Veep: A Show Fit for This Political Moment
Kamala Harris isn't like Selina Meyer, Biden is.
Update: Joe Biden ended his candidacy on July 21, 2024. I commend his decision. In relinquishing the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Biden has proven himself more noble than Selina Meyer.
While this piece will remain available, I’d be remiss if I didn’t retract this damning comparison, and clarify that Selina Meyer’s amoral hunger for power and overwhelming incompetence is, and has always been, more representative of Trump’s abhorrent conduct.
Following a calamitous performance at the June 27th debate, President Biden (81) has been besieged by voices within his own party calling on him to exit the 2024 Presidential Campaign. As pressure on Biden continues to mount, all eyes have turned to Kamala Harris, the most viable alternative to lead the Democratic ticket.
As the first woman and P.O.C. to occupy the Vice President’s office, Harris has been compared to HBO’s fictional “Veep,” Selina Meyer, a comparison that Veep’s showrunner finds lamentable.
“Mandel is flattered by the ongoing resonance of the series, and often finds himself comparing real political double-talk to Selina. ‘But that goes for every candidate in the world, not only for women candidates,’ he says emphatically. ‘I understand that people all over the internet are dying to make the narrative somehow that Kamala is Selina. I personally choose not to accept it. It’s too simplistic, and I don’t think they’re doing it in a fun way. I think they’re doing it to try and somehow make her seem less than, and I don’t enjoy it.’ Or as he puts it later in our conversation, ‘Veep is ever so slightly getting weaponized against Kamala.’
- “Veep Showrunner Says Kamala Harris Isn’t Like Selina Meyer—but Mike Pence Sort Of Was” by Joy Press, published in Vanity Fair.
As a diehard fan of Veep, currently rewatching the show for a fifth time, I find it perfectly suited to this political moment.
Veep follows Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a presidential hopeful turned reluctant vice president, as she vies for relevance, influence, and proximity to power.
Broadly, Veep is a biting satire of our deeply dysfunctional political system, but it’s also a focused character study of Selina Meyer and the way power changes her. Throughout Veep’s seven seasons, Selina proves herself unfit to hold office time and time again. However, the embittered VP always has her eye on the prize: the presidency.
As Joy Press writes in Vanity Fair, “Over seven seasons of HBO’s acidic comedy, Meyer grew increasingly power-hungry and amoral, refusing to give up even as she repeatedly had the carpet pulled out from under her like a West Wing Charlie Brown.”
Selina’s hunger for power, bolstered by a delusional sense of entitlement to the presidency, does not remind me of Kamala Harris. Rather, Selina reminds me of Joe Biden: a presidential hopeful turned VP turned POTUS, whose egotistical delusion about his fitness to serve evokes the specter of Selina Meyer’s most profound flaws and most disastrous political instincts.
Selina Meyer for President
Of all the television shows about D.C. politics, Veep is widely considered to be the most accurate. Washington isn’t a place for soaring idealism à la The West Wing. The halls of Congress aren’t home to the machiavellian machinations of Macbethian proportions, as seen in House of Cards. Instead, D.C. is filled with self-serving political hacks bumbling through controversy, propelled by a mix of ambition and incompetence.
Beginning during the Obama Administration, Veep brilliantly lampoons political gasbags that flap their gums without saying anything at all. Despite always misleading the American people, there’s something endearing about Selina’s vapidity. It reflects a conception of politicians as aimless rather than actively malicious.
At the start of Armando Iannucci’s brilliant satire of American politics, Selina Meyer's unsuccessful presidential bid has landed her the “honor” of serving as Vice President. In a role with almost zero constitutional power, she is relegated to the margins by the administration she serves. She is saddled with intractable, unsexy political initiatives (e.g., combating obesity). She desperately craves proximity to power, perpetually waiting for a call from the President that will never come.
Excluded from the administration, she becomes preoccupied with establishing her own legacy. In the first season, she works to pass her “Clean Jobs Initiative.” In the pilot, her attempt to switch all utensils in the Capitol Hill cafeteria from plastic to cornstarch evokes the ire of the oil lobby. As Dark Money seeks to sink her legislation, Selina makes compromises that reveal a dearth of genuine conviction. She values nothing except her own ambition.
Early seasons suggest that Selina’s failures arise from her office’s dysfunction. However, it’s immediately apparent that Selina Meyer is not a very good person. Yes, her staffers are nincompoops, but that fact only obfuscates Selina’s personal failings. Selina doesn’t acknowledge that “the fire she has to put out” is entirely of her own making.
Earlier, regarding a staffer whose tweet pissed off the oil lobby, Selina publically stated, “Oh, boy. It seems with that cornstarch tweet, we were hoist by our own retard.” That is why Selina is in a meeting “apologizing to that fucktard,” the Chair of the American Association for Mental Health Charities.
Selina never takes responsibility for her actions. Instead, she passes the buck, as politicians are wont to do.
Selina and Biden are both out of touch and unfamiliar with the contemporary landscape of political media. Take, for example, the moment when (a comparatively functional) Joe Biden urged voters to visit a phone number at the end of a 2020 Democratic primary debate, saying, “Go to Joe 30330.” Or when Selina is caught glancing at her cell phone in a photo released by the White House, which quickly becomes a meme, which she cannot understand:
Selina’s befuddled response to becoming a meme exemplifies the frustrations of politicians tasked with using and/or regulating online platforms despite being unable to connect their phones to WiFi. How can you govern what you cannot grasp? Selina doesn’t care. Joe seems to think he’s got a firm grasp on everything.
Operating on the margins of power, Selina doesn’t treat people with much respect. During season one, Selina has a meltdown in the wake of a political failure. Her tantrum is hilarious, entirely unbecoming of her office, but brilliantly acted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who won five out of six consecutive Emmys for Best Actress in a Comedy Series). Beneath her histrionics, there is a note of genuine frustration. Her rage arises from her impotence.
As the show continues, Selina gets closer to the presidency. In the real world, the landscape of American politics became increasingly vitriolic. Trump ushered in a new era of political malice and brazen corruption, reflected in the progression of Selina Meyer’s character. The show shifts from a gleefully profane show about powerful idiots to a downright poisonous portrait of power-hungry monstrosity.
For example, consider the way that Selina speaks to a Congresswoman who poses a threat to Selina’s path to power. Selina begins by playing nice and attempting to woo the Colorado Congresswoman with special Vice Presidential M&Ms (but she doesn't have enough for the Congresswoman’s six children). Finally, the ladies level with each other, and a more powerful Selina sings a far more threatening tune:
In another incident, Selina discovers her ex-lover/political opponent is sleeping with his chief of staff. Amid the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, Selina urges the vulnerable staffer to speak out, telling her:
“Can't say I blame you. I mean, that Nutmeg State indefinable really turns my hydrant on. The only difference is that I was the most exciting conquest of his life, and you just had the motel room closest to the ice machine... Trust me, he will never see you as anything other than the T.G.I. Friday's hostess on Proactiv who lets him bend you over his desk while you close your eyes to avoid coming face-to-face with that framed photo of his family's trip to Aspen while he drowns your Little Mermaid back tat in a pool of jizz and admires his own reflection... I just hate to see smart women throw away their political careers on powerful men who only see them as the gash of least resistance."
My point is that power changes Selina, morphing her impotent rage into savage threats of retribution or blatant manipulation. The process is gradual, but the changes are stark and reflect a dire truth about human nature and its relationship to power.
Selina’s behavior renders her morally unfit to be president, and, in that regard, her particular brand of political malpractice more directly echoes Trump’s conduct. She’ll do anything to obtain power and everything to maintain it. She refuses to relinquish power for fear of, once again, becoming irrelevant.
This is where Biden begins to resemble Selina. I did not anticipate seeing Biden reflected in Veep’s portrait of a politician with a vice grip on political power, yet here we are.
Joe Biden, not Kamala Harris, deserves to be compared to Selina Meyer.
Biden for President, Again!
Concerns about Biden’s age and fitness for office were salient in the 2020 Democratic primary. It was one of the many reasons that he was never my chosen candidate.
Running for the presidency in 2020, Biden pitched himself “as a bridge, not as anything else,” to “an entire generation of leaders” that “are the future of this country.” So, once Biden secured the nomination, I supported him as a “steward of democracy” who, at age 78, would serve a single term before passing the torch.
Instead, Biden declared his intention to run for a second term, rendering the 2024 Democratic Presidential primaries non-competitive. Rather than elevating Harris as Vice President, Biden’s administration gave her an unenviable portfolio of intractable policy problems, effectively setting her up to fail. It’s a move borrowed directly from the Veep playbook of political sabotage.
I’m a policy wonk with a particular interest in the presidency. I find electoral politics fascinating, and I have watched every televised presidential debate in the C-SPAN archives, going back to Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960.
Generally speaking, debates aren’t the proper venue for detailed policy discussions; they are displays of political theater. Unfortunately, the June 27th debate was the most consequential display of political theater I have witnessed in my (admittedly short) life.
During the debate, the Democratic party’s octogenarian nominee offered his vision of America’s fiscal future:
BIDEN: [Trump] had the largest national debt of any president four-year period, number one.
Number two, he got $2 trillion tax cut, benefited the very wealthy.
What I’m going to do is fix the taxes.
For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period.
We’d be able to right – wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that – all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID – excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with.
Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.
JAKE TAPPER: Thank you, President Biden.
Inspiring stuff.
All joking aside, I broadly agree with Biden’s policy platform, but I’m deeply troubled by his inability to articulate his own policies semi-coherently.
As of publication, there are 113 days until the 2024 election. Democrats are in limbo as Biden, insistent on remaining in the race, attempts to prove he is cognitively capable of serving four more years in the most high-pressure job in America.
I want nothing more than to see Donald Trump, whom I view as an existential threat to our democracy, defeated in November. However, if Biden insists on remaining in the race, he will spend the remainder of the campaign fighting a losing battle.
As a Democrat, there is no way for Biden to assuage my concerns about his age. The fact is, President Biden, at 81, is an old man. While valuable, the wisdom that age bestows does not outweigh Biden’s cognitive liabilities, and the 51 million Americans who watched the 6/27 debate cannot unsee that fact.
This week, Biden sought to quell concerns with an unscripted press conference following a NATO summit. From the podium, he articulated vociferous support for international cooperation with our European allies.
Implicitly comparing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Biden made clear that appeasement is not a viable strategy for de-escalation. He effectively contrasted his administration’s policy with Trump’s hostility towards NATO and affinity for ruthless autocrats like Putin.
However, Biden’s command of foreign policy was significantly undermined when he referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” and assured reporters that “I wouldn't have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I didn't think she was not qualified to be vice president."
🚨BREAKING NEWS:🚨 Former President Trump is “fine” after a failed assassination attempt during a rally in Pennsylvania.
To the families of the deceased, I extend my deepest condolences.
To the former president, I offer my most feckless thoughts and prayers.
Biden’s gaffes aren’t going to stop. As I drafted this piece, I was sent news of an incident lifted directly from an episode of Veep.
At this point in the election, we, the voters, have no power in this process. Democratic voters have consistently expressed these concerns before and during Biden’s presidency, only to be met with accusations of ageism.
Old age doesn't render a person obsolete. It may, however, render them less suitable for certain tasks.
For example, I wouldn't ask an 81-year-old to help me move my couch. Pragmatism, not ageism, leads me to that conclusion.
Granted, moving a couch and being president aren’t the same. Being president is far more difficult.
Joe Biden will decide whether to remove himself from the ticket. Surrounded by staffers who kowtow to the office of the presidency, much like Selina Meyer, I doubt Biden will make the right choice.
The actions Biden and his administration have already taken to keep Joe in the Oval for four more years have led us to this exceptionally bleak moment. Biden’s insistence on serving four more years is an ill-fated gambit whose blatant political selfishness befits the Meyer administration.
We are careening towards electoral tragedy because of the hubris of an 81-year-old man who has somehow deluded himself into thinking he is best fit to serve as President. The flame of American democracy flickers, locked in the vice grip of wrinkled hands, and our country’s future feels as brittle as Biden’s bones.
Democratic party elites need to decide how intent they are on losing this election and, then, how exactly they want to go about doing so.
If you need me, I’ll be watching Veep because at least Selina Meyer makes me laugh, and if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.
If forced to choose between Trump and Biden, maybe I’ll cast a write-in vote for “Selina Meyer.” I don’t live in a swing state, so my vote doesn't really matter anyway.
All seven seasons of Veep are available to stream on Max.
Until next week, God save America, my fellow film freaks.