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By mid-morning Wednesday, a parody Twitter account in his name had amassed more than 100,000 followers, including, but not limited to, the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the former New York’s chief book critic. Times, some political operatives and a “crazy cook” from Turlock, California.
For one night and early morning, as this dark and fatal election season draws to a difficult conclusion amid a pandemic, they were united in their desire to read bug puns on Twitter. The debate itself, the discussion of which was quickly erased by the news about the upcoming one, was mostly memorable for its discussion of the coronavirus and Pence’s description of an alternative and far more engaging history of the Trump administration’s response. That followed, in the lead up to a couple of days of drama over Pence’s camp’s reluctance to seat their candidate next to an ornamental Plexiglass barrier, from a scientific perspective.
It was not the first time that the theater of politics had been interrupted by the absurd. Nor was it the first time that the bright light of a debate, theoretically, if not practically designed to address the existential problems of the day, was overshadowed by something strange or sinister. Usually, however, he is one of the candidates that lights the little fire that crackles for longer, much longer than it should.
Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign quickly struck with puns and he started selling a “Truth Over Flies” fly swatter for $ 10 on his website. But be careful, “Orders ship in 14 days”, or around 13, in the long run, from the moment this episode opens through the window of collective cultural memory.
The modern era of late night debate memes has generally had some kind of underlying metaphorical meaning. In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, now a junior senator from Utah, boasted of the “folders full of women” he used while serving as governor in Massachusetts. Romney later described the wording as “inelegant,” but defended his efforts to create a more diverse workplace.
Viral Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, one of which quickly amassed 300,000 followers, that sprang up from his comment, have mostly been abandoned. @Bindersofwomen is currently one of the few who tweets, but only to about 1,200 loyalists. (Or, more likely, about that number of zombie followers who haven’t selected their feeds in eight years.)
The folders, it turned out, were real, as the Boston Globe reported in 2017, just under five years after their star change. There were two of them, three rings each, weighing 15 pounds, 6 ounces.
For his part, former President Barack Obama could consider himself lucky that 2020 social media was still mostly stardust in 2008. In a debate with Hillary Clinton during that year’s salty primary campaign, a moderator asked Clinton what would tell New Hampshire voters about their “sympathy problem.”
“Well, that hurts my feelings,” Clinton said. “But I’ll try to continue.”
After she described Obama as “very nice”, the future president chimed in: “You are nice enough, Hillary.”
“I appreciate it,” she replied, smiling, somehow, despite everything. The episode raised some eyebrows and made headlines, but it didn’t elicit the kind of popular reaction it might have even a few years later.
Other oddities, missteps, and late-night debating trivia have survived much longer.
The late former President George HW Bush’s decision to take a look at his wristwatch as a voter began to wonder how “the national debt affected” his life was caught on camera in 1992 and framed as evidence of the incumbent’s disconnect with the common Americans.
And then there was the sweaty, waxy face of Richard Nixon, who, as we are reminded every four years, shaped public opinion around the 1960 campaign, and not in its favor. The juxtaposition with a bronzed John F. Kennedy, poised to lead America to a New Frontier, was reportedly a watershed moment in that year’s election.
Political talents lesser than Nixon, who lost to Kennedy by a chip before winning twice, in 1968 and 1972, have seen what could have been a slight digression or stumble take on a life of its own. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential candidacy never fully recovered from an inconvenient moment of oblivion on a Republican primary debate stage. Describing how he had cut federal spending, Perry informed voters that he would like to fire three large government agencies.
The Departments of Commerce and Education were two of them. The third, however, eluded him. “Whoops,” he said, surrendering to the memory lapse as his rivals watched. It was the Department of Energy, the same agency Perry would lead for more than two years as a member of the Trump administration’s first round of chiefs of staff.
Not all self-generated signature debating moments are rejected or regretted by their authors. In 2012, after Obama made his way in a first round with Romney, then-Vice President Joe Biden came out pitching against his opposite number, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan. In a performance that The Guardian described as “high-energy … partly an angry debater at the bar, partly a condescending older guy, partly a comedic mime,” Biden dismissed a comment from Ryan by stating: “With the all due respect, that’s a lot of malarkey. ”
Malarkey, and his wish for it to disappear, has been a theme of this Biden campaign.
In December 2019, the campaign launched an eight-day “No Malarkey” bus tour through Iowa. And yes, there are buttons and magnets emblazoned with the expression for sale to match your fly swatter on the Biden 2020 website. .
But the longest-running debate night speech in recent memory came from then-candidate Trump during one of his run-ins with Hillary Clinton around this time in 2016. And appropriately, it was an interruption. As Clinton spoke about taxes and social security, and suggested that Trump would try to avoid the former at the expense of the latter, Trump leaned into his microphone and muttered, “What a disgusting woman.”
Clinton moved on, but an enduring meme was born, one littered with T-shirts and other branded items.
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