I just turned 56, and as a Gen Xer, I am old enough to remember when the vice presidency was a ceremonial job that included attending funerals for foreign dignitaries, sitting behind a president during the State of the Union address, attending ribbon cuttings, but mostly long stretches of doing nothing anyone noticed.
I miss those days.
This past week, Vice President JD Vance engaged with Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen on X, the latter writing about the price of burritos. Without realizing Thiessen was actually defending the administration, Vance cracked that anyone who had ever met Thiessen in person could tell he’d “never missed a burrito.”
The entire exchange had started with a Turning Point USA staffer relaying a college student’s complaint about a $20 burrito. Thiessen told the kid to cry him a river because the meal plan already covers cafeteria food. It ended with the second-highest-ranking official in the U.S. government making a fat joke. Vance’s comment likely came out of Thiessen’s criticism of Vance as it relates to the conflict with Iran.
A long time ago, John Adams, a onetime vice president, wrote to his wife Abigail: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” It is the sort of prose we expect from historical figures, said in private and not meant for engagement. The presidency, vice presidency, Congress, and the entire apparatus of American government exist so that the everyday person doesn’t have to spend their lives thinking about it. That only works if the people doing the job behave like adults while they do it.
A few days before the affordable burrito fight, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), at a hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who invoked the Fifth Amendment, spat, “Who the f*** do you think you are?” at Fauci.
Afterward, when a reporter followed up, Moreno explained that Fauci had pleaded the Fifth because “he’s a piece of s***.”
Whatever you think of Fauci, his diaries, or what he told the public during the COVID-19 pandemic versus what he said in private is not the issue here. It was a Senate hearing room, not a bar, and the man doing the talking was a senator, not some drunk who thinks everyone wants to hear what he has to say.
The worst part is, within the last 10 years, this became common, much to my chagrin. I am old enough to know what a bulletin board system is, in the old days before anyone used the word “internet.” I grew up without a smartphone, without social media, with zero expectations that a senator or a vice president would beclown themselves, purposely, to an audience of millions.
We all know politicians said crude things then as well, and in the past before that. If you want to indulge, visit Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library in Austin, Texas, and listen to the White House phone call recordings — he famously had one in the toilet. The difference is, at the time, those things were off the record. Or made in a car, to a staffer, or to a reporter they trusted not to print it. There was a version of a politician for public consumption and a version for everyone else.
And it was better that way.
This has nothing to do with some moral objection or anything like that. I curse all the time. So do most of the reporters and editors I know, and so does nearly every politician I’ve ever covered or spoken to at any length.
My complaint is the collapse of the distinction between the private and the performative. There is something culturally wrong when a vice president now has the same relationship to his phone that a 19-year-old college student has to his. Especially when the vice president is a retired Marine and Yale Law School graduate.
What’s worse is that it’s treated as proof of authenticity rather than a breakdown in restraint. Being crude on the record now reads to a certain kind of politician as proof he’s “real,” or “like us.” It reads to me more like the danger that has become of people using institutions as platforms instead of being shaped by the institution.
Make politicians boring again.