Just Be Normal
The ease at which the Democratic Party transitioned from Biden to Harris is the last week has been surprising, but even more surprising has been their new message for the election — all these Republicans sure are weird. It’s an attack that works, and you know it works because hit dogs holler:
But the thing that Ramaswamy gets wrong here as he’s hollerin’ is the it’s not a juvenile attack, it’s the Democratic Party asserting that the GOP’s policy stances are the things that people find to be unsettling.
It’s that the GOP is the party of Moms for Liberty, who want to be the personal arbiters of what books your kids can read and what they learn in school. It’s that the GOP is the party of the guys with guns who show up to threaten the nice drag queens who take the time to read to your kids at the library. It’s that the GOP is the party of the guys pushing to have your kid’s genitals inspected by the state before they can play sports. If you start to list the policies out, like this excellent ad from a Pro-Harris SuperPAC did, it becomes very clear that the weirdness isn’t localized to a VP candidate who looks like you drew former Twins backstop AJ Pierzynski from memory, it’s the rot of a party that has drifted far from what normal Americans are willing to accept.
What’s more, this attack works because conservatives have spent basically as long as I’ve been alive forcing the argument to me done on their terms, and refusing to do that because everyone knows they’re creepy and extreme cuts their legs out form under them. They’re out here screaming ”DEBATE ME” while we’re just laughing at them. It’s the way to handle a bully.
There’s an impulse to say “well, why didn’t the Democrats do this sooner?”, since we’ve been dealing with this for almost a decade now, and as Bluesky user @GOLIKEHELLMACHINE mentioned earlier today, I don’t think that we were in an environment ion America where you could land this attack and have it stick. Clinton tried talking about “Deplorables” and “Dangerous Donald” in 2016, and the media turned it into a win for Trump. Sure, the language was a bit clumsy (weird is easy to understand, deplorable clearly came form a thesaurus), but eight years ago people who weren’t tuned into this stuff weren’t sure how seriously to take any of this. Now, especially after the last four years, everyone has had either a friend who got into QAnon, or a co-worker who won’t stop yelling about how DEI is keeping them down despite being bad at their job, or a family member who has ruined several holidays by refusing to get vaccinated. Every American has one of these connections, and every American knows how unpleasant it’s been to work around them. They’re all sick of it!
This opens up an incredible lane for the Democrats to run in — the lane where they’re able to Just Be Normal. It’s no surprise that the guy who’s been going on TV to talk about how weird the GOP has become is Gov. Tim Walz, pictured here snagging an all time photo op as he signed a bill to make school lunch free in Minnesota:
Compare and contrast that with Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former Trump press secretary, signing a law about school vouchers:
I know that a picture is worth a thousand words, but these are the kinds of easy wins you can stack up if you’re willing to just be normal and try to use power for the good of people. The Republican Party is full of weirdos, but the American public as a whole is separate from that, and they’re more understanding and less bigoted than you think. They don’t think that Trans people are demonic like the guy who shows up to the guy making minimum wage at Target does, they think people should be left alone. That used to be the stated position of the Republican Party, but we can steal that from them.
That’s the electoral advantage that the Democrats have and appear to be willing to exploit, and it’s giving me great hope for the future. We’re all sick of the people who have become the standard bearers of the Republican Party, the guys who want to track women’s periods, or the ones who insist there’s nothing that can be done about the constant and omnipresent threat of gun violence. Let’s spend the next four months calling them weird and being regular people. It’s going to drive them nuts and win the election for us, and it’s just so easy to do.
Correction: This blog originally said the photo of Gov. Sanders was her rolling back child labor protections, which was incorrect. That photo was from a different bill involving school vouchers. There was no photo op for the child labor bill with children, for reasons that should be obvious to the reader.
