At the convention, Democrats are working to reclaim the flip side of weird.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz used the potency of a single word to help propel himself onto last night’s Democratic-convention stage as Kamala Harris’s pick for vice-presidential nominee. Only a few weeks ago, in late July, he branded the Republican ticket as “weird,” and they have been reeling since. But weirdness is a negative quality, the opposite of which, of course, is normalcy, and that is exactly what the DNC tried to project on its third night.
The introduction of weird took one of the central subtexts of modern American politics and made it text. Ever since Richard Nixon declared himself the champion of the “silent majority” (the other side apparently being the noisy minority), the normal/weird divide has pretty much worked to Republicans’ benefit. When Democrats were labeled as latte-drinking or chardonnay-sipping, they were essentially being called weird. I’m not sure why such great beverages were slurred in the process, but for the GOP, characterizing opponents as out-of-touch coastal elites has been a winning strategy for a long time. Remember John Kerry windsurfing? Remember Barack Obama eating exactly seven “lightly salted” almonds every night? Weird.
If the flipping of this script began with Walz’s epithet, the convention is completing the turnover. In the lead-up to Walz’s nomination-acceptance speech, viewers heard Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg describing in great detail a typical dinner at his house, “when the dog is barking and the air fryer is beeping and the mac and cheese is boiling over and it feels like all the negotiating experience in the world is not enough to get our 3-year-old son and our 3-year-old daughter to just wash their hands and sit at the table.” Amy Klobuchar, one of Minnesota’s U.S. senators, told us about the chicken-Parmesan dinner her mother-in-law brought over to Tim and Gwen Walz’s house when their son was born. “That’s what we do in America,” she said. “We look out for our neighbors.” Even Bill Clinton, famously a former aficionado of McDonald’s, mentioned that Harris had spent more time there than he had—back when she was slinging burgers, probably the most normal job in America. The Latte Liberals have become the Casserole Liberals.
Then there was the orgy of normalcy around the VP nominee, a former high-school football coach whom Klobuchar lovingly called a “dad in plaid.” One of his former students introduced him this way: “Tim Walz is the kind of guy who you can count on to push you out of a snowbank.
