On today’s show, Calvin and Alex analyze the rhetoric and politics of the 2024 presidential election in terms of a particularly significant job this cycle: the vice president, or veep! We begin by discussing Vice President Kamala Harris’s meteoric rise to the Democratic nomination following President Biden’s departure from the race, as well as Harris’s conspicuous similarities to HBO’s fictional Veep, Selena Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus). We then compare and contrast the aesthetics, rhetorical styles, and political stances of Harris’s vice presidential nominee and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Republican veep nominee and Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance.

Along the way, we discuss how the Democratic Party under Harris and Walz is embracing a rhetoric of normalcy vs. “weirdness” that is genuinely novel and effective as a strategy for delegitimizing GOP policy, and how this approach may help to expand the Democratic voting base in response to state-level crises over reproductive justice and public education. We theorize the Dems’ normalizing discourse as a way of forthrightly indexing liberal values and connecting to core American ideographs while also positioning themselves as outsiders fighting a noble cause against entrenched GOP power in state governments and the national judiciary. Nevertheless, we conclude on a cautionary note about the dangers of normalization rhetoric, particularly in a country with an ongoing legacy of structural racism and imperialist foreign policy – including the brutal and unresolved conflict in the Gaza Strip.

Textual Artifacts Analyzed

Harris-Meyer comparison text:

https://youtu.be/72vUngNA9RM?si=izGYEEFsBRjQrlXj

Walz artifacts:

https://www.msnbc.com/inside-with-jen-psaki/watch/-these-guys-are-weird-gov-walz-blasts-trump-vance-obsession-with-anti-freedom-agenda-215711813835

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ajzMgbGsY

Vance artifacts:

https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913476514279744

https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913478808342571

https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913483606901062

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/read-the-transcript-of-jd-vances-convention-speech.html

Vance RNC speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8TlBHRtrvM

Vance’s TED Talk, “America’s Forgotten Working Class”

Scholarly Works and Concepts Referenced

Kiossev, A. (2008). The oxymoron of normality. Eurozine http://www.eurozine. com/the-oxymoron-of-normality/

Pollak, C. (2021). Legitimation and Textual Evidence: How the Snowden Leaks Reshaped the ACLU’s Online Writing About NSA Surveillance. Written Communication, 38(3), 380-416.

van Dijk, T. A. (2000). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446217856

Kairos:

https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28358

Ethos:

https://www.reverbcast.com/podcasts/2024/6/28/e94-reblurb-ethos

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here