Weird isn’t the half of it. Narrowcasting their peculiarity ignores the danger…
do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do
(The Twilight Zone opening rif)
Sure, JD Vance has added a sense of weirdness to the GOP’s fall ticket. The VP candidate with a litterless feline obsession gives pause, but have we all forgotten the weirdest weirdo of them all? He of the wispy mane dyed in unearthly tones of orange, the vocabulary-enfeebled con man whose limited verbal skills punctuate rallies with inane babblings, embodies the peculiar. In the GOP, the weirdness, like cruelty, is the point. Their menagerie of oddities, includes a House and Senate filled with Boeberts, Sántoses, Greens, and Gaetzes. The Republican Party has formally entered a carnival sideshow found somewhere only in the twilight zone of current American politics.
That said, the Harris campaign should avoid the low-hanging fruit that GOP’s tinfoil-hatted leadership wears with pride. The convicted presidential candidate learned his signature art-of-the-con from Roy Cohn whose career ended with his being disbarred by a five-member Appellate Court panel for “unethical and unprofessional conduct.” The charges included misappropriation of clients’ funds, lying on a bar application, and falsifying a change to a will. Trump’s crimes coincidentally mirror Cohn’s but for the fact that the former president was able to hijack one of the two major political parties. In a stroke of pure political malfeasance, the GOP has been able to insulate Trump through legislative and judicial misconduct. Trump is a ham-handed version of Cohn’s more cerebral cons:
What Cohn could, and did, get away with was the very engine of his existence. The infamous chief counsel for the red-baiting, Joseph McCarthy-chaired Senate subcommittee in the 1950s, Cohn was indicted four times from the mid-’60s to the early ‘70s-for stock-swindling and obstructing justice and perjury and bribery and conspiracy and extortion and blackmail and filing false reports. And three times he was acquitted-the fourth ended in a mistrial-giving him a kind of sneering, sinister sheen of invulnerability. Cohn, Tyrnauer’s work reaffirms, took his sanction-skirting capers and twisted them into a sort of suit of armor.
- Politico Magazine, “The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned From Roy Cohn,” by Michael Kruse
I fear that weirdness as a response to the GOP presidential candidates is narrowcasting. It is easy pickings and glosses over the threat that their strangeness holds for democracy. The weirdness factor has been the recent Democratic response to Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his Veep and Vance’s poor early showing. His multiple double downs on the “childless cat ladies” quote are easy targets as they coincided with and reinforced the GOP attack on women and their odd sense of family values. The gist of his “childless cat ladies” remark was to bash Dems as bad on family values- but the examples he used said much more. His inclusion of Pete Buttigieg who is married and has children is a suggestion that gay married couples are somehow illegitimate. Turning on AOC and Harris suggested that their situations- a non-married woman and a stepmom- were aberrant to traditional American ideals.
Americans, they suggest, especially white ones, are duty-bound to multiply. This isn’t simply weird, it is dangerous. It fits in with the Christian nationalist doctrine defining women as homebound breeders. It denies women- and men- the many roles life has created for them. It rightfully could be considered a GOP leitmotif, a strategy that Republicans have successfully used in red states and more rural areas that make up their base because it justifies their choices. While Republicans pretend to court suburban soccer moms, they reject the lifestyles associated with urban and suburban life. It is a lifestyle that is foreign to them because it is different. For this Republican Party being different is threatening.
Unfortunately, Republicans have some research to back up their odd strategic choices. Recent election analyses suggest that Republicans may, in fact, be inexplicitly entangled with their base. Their play for married, non-gay, and prolifically fertile couples is based on research that demonstrates that this is the heart of their constituency:
Married men and women are more likely to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party than their unmarried counterparts, with 59% of married men and half of married women oriented toward the GOP.
Men and women who live with partners- both gay and heterosexual- favor Democrats by similar margins, as do divorced and never-married men and women. Therefore, it is not surprising that the GOP think tanks that are comprised of the more extreme elements of conservatism have chosen reproductive rights, gender identity, IVF, and contraception as their “weird” core policy initiatives. The 50-year obsession with making the judiciary more reactionary was a long-term investment of the extreme right as it slowly but surely drove centrists from its ranks while focusing on religious zealots and faith-based logic that put them out of step with their time. It mattered little that many were found to be hypocritical and intolerant of more evolved social norms. In a Venn Diagram of base supporters of the GOP, the common factors would be white, Catholic, Protestant, and particularly, evangelical groups within each religion. The point is that while their message is weird and outside the norm, there were strategists within the GOP hierarchy who fabricated the message and provided it to Vance, their favored choice for VP. They peddle this message to their faithful while pretending to the rest of the voters that they don’t mean it — to accept their euphemistic distortions about “family” and traditional values.
The Democratic response should not be to dismiss “the weirdness” as if that alone will be a disqualifying factor in the race. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” have been the target of the extreme wing of the Republican Party since Roe v. Wade was decided on as the wedge issue that would support the 1976 ticket and Ronald Reagan’s “Family Values” culture war. It served as a fault line politicizing a central theme conservatives would market as traditional values to counter the liberalism they detested. They rejected the rippling effects of Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and the societal integration that grew out of legislation and court decisions of the post-WW II era. The extremism we are experiencing today is rooted in racism and bigotry that has so divided the nation into red and blue, just as it had separated us a hundred and fifty years earlier into blue and gray. For GOP strategists, color shades their policies and tints the true nature of their “values” arguments. They have divided the nation with red values that are inherently racist, misogynist, anti-intellectual, and deeply intolerant of the “others” among us as if these were the American values to return to instead, of representing the prejudice and immorality we had hoped to be rid of.
Joe Biden ends speeches with a call for defending America’s greatness. It stands in contrast to the GOP vision of America in failure. It has its place in the Democratic messaging:
We just have to keep faith — keep the faith and remember who we are. We are the United States of America, and there is simply nothing — nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together. So, let’s act together, preserve our democracy.
Kamala has to raise the ante, challenging us to imagine what we can be — what the MAGA agenda prevents us from becoming. Her goal stretches and further defines what she and Biden were charged with in 2020. He had to defeat Trump and return order after the tumultuous and incompetent presidential era. Harris has to bring together a whole new coalition and reintegrate portions of the electorate that include the “non-childless cat (white) ladies” who voted with their husbands in 2016 and 2020 against their interests, deliver us from religious extremists, and cool the political winds that divide us. Her coalition succeeds if it delivers a House and Senate that doesn’t just beat Trump, but that destroys the extreme movement that has taken over the Republican Party once and for all. This is a tall order, not quite one that Kamala Harris and Democrats had wished for, but a task we all now must accept and strive for. Anything less prolongs our national jeopardy.
Abe Lincoln once said. “I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.” He never did.
Kamala channels Lincoln at each of her rallies promising the nation, and especially its women, that we will never go back, back to days some Americans thought made us great because it kept us white, male-centered …and, weirdly, a lot like them.
Originally published at https://vincerizzo.substack.com.
