increasingly normal to many of us, especially compared to stupid.
Something tells me the Kamala suit won’t wear well and will wind up on the dressing room floor. Time will tell.
“What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized .… As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral — the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called — is now seen as pathological.”
Gertrude Himmelfarb
The Wendy's commercial was perfect, as was the Gertrude Himmelfarb quote. You hit the nail on the head.
Thanks for reminding me of that great Wenfy's commercial!