For months now, Democrats have decided the media’s narrative of the presidential contest to astounding success.
According to Grabien data, in September, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, and MSNBC referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “brat” 26 times and “joy” 523 times. Democratic running mate Tim Walz was deemed “folksy” 20 times and “moderate” 473 times.
And J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator tapped as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, was transformed from the most influential political memoirist since former President Barack Obama into a cat-hating theocrat whose fictional fornication with a couch carried so much clout among Too Online liberals that the Associated Press published an entire fact-check that memed the media creation into the mainstream. From the time Vance was chosen as the Republican vice presidential nominee until he faced off against Walz at their CBS debate, he had been called “weird” on the aforementioned five networks a whopping 1,350 times.
Then Vance, not the caricature, but the actual man, stared down Walz, not an actual man, but a caricature hired by the Harris campaign to make the vice president look competent in comparison, and reality hit.
Vance was empathetic and efficacious in explaining why the pro-life side, his own endorsed position, lost in the Ohio abortion referendum. He was disciplined and detailed in defending the Trump foreign policy doctrine of “effective deterrence,” “smart diplomacy,” and “peace through strength” in contrast to the chaos wrought by Harris and Joe Biden, who, you may recall, is technically still president, and Vance was gracious when Walz admitted he was out of his league, which he was. The one thing Vance, perhaps the first normal person to join a presidential ticket in a decade, was not? “Weird.”
Trump is a billionaire who was a creation of Hollywood and Manhattan a quarter-century before the Right claimed him as its own, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, after staying married to one accused rapist, was claimed by similar circles frequented by Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. Biden is the career politician who forayed half a century dependent on the taxpayer dollar into millions bankrolled by business deals to his brothers and sons from foreign adversaries, and Harris is a San Francisco scion of the crooked champagne socialists that rule California with an iron fist. She’s not unique in having Mayor Willie Brown as her political patron and sugar daddy — in that way she’s just like Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), whose own career was created by the Getty dynasty, and that makes them both weird. Walz, a pathological liar whose unsettling demeanor was exposed by Vance on the debate stage, is an actual weirdo who I would never want to have a beer with, and former Vice President Mike Pence, while very much nice enough and a paralleled patriot worthy of my respect, probably wouldn’t want to have a beer with me.
But Vance is not weird and he never has been. In fact, he’s so laudably ordinary that Hillbilly Elegy graduated from the memoir celebrated by Left Coast elites as their blueprint to understanding white, working-class Trump supporters to an Oscar-nominated biopic optioned by Netflix and directed by Ron Howard.
Medieval English had a term for the characters that are both ordinary in their starting circumstances that the audience can relate to them and extraordinary enough in their journeys that they become protagonists of their own stories. Vance is a 21st-century everyman, and in a town full of egomaniacs and actual weirdos who cavort with foreign assets, popular perverts, crooked cronyists, and, worst of all, sycophantic and shameless clout chasers and flatterers, the everyman seems much more exceptional than he should.
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Politicos across both sides of the aisle can have good faith gripes with Vance’s policy persuasions. His predilection toward protectionism indeed contrasts with the free marketeer’s rejection of mercantilism, and he has sided with the unions that conservatives have historically decried. He lauded Trump as a defender of the Affordable Care Act, which even the former president used to pretend he wanted to replace, and Walz was not wrong that the tariffs the Republican ticket proposed are indeed consumption taxes by another name. Indeed, on the issues, conservatives especially can find much to argue against in Vance’s zero-sum view of the economy.
But as a messenger, Vance succeeded in championing Trump’s candidacy with more precision and potency than the former president himself, and he did so with the sort of charisma and character that turned Hillbilly Elegy into a national phenomenon. Maybe if he had gone into Tuesday with higher expectations, the results wouldn’t have been so devastating for Democrats, but in successfully manipulating the media to lie that Vance was “weird” dozens of times a day, every single day, he was allowed to blow past public expectations, making Harris and her media hagiographers victims of their own success.