It’s not so bad that JD Vance is ‘weird’

For almost a fortnight, the Democrats have had only one word in their word cloud when it comes to JD Vance: ‘Weird.’

On Sunday, Vance finally responded to the charge, on CNN’s State of the Union, calling it: ‘fundamentally school yard bully stuff.’ ‘No, we’re not ’, Trump had told a rally in Montana, a couple of days earlier. ‘We’re very solid people.’

Yet on it goes. From dawn to dusk, the CNBC/USA Today/NPR message machine has been pumping out the same word in the mouths of different commentators. This is no accident. The ‘weird’ meme is supposed to have started with Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ VP pick, during an appearance on the TV breakfast show Morning Joe. 

Never mind the disastrous overall failure of the Democrats, their capacity to get everyone pumping out the same line – be it ‘Biden is in the form of his life’ or ‘Vance is weird’ – has never been better. 

In fact it’s too good: as with Theresa May in 2017, incanting ’strong and stable’ or Question Time audiences groaning as Keir Starmer winds up to the millionth ‘my dad was a toolmaker’, there is a point where even the most bovine voter wakes up to what is happening.