Those Weird Enough to Ignore History

This will be a weird election, but not in the sense of uniqueness. If anything, 2024 is a race to find out who can best ignore recent history and doom the rest of us to repeat the weirdest aspects of it.

Poll after poll resoundingly declares what Americans want. We want normal. That’s why Gov. Tim Walz latched onto calling President Trump and Sen. Vance “weird” even before he became their direct opponent.

The trouble is, neither Trump nor Harris are great candidates to usher us into a not-weird era. Primaries are not good at surfacing normal candidates, but primary voters’ oddities aside, the general populous doesn’t want weird.

The 2024 presidential election will be won by whoever appears the least weird. This should be obvious to both campaigns, but all indications are that neither campaign majors in obviousness.

Obvious is that having the teetering Sen. J.D. Vance go after his counterpart, Gov. Tim Walz, for his lesser, and inflated, military service is not a good idea. For most of us who have not served — including the top billed on both tickets — 24 years of National Guard duty isn’t bad.

True, Vance was a Marine. True, Walz did inflate his record inappropriately, as even CBS News reports. That should be talked about. But, not by the candidates themselves, if they’re wise.

“My military service was better than yours” isn’t the game an unpopular veep candidate will win the unweirdstakes with. Just ask John Kerry how swiftly that tact yielded results.

Likely, neither campaign remembers the then-senator-and-present-climate-czar’s imprudent attempt to paint himself the greater military hero than his foe, George W. Bush. Anyone weighing such a strategy, take note: we don’t speak of a “President Kerry.”

Two VP hopefuls arguing who was the hero-iest non-combatant will not age well. It’s weird.

Pshaw! Ancient history! We need to be unburdened by what has been!

Let’s focus on the present, then. In 2016, Trump did ride a wave of people’s desire for something different. Status quo Republicans had failed and the term-limited Change Candidate, President Obama, was now the new Democratic establishment.

In all, voters picked twelve consecutive years of outlier candidates between Obama and Trump. 2020 was the cutoff.

In a year of global turmoil, the election of Joe Biden signaled everyone’s collective yearning for a politician as ordinary as vanilla ice cream. Biden was the favorite of virtually no one, but he rose to the top of the primary and general election on being ho-hum “normal.”

President Biden’s “mandate” was not to be a Progressive Change Agent, but to be a reset to normalcy. Whether he could do that isn’t the point. Biden won on perception: he was a familiar “old guard” face. His campaign could have run in any of the last several decades (in fact, it did), he followed the rules of conduct in places like debates — he felt reassuringly ordinary.

Disappointed as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and her “Squad” may have been that the primary selected the generically geriatric, people went for the LWC: the least weird candidate.

Four years later, the tide of “weirdness” continues to recede. Biden’s reelection campaign did not collapse for the places he operated in the realm of the prosaic. Biden’s offering of the mundane is what led many to willful blindness to his progressing dementia. (Though those of us who have cared for loved ones afflicted by the same couldn’t avoid seeing it.)

Rewind his acuity four or eight years and he would have averaged his way into another term. Congressional races confirm the national thirst for the bland.

Repeatedly, anti-establishment, far-right candidates who managed to primary non-weird, albeit boring, GOP candidates have lost in the general election. The inevitable shift in power towards the opposition party in mid-term elections was blunted by the fact that people wanted normal and the opposition party raced to get weirder. Many of the Democrats who won were weird, just not as weird as their Republican opponents.

Whatever Walz wants to imply, weird is a bipartisan sport. Which is why the far-left, and frequently anti-semitic, group of Democrats known as the Squad has started losing at a similar rate to Trump-backed candidates. Given how Instagram-trendy and nationally visible these figures are, this is no fluke. In June, New York’s Rep. Jamaal Bowman fell in a primary race to a less weird Democrat. This week, another Squad member, Rep. Cori Bush, of my own St. Louis, was resoundingly defeated.

People want normal.

To the chagrin of pro-life folks like me, the country leans pro-choice. Nonetheless, Americans want it limited to early in pregnancy. Likewise, other social issues. For example, the population generally favors “LGBT rights,” but not the activist edge that refuses to acknowledge the validity of biologically female-only spaces in sports or restrooms.

The same could be written on everything from policy debates concerning gas versus electric cars to trade embargoes. On some things I may agree, others I may not. Likely, the same is true for you. What’s clear, though, is that the public lands somewhere that looks a lot calmer and less reactionary than what either party has been peddling as of late.

People don’t want a candidate constantly smitten with despots such as Vladimir Putin and Nicolás Maduro. People don’t want a candidate eager to support protests sympathetic to terrorists determined to kill Jews, either.

Yet, here we are — on social issues, on foreign policy, on the domestic economy — both campaigns have major areas where they are weird. And, dial into their personal styles, both presidential hopefuls are, well, very weird.

The two are unburdened by what had been anchors of moderation for them. Establishment Republicans who tilted Trump’s first term away from populism are now outcasts; an establishment president who tempered Harris during her tenure as veep is now off to pasture. Likewise, both have selected running mates who encourage the candidates’ weird impulses instead of moderating them.

Once the new nominee with a new running mate and an upcoming convention bump fades some for Harris, the race is going to be tight like most recent ones have been. And then the determining factor will be who can be the LWC.

What would LWC-leaning campaigns look like?

For Harris-Walz, it’d be a campaign that is more James Carville’s “It’s the economy stupid” and less Tim Walz’s recent “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” Less insisting everyone become social progressives like they are and more 1990’s Clintonian genuine big tent. More of Biden when Biden was Biden and less of Late-era Biden who has seemed an artificial construct architected by those far left of the president.

For Trump-Vance, we have seen what it would look like, albeit only for a moment. A Trump like he was for the few days immediately after the assassination attempt against him garnered attention from those who typically wrote him off. The Republican National Convention showed a surprisingly “ordinary” version of Trump’s GOP, largely inoffensive and familiar. The president’s actions since, such as questioning Harris’s biracial heritage or erratic on-again-off-again debate commitments do not serve that presentation.

Given the pressures of their own inclinations to enter the weirdiverse, an Olympic level of strength of will is required for either campaign to reach LWC status. In a race with only one medal, whoever manages that feat will win.