Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, multiple outlets have reported, entered the Kamala Harris veepstakes because of one word: “weird.”
You’ve probably heard the Harris campaign use it a lot lately, usually to talk about normal Americans who happen to be Republican. Specifically, they like using it on former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Because the man is productive and has a large family, he’s an oddball. Normal is strange, strange is normal. This is the Democratic Party of 2024.
Walz, speaking to cable news last month, went viral for saying this about the Republicans: “These guys are just weird,” per The New York Times. That one sentence, which was shared by many liberals on social media, became the Harris campaign’s mantra in the past few weeks.
On Tuesday, Walz was named as Harris’ running mate. He went on to prove how weird the other side of the aisle was by … dwelling on a fake rumor that Vance once made love to a couch and using his first speech as the man running for second-in-command by making a sick joke about it.
So, first off, a bit of background for those of you who may have missed this during Walz’s speech on Tuesday due to a lack of context: In mid-July, a Twitter user named @rickrudescalves made an untoward viral joke involving Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and a fake incident where Vance reportedly used a “latex glove shoved between two couch cushions” for, ahem, inappropriate activities. (One tries to be as euphemistic as possible with these things; hopefully, you will infer where this went from here.)
The claim got even more traction as fact-checking institutions gave it air by pointing out that, no, Vance had written about no such thing in the book, a fact that should have been apparent by the fact that he passed a vetting process for running mate that one assumes included Donald Trump’s people reading his book.
Roughly two and a half hours into the official introduction of Walz at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, things had certainly gotten odd, but not “weird,” per se. More like this kind of bizarreness:
Walz is incredibly weird. Look at his expressions. pic.twitter.com/UGIDHGJGC8
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 6, 2024
Will Walz publicly apologize for spreading a disgusting lie about his opponent?
I mean, that doesn’t look like a reaction within the normal range of human emotion, but most of us also don’t get named as a running mate for the nominee of one of the two major political parties in the United States every day, so there’s also that. I would have been willing to spot Gov. Walz this behavior.
If only it had been constrained there, alas.
“J.D. Vance literally, literally wrote the forward for the architect of the Project 2025 agenda,” he said, bringing back that tired old horse.
Then, he went onto sarcasm: “Like all regular people I grew up with in the Heartland, J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a best-seller trashing that community. … That’s not what Middle America is.”
Then, the cringe: “I gotta tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Just so he made sure you got the message: “Did you see what I did there?”
Kamala’s face was twisted into a smile so forced I almost felt bad for her. Almost:
The world is falling apart at the seams economically, we have two wars going on, our current president is basically a speaking vegetable, one of our biggest allies is currently consumed with race/religious riots, and our current vice president picked, as her potential veep, a guy who’s making disgusting jokes in front of a national audience about what the other party’s veep candidate does to couches, which was invented by someone on social media.
This is fine. Nothing weird about this. You know what is weird? J.D. Vance! Hoo boy, is that guy ever weird, what with his family and starting a successful career from nothing and all that! But this guy, totes normal. Vote Harris-Walz.
There wasn’t a whole lot of overnight polling done, but I’m not quite sure that the dirty uncle vibes Walz was giving off were quite what America was looking for as Harris rolled out her pick for veep:
This is a bad sign, guys. https://t.co/Qmf3pkEm85
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) August 6, 2024
As a retired political communications person, let me note that no one who is not terminally online will understand this reference and if you have to explain it to the Elderly Democrats Club you need to GOTV, they’re gonna get the vapors https://t.co/Y4rHNZ8Uve
— Emily Zanotti 🦝 (@emzanotti) August 6, 2024
I see we are extremely online and proud of it. https://t.co/WtsYIZ3ymg
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) August 6, 2024
Yes, he gets the jokes the kids make, gross though they may be. Respect, America!
Look, forget about the fact that this is exponentially more disgusting than anything any presidential or vice presidential candidate has said on the campaign trail in my lifetime. Let’s completely toss that fact out the window: How, exactly, are the Democrats going to sell this whole “Minnesota nice” and “Midwestern decency” line they seem to be taking with Walz if his very first appearance includes a joke where the punchline is, “My Republican counterpart once rutted with a piece of furniture”?
That’s not exactly the kind of stuff you “J/K, y’all! Take it easy!” at the next media briefing. And it’s definitely, decidedly, unabashedly “weird” in a way that the Republicans aren’t.
