[soundslides width=”620″ height =”533″ id=”2694″]
The public showed up for a fight. They saw a fight.
It took 20 minutes for Biden’s smirk to get its own Twitter and less than 24 hours for people to forget that vice presidential debates are as meaningless to the electoral process as Rogaine is to Jimmy Stockdale, which probably isn’t even funny because it was a reference to vice presidential candidate James Stockdale and care about Vice Presidential candidates, or their debates.
Caricatures of celebrities, political or otherwise, have been around for centuries. But like many other forms of media, the process by which we produce, distribute, and consume them has been democratized and it is never been easier to form stereotypes about public figures, and then bolster them as valid social commentary. A kid with MS paint and Internet access can do the job of a cartoonist, editor, or social critic.
I’m talking, of course, about memes.
But one does not simply become a celebrity meme. The subject needs to do something, or have an existing reputation that results in easy-to-understand, inspired criticism. Think Charlie Sheen post-freakout.
If we look at the meme ability of our presidential candidates and our vice-presidential candidates, there is a huge disparity. Obama just isn’t meme-able. There are funny pictures here and there with witty captions, but nothing with the viral prowess to characterize him as anything but “the nice guy.”
And why isn’t Mitt Romney meme-able? He has the despicable rich guy persona, but even I have to admit drawing a blank on the specificities of his personal character. Both Romney and Obama don’t have enough outlying characteristics that might give their memes lasting power. And we can be fairly certain that both camps have teams of PR consultants tasked with keeping them out of any meme-able scenarios.
But Vice President Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan have quickly become some of the most meme-worthy players on the Internet. Look up their names on Reddit, Imgur, or Meme Generator, and at once be confronted by all the criticisms of these two candidates. Sites like Buzzfeed have even compiled lists of the most noteworthy ones.
With Biden, it’s his persona as a guffawing gaffe-generator who loves to hang with his friend the President. Popular memes show him asking the President his view on hot dogs, or making inappropriate jokes about David Axelrod, and yet all are depictions of the now almost 70-year old as being not the brightest crayon in the box. Let’s not forget he has been in the Senate since 1972 before becoming Vice President, was the former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and helped consolidate bipartisan deals because of the respect many Congressional Republicans have for him. Nah, let’s just focus on the times he dropped F-bombs on camera!
On the other hand, Paul Ryan’s recently popular memes are captioned with overly condescending and sexist comments. There is the now-famous Paul Ryan Gosling, which starts with “Hey Girl,” only to end with “I’m from the 1970s, but my views on your body are from the 1950s,” or “I’m only working out my upper body, with the hopes that it’ll trickle down.” When Romney announced Ryan as his running mate in August, and they were seen wearing almost identical checked shirts and saying things like “Gosh, isn’t this guy great,” the Internet community had a field day. Their bromance has become legendary (see the September 3 cover illustration of The New Yorker). Again, never mind his position as the go-to policy expert in the Republican Party. Let us all make fun of his love for P90x big brother Mitt.
This says something about our views of the vice presidential candidates. Maybe they are easier targets, while Romney and Obama just seem too presidential, and honestly, too boring. They may just be too carefully filtered in their actions to develop a persona with lasting power. (Although I can’t help but wonder how some of our Founding Fathers would have done on the meme-ability scale. Overly Honest Abe? Naturally Badass Teddy? Or OG George Washington?)
And so it is that this presidential race has stronger ties to the meme world as these sites become a new platform for the opinions of young voters. More of us get involved because of the ease in which we can create and spread simple, one-frame political satire. From many points of views, memes might actually have reached out to pockets of people previously uninterested in the electoral process. But in doing so, it has subjected these political figures to character oversimplification in a way not unlike modern reality television. How many New Jersey residents, fashion designers, pageant contestants, and truck drivers have been offended by the objectifying point of view that reality television presents? Memes draw attention to the most extreme traits of their subject, despite infrequency and hammer it home.
But people on the Internet, especially young people, have a tendency to diminish deeply complex political issues into black-and-white personality issues, such as “Romney is a corporate croney,” or “Obama seems like the kind of guy you could just shoot hoops with.” Memes are indicative of this changing political landscape into extreme polarization and divide. They offer a comical addition to the usually troubling election coverage, and are more or less a side effect of the emergence of the Internet and its tools during changing times. I can’t help but wonder if someday they will show up in a history textbook as an example of valid political commentary. Who knows, maybe we’ll all actually be able to remember who the losing Vice Presidential candidate was for once. Back in 2012, was it the man a couple fries short of being a happy meal, with his foot-in-his-mouthful-of-veneers, Vice President Incumbent Joe Biden, or was it the guy straight out of a Norman Rockwell bromance, the iron-pumping sexist with the Burj Khalifa of widow’s peaks, Rep. Paul Ryan? Only time will tell.