Sunday, July 17, 2022

MAYBE DEMOCRATS ARE THE NORMAL ONES

There's a Peggy Noonan column, written in 2004 just after George W. Bush defeated John Kerry, that I think about sometimes. In that column, Noonan wrote:
I think the people tended toward Mr. Bush because they saw him as a good American man, a man they know—an imperfect one with an imperfect past who turned his life around with grit and grace. That’s a very American story. It’s one we all know, and respect....

The American people arguably did not pick the more interesting man in the race. Mr. Kerry strikes me as a complicated and intelligent person, and the one time I spent any time with him he seemed to be bright, and to have an interesting range of thoughts on many issues. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, does not strike me as the most interesting man in the world. That’s one of the things I love about him. I sort of have a theory that Americans don’t necessarily desire terribly interesting men as presidents. “Interesting” tends to bring with it a whole bunch of other attributes—”complicated,” “hard to figure,” “unknowable,” “startling,” even sometimes “tortured and tragic.” A lot of us are Republicans, and we just hate tortured and tragic. Or rather we like it in our plays and novels and TV characters and even in our friends. But not in the guy with his finger on the button.

I think Mr. Bush, the better man in terms of character, was also the more normal man. And we like normal. He loves sports and business and politics, and speaks their language. Normal. His wife is important to him, and his kids seem a bit of a mystery to him, and perhaps even to some degree intimidating. Normal. He thinks if bad guys attack New York City and the Pentagon, we go after them and kill them—normal. He thinks marriage is between a man and a woman—normal....
Noonan goes on to list a few beliefs she ascribes to Bush that challenge separation of church and state, which she also portrays as "normal."

But what's "normal" changes -- right now in America, it's normal to be in favor of same-sex marriage. (In a Gallup poll published last month, support was 71%.) It's normal to oppose the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade (60% were opposed in a late-June Monmouth poll), and it's extraordinarily abnormal to support the abortion bans with no exceptions that many Republican officials are imposing in their states (only 11% support such bans in the same Monmouth poll). And so on.

And while the GOP propaganda machine might have done a geat job over the years persuading voters that Republicans are personally normal while Democrats are a bunch of neurotic weirdos, that effort broke down when Donald Trump came along. His cultists believe he's a normal guy who loves his family and has simple emotions, but anyone who's read a New York gossip column at any time since the 1980s, or been exposed to any national political news since 2015, knows that he's a bundle of mental disorders, primarily narcissism. His world is full of evil brooders and whackjobs -- Bannon, Giuliani, the My Pillow guy. To most of us, he's so "interesting" as to be exhausting. Joe Biden beat Trump in part because Biden is not "interesting."

And now we come to 2022, when we're learning that quite a few Democrats are outpolling Republicans, particularly in Senate races, and are also outraising Republicans, even though it's been widely assumed that 2022 would be an excellent year for the GOP. Candidates who are being outraised and/or are stuck in tight races include Herschel Walker in Georgia, Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona, and J.D. Vance in Ohio.

Maybe one reason is that Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman, Mark Kelly, and Tim Ryan seem more normal.

Herschel Walker has a history of domestic violence, has lied about his business career, and has failed to acknowledge three of his own children. He blames some of his difficulties on multiple personality disorder. He's the "interesting" candidate in the race, in Noonan's sense of the term. By contrast, Raphael Warnock's best-known TV ads featured him interacting with a beagle.



John Fetterman seems "interesting" or eccentric, in his shorts and hoodies -- but America is full of white guys (and some non-white guys) who dress like Fetterman and who are tattoed like him. His style doesn't say "elite," "effete," or "clever" -- it conveys the opposite. Mehmet Oz is the effete guy in the race -- he's held citizenship in two countries, he lives in a mansion (which is not in the state where he's running), and he's a famous TV doctor. Fetterman had a stroke this year, and he blames himself for ignoring signs of poor health, while crediting his wife for noticing his stroke symptoms -- a pattern a lot of middle-aged men in America can relate to. For middle-aged men, ignoring health problems and putting off seeing doctors is normal.

Blake Masters and J.D. Vance would seem to have pretty good normal-guy credentials -- Vance grew up with "hillbilly" relatives, and both served in the military. But both seem to have a weird servant-master relationship with a tech billionaire and would-be Bond villain named Peter Thiel. Both come off as humorless, brooding, Dostoevskian underground men who despise anyone who disagrees with them. If they don't like you, they call you a "psychopath" or a "sociopath."



Vance is running against Tim Ryan, who still comes off as the high school quarterback he used to be. Masters, if he wins the nomination, will be running against Mark Kelly, a normal-guy former astronaut whose wife, Gabby Giffords, was grievously wounded in a mass shooting. (What was it that Peggy Noonan said about the relatability of "grit and grace"?)

Was the GOP ever really the Normal Party? Maybe not, but it clearly isn't now. It may not matter -- all of these Republicans might win in the end. But if they do, it's because this is the year the weirdos won.
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