Who’s Normal Now?
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz used the potency of a single word to help propel himself onto last night’s Democratic-convention stage as Kamala Harris’s pick for vice-presidential nominee. Only a few weeks ago, in late July, he branded the Republican ticket as “weird,” and they have been reeling since. But weirdness is a negative quality, the opposite of which, of course, is normalcy, and that is exactly what the DNC tried to project on its third night.
The introduction of weird took one of the central subtexts of modern American politics and made it text. Ever since Richard Nixon declared himself the champion of the “silent majority” (the other side apparently being the noisy minority), the normal/weird divide has pretty much worked to Republicans’ benefit. When Democrats were labeled as latte-drinking or chardonnay-sipping, they were essentially being called weird. I’m not sure why such great beverages were slurred in the process, but for the GOP, characterizing opponents as out-of-touch coastal elites has been a winning strategy for a long time. Remember John Kerry windsurfing? Remember Barack Obama eating exactly seven “lightly salted” almonds every night? Weird.
If the flipping of this script began with Walz’s epithet, the convention is completing the turnover. In the lead-up to Walz’s nomination-acceptance speech, viewers heard Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg describing in great detail a typical dinner at his house, “when the dog is barking and the air fryer is beeping and the mac and cheese is boiling over and it feels like all the negotiating experience in the world is not enough to get our 3-year-old son and our 3-year-old daughter to just wash their hands and sit at the table.” Amy Klobuchar, one of Minnesota’s U.S. senators, told us about the chicken-Parmesan dinner her mother-in-law brought over to Tim and Gwen Walz’s house when their son was born. “That’s what we do in America,” she said. “We look out for our neighbors.” Even Bill Clinton, famously a former aficionado of McDonald’s, mentioned that Harris had spent more time there than he had—back when she was slinging burgers, probably the most normal job in America. The Latte Liberals have become the Casserole Liberals.
Then there was the orgy of normalcy around the VP nominee, a former high-school football coach whom Klobuchar lovingly called a “dad in plaid.” One of his former students introduced him this way: “Tim Walz is the kind of guy who you can count on to push you out of a snowbank. I know this because Tim Walz has pushed me out of a snowbank.” During the student’s speech, and to the sounds of a school marching band, the members of the state-championship-winning team that Walz once coached all walked onto the stage, now middle-aged men stuffed into their old jerseys. Even the sight of Gus Walz, Tim’s teenage son, weeping in the audience as his father spoke, mouthing the words That’s my dad, was like the ending of a feel-good sports movie that a family might sit around and watch on Thanksgiving.
Barack Obama set the tone for all this hominess in his address on Tuesday night when he spoke about his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, and his grandmother Madelyn Dunham, the Kansan who raised him. The two women came from very different backgrounds, but, he said, they “shared a basic outlook on life—strong, smart, resourceful women, full of common sense.” Talking about people such as them, he segued into a Norman Rockwell sketch that could easily be delivered by the grandfatherly actor Wilford Brimley:
Many of them toiled every day at jobs that were often too small for them, and willingly went without just to give their children something better. But they knew what was true and what mattered. Things like honesty and integrity, kindness and hard work. They weren’t impressed with braggarts or bullies, and they didn’t spend a lot of time obsessing about what they didn’t have. Instead, they found pleasure in simple things—a card game with friends, a good meal and laughter around the kitchen table, helping others and seeing their children do things and go places that they would have never imagined for themselves.
By associating Democrats with the qualities—hardiness, unpretentiousness, hopefulness—embodied in his speech by two women across a racial and geographic divide, Obama was laying a claim to normal. Harris’s parents, Walz’s parents—they possessed these qualities too, Obama said. The country’s extensive common ground is spoken for not by the Republicans, he was not so subtly telegraphing, but by the Democrats. What his countrymen “yearn” for, he said, is “a return to an America where we work together and look out for each other.” (Could Make America great again be too far behind?)
This was part of what Van Jones, speaking on CNN last night, called a “muscular patriotism” that he was witnessing at the convention and around the Harris-Walz ticket. He meant, I think, not just the flags and chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.,” which indeed felt more present than usual in a crowd of Democrats, and not just the efforts to reach out to Republicans—the country singers, the Texas sheriff who endorsed Harris wearing a ten-gallon hat. Rather, the audience could hear it in the speeches again and again: a focus on unifying values, an ethic of neighborliness.
I didn’t pick up that much that could be categorized as identity politics—you had to really strain to hear the language of progressivism, so dominant at the Democrats’ 2020 convention. Walz’s support of gay students during his years as a teacher was touted, but not the laws he passed making Minnesota a “trans refuge,” ensuring gender-affirming care for young people. In place of some of the progressive touchstones was something a lot more basic. “We are a country of people who work hard for the money. We wish our brothers and sisters well, and we pray for peace,” said Oprah Winfrey, the evening’s surprise celebrity speaker. “When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about someone’s race or religion, or who their partner is. We try our best to save them.”
Being a good neighbor—it doesn’t get more normal than that. Gwen Walz said the values she grew up with were “Love your country, help your neighbor, and fight for what’s right.” And in Walz’s speech—after walking out to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town”—he used the word neighbor eight times.
This is language that isn’t really interested in acknowledging the country’s cultural and political divides. It wants to look past them, to an idyll in which even different families and divergent politics are all part of an American picket-fence normal. (Introducing his blended family, Kamala Harris’s stepson, Cole Emhoff, said, “We might not look like other families in the White House, but we are ready to represent all families in America.”) Obama is a good salesman for this move, since bromides like hope were also the fuel that drove his own campaign—though if there were ever a lesson in how hard it is for Americans to just see themselves as neighbors, it was all the bitterness and acid that spewed after he was elected.
For the moment, normalcy seems to be an effective strategy, particularly for a presidential candidate who—with the notable exception of Obama—would look very different from all the presidents who came before her. To tell from the tear-stained faces of the crowd at the convention, it is also making people feel good.
And, maybe just as notably, it’s making Donald Trump feel bad. He now seems desperate to reclaim lost territory. “I think we’re extremely normal people," he told a crowd this week. “We’re like you. We’re exactly like you.”