The Unbearable Obviousness of Being

In my home state of Ohio, the announcement of the newly minted Harris-Walz ticket approximately coincided with the commencement of yard sign season.

To be sure, a certain number of MAGA enthusiasts and Democratic diehards cheerfully (or not) turn their front lawns into year-round political advertisements, but, in my neck of the woods, some not entirely unappealing combination of Midwestern reticence and homeowner association rule compliance usually results in the first crop of signs coming towards the end of summer in an election year. 

In any case, by the time I first began seeing strong evidence of yard-based support of the Democratic ticket, the signs were in support of the replacement candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. It is hardly surprising that Democratic voters would not hang onto their Biden-Harris yard signs—antiques on par with the “Dewey Defeats Truman” Chicago Tribune—but I must admit that I wasn’t prepared for one particular Harris-Walz sign that I encountered during those heady post-Biden weeks.

One Saturday afternoon, while taking a stroll through an idyllic, strongly left-leaning college town in the otherwise deep red Buckeye State, I encountered a yard into which was planted a sign that I found genuinely troubling in its framework: Beneath the names “HARRIS” and “WALZ” was the word “obviously,” in smaller but still prominent lettering.

What bothered me about the sign was not its entirely predictable endorsement of Harris-Walz—entirely predictable, that is, in the context of a woke college town—but the invocation of the adverb “obviously” to explain or defend that endorsement.

Contemplating the sign from the sidewalk, I found myself asking: Among all the ways in which one could describe the Harris-Walz ticket, “obvious”—as in self-evident, clear-cut, or plain to see—was simply not one of them. After all, it wasn’t “obvious” that the vice president and the governor were the answers to the Democrats’ Trump problem earlier in the year, when the party actually held its primaries, such as they were. Back then, cooler heads reasonably judged it far from “obvious” that the practitioner of a failed 2020 presidential campaign (Harris) and a highly goofy far-left governor (Walz) would fare any better against Trump than Joe Biden. Why was the duo “obvious” now but not then? 

Of course, the “obviously” yard sign was less a reflection of its owners’ fealty to the Democratic standard-bearers than to the Democratic Party machine that had selected them—a faith akin to the expression of confidence in “the experts” that was popular among liberals during the pandemic. According to this logic, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and George Clooney were “obviously” to be trusted in their electoral judgments in the same way that Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Big Pharma were “obviously” to be respected during a public-health crisis.

I digress. 

Contemplating that Harris-Walz yard sign, I wondered whether there was any Democratic ticket that would not have been seen by the party’s faithful as “obviously” superior to Trump-Vance. Would not the same folks who regarded Harris-Walz as being the “obvious” choice have felt just the same way had the Democrats swapped out Biden-Harris for some equally random combination—say, Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom? Or Newsom and Gary Peters? How about the Taylor Swift-Billie Eilish ticket? Or perhaps an “all-doctors” ticket of Jill Biden and Anthony Fauci? This is a party of followers who will brand as “obviously” superior whichever candidate and whatever program their overlords prescribe.

Above all, to characterize a presidential ticket—any presidential ticket—as being “obviously” superior to another is a bald-faced expression of confidence, indeed, arrogance: a kind of thumbing of one’s nose (or waggling one’s yard sign) at the quaint notion that there is even a decision to be made in the election. This was a variant of the Biden-Harris-Walz argument that their side, no matter its nominal standard-bearers, stood for the democratic process itself. Arguments, debates, persuasion were rendered immaterial when the choice was so “obvious.”

Happily, perhaps even miraculously, this belief in the inherent logic and obviousness of the Democratic brand was turned down by somewhere around 76 million voters on Election Day. Those who voted for the Trump-Vance ticket exercised independence from the groupthink that laughably judged a Harris-Walz administration an inescapable fact of history—“the end of history,” one might even say. To vote for Trump-Vance was a way of saying: “Hold your horses—I do not find anything at all obvious about wokeism in the military, an uncontrolled immigration crisis, and men in women’s sports.”

I begrudged no one their right to express their support for Harris-Walz in the form of signage alongside their begonias, but the idea that their preference was “obvious” was an insult to common sense.

Instead of the allegedly “obvious,” voters in the last election opted for the wild, the unpredictable, the productively disruptive, the entirely non-obvious. Anyone who doubts that this was the intention and the consequence of the American public need look no further than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

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