Georgia, Arizona and the still-dim prospects for the GOP recovering its sanity

 Raphael Warnock's Senate-seat victory over Hershel Walker has its roots in the Republican Party's indulgence of the Very Stable Genius's big-baby reality denial in late 2020 and early 2021. His allies urged rural Georgia voters to boycott the January 5 runoff election pitting Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue against Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Trump himself kept his drool-besotted cult followers agitated with his hour-long phone call to Brad Raffensperger ("The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry, and there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you've recalculated.")

Georgia had been a pretty reliably red state for some time. It still is, to a considerable degree. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger handily won re-election last month. And Warnock is an extreme leftist. But the state's voters wisely backed away from the Trumpist Kool-Aid. I don't envy their options at all. 

So the Senate is now 51-49. It didn't have to be this way, but it's what you get when Trump still looms so large in the national psyche. 

In Arizona, Kari Lake has taken that page out of the Trumpist playbook. She is still calling her defeat a sham even as all counties in the state have certified the election results. She looks poised to do what she can to burn down any vestige of political good will, just as the VSG is determined to do to the national Republican Party if it dares to veer even slightly from kowtowing to him. 

The party is definitely still less than hospitable to actual conservatives - you know, the ones who saw that embracing Trump and what he was unleashing from the summer of 2015 onward. Those who aren't nuts or sycophants never pass up a chance to show that they are cowards. 

I'm not impressed by this Forward Party, and my early enthusiasm for Principles First has atrophied a bit.

So I remain politically homeless. But I remain vexed by this question: How hard can it be to articulate the convincing message of real conservatism and keep the batshit nuttery out of it?

The obligatory post-election post

 No, I didn't vote.

You didn't think I was going to change my mind when the day arrived, did you? The choices before me were a little like those before Poland in late summer 1939: would you rather be occupied by Germany or the Soviet Union?

As I've mentioned before, a number of people in my own city had implored me to at least weigh in at the polling place on some local races, particularly for school board. And, indeed, those races, as was the case with school board races around the country, were ground zero for some key culture-war issues. And in our city, the not-with-my-kid's-noggin-you-don't folks lost to the progs. Not surprising. It's very much a flyover community: a manufacturing-based economy, high population of people whose families have been in the area since the nineteenth century, a tendency to vote Republican generally speaking. But it is also the world headquarters of a Fortune 200 company that is, as they all are, ate up with DEI and climate alarmism. Mainline Protestant churches, whose own congregations are bleeding membership to the point that one has closed its doors, have an outsized presence in civic affairs. So, count me dismayed but not surprised.

But let's broaden our scope to the national level. 

I'm not going to try to cover the angle so excellently dealt with this morning by John Podhoretz at the New York Post. I shall defer to him regarding the impact of the Very Stable Genius:

What Tuesday night’s results suggest is that Trump is perhaps the most profound vote-repellant in modern American history.

The surest way to lose in these midterms was to be a politician endorsed by Trump.

This is not hyperbole.

Except for deep red states where a Republican corpse would have beaten a Democrat, voters choosing in actually competitive races — who everyone expected would behave like midterm voters usually do and lean toward the out party — took one look at Trump’s hand-picked acolytes and gagged.

Okay, that handles that factor.

Why are the results still so messy two days out? Why hasn't the Arizona governor's race been decided yet? Why is a runoff for the Senate race in Georgia going to be necessary? Why was the Senate race in Wisconsin such a squeaker?

It's a reflection of our national disunity. The United States is a big, messy complex country that no longer has a common culture to bind it. Nothing rallies us around the flagpole anymore. 

DeSantis, of course, has proved himself to be the most successful Republican governor who has aspirations beyond his present position. He won handily. 

I would advise him to now focus on the more mundane victories he's racked up in Florida so far, such as property insurance reform. Yes, voters have indeed been on his side on the culture-war stuff, such as education, and even his dustup with Disney. But as he maneuvers onto the national stage, he's going to encounter the Left's vitriol big-time if he puts those issues front and center. 

Would I vote for him in 2024? That probably depends on how he handles himself over the next year-plus, both as Florida governor (he handled Hurricane Ian well and got right on this current storm as well) and as a presidential candidate, should he choose to be one. (Will he have what it takes to deal with what the VSG would certainly dish out?) If he comports himself well, I might be willing to overlook his endorsement of some of this cycle's losers.

Now, let's cross the border to the north and look at the state of Georgia. Georgia, it seems to me, reflects the national messiness I alluded to earlier. Brian Kemp has been a solid governor (albeit with a little of that gotta-be-on-my-party's-bandwagon mentality that I loathe). Brad Raffensperger has been likewise an exemplary secretary of state. He handled that hour-long-call with the VSG on January 2, 2021 superbly. But what is up with Marjorie Taylor Greene's district? There's clearly still a concentration of people in at least one place who didn't, to use Podhoretz's term, gag. But given the rest of the state's fairly level-headed voting behavior on Tuesday, I suppose it's to be expected that Warnock and Walker, both of whom are, shall we say, unpalatable to all except the ate up on the Left and Right, would be neck and neck.

So the whole thing gives us a pretty accurate snapshot of post-America in the present moment.

I'm just glad the eternal record book shows I didn't contribute to either kind of damage to our beleaguered land. 

 

Until every last faint whiff is completely gone

 

Ryan, my man, you left yourself vulnerable to this. You're smart; you know that this was an avoidable mistake, but because you thought there was something to the wacko claims of the Arizona Republicans, you decided that overrode smart political strategy.

In other words, you can't escape the election-denier label.

Ryan has always, quite authentically, projected a straight-arrow, solidly-principled-guy image. He has a track record, even preceding winning his state-representative seat, as an impeccably conservative engaged citizen. I agree with him on pretty much all public-policy issues and cultural-issue positions. 

And there's no way I could ever vote for this Thomas guy. He is clearly all in on what it means to be a Democrat in 2022. 

But, Ryan, you have given him about the lowest-hanging fruit a political opponent could ask for.

And this once again reinforces my conviction that, until every last vestige, every faintly detectable trace of the stench of Trumpism, is removed from the Republican Party, I am not going anywhere near a voting booth.

Now, I realize that everybody from drool-besotted leg-humpers to sober, non-biased analysts of the "hard realities" of how politics works would tell me I'm being impossibly unrealistic, that I have to make my choices as an engaged citizen within the parameters of what's politically available. 

(By the way, allow me a moment of digression that is actually relevant here. This is a mirror reflection of what dismays me about Adam Kinzinger going to bat for Democratic candidates in races around the country. Their vision is the antithesis of what he's on record as standing for. It is all about wealth redistribution, identity politics militancy and climate alarmism. No matter what else is happening in the world, giving such people a boost most decidedly does not move the world in a direction that a conservative wants to see it move in.)

No, I want to sleep well at night. I want the eternal record book to show that I didn't participate in the derailing of the American experiment. 

I will find it interesting to see how Ryan deals with this line of attack, but not because I have any personal stake in the contest, but because, like all Republican capitulations to Trumpism, it will provide insights into basic human behavior and motivation.