By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — She went from being one of many to the one and only.
Just about every city has at least one if not three, four or more of them — the pairs of telegenic news anchors at desks who introduce reporters live in the field.
It’s most likely one man and one woman in the studio tossing the story to a journalist outdoors with some background like police cars or a crowd or an arena or a hospital.
After other work in television, Kari Lake was a news anchor here for more than two decades, one of the many poised announcers around the nation expected to be able to handle breaking events without being flustered.
She was good-looking, as they’re expected to be, but she was one of many.
Then she quit that job in early 2021, and in less than two years was being described in terms such as the most dangerous politician in America. Not only did she express strong conservative views, but she also understood from the inside out the media that would tackle her message.
Lake was a journalist no longer, but a critic of journalists she described as biased while she, as the unexpected Republican nominee for governor here, would challenge the framing of their questions while saying what she thought needed saying.
After her surprise early retirement from TV news, Lake expressed her disgust with what she saw as liberal bias. Then she said people started asking her to run for governor, so she announced her candidacy as June 2021 began.
Before long, Lake’s style and approach started attracting attention around the nation. She wasn’t one of those Republicans who said she had to wait for “consensus” and was perfectly happy to wait maybe 75 years for that to happen.
Lake campaigned as a conservative but never had held office to sponsor or sign conservative legislation.
The Wanderer asked another longtime major-market television journalist, California’s Barbara Simpson, for her opinion of Lake’s sincerity.
Simpson replied on October 25: “I have no doubt as to her ‘sincerity’ — whatever that means. She’s smart and determined to succeed. There’s no doubt that if she wins, that would give her the experience to run later for national office. That is a smart decision and she is smart.
“Arizona is an important state given the immigration problems this country faces,” Simpson said. “If she wins and can help solve some of those problems, it is a win-ticket for future successes. If that is what she wants. Time will tell.”
Other Republican candidates, ones who didn’t formerly run anchor desks, also were benefiting by getting their faces directly before the voters through live television instead of editors being able to cut and splice what people saw.
Widely viewed gubernatorial debates the night of October 25 were regarded as helping Republican campaigners — Lee Zeldin in New York, Mehmet Oz, MD, in Pennsylvania, and Tudor Dixon in Michigan.
Zeldin roasted Democrat incumbent Kathy Hochul for her lockstep with her party’s extremism. In one telling point, Zeldin said Hochul campaigns against gun violence (which is Dem code for wanting to take away law-abiding people’s firearms), but there are other equally damaging kinds of attacks that Hochul takes lightly in crime-ridden New York, like stabbings, beatings, and throwing people in front of subway trains.
In Pennsylvania, seriously impaired Democrat stroke victim John Fetterman struggling to express himself and outright lying about his fracking stand gave his GOP gubernational foe, Oz, a big boost to being declared the clear winner of their debate.
Michigan’s Republican Dixon reminded viewers of how incumbent Dem Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had damaged their state with lockdowns reputedly to fight the COVID disease.
Dixon also cited harm that Whitmer did to public schools.
Indeed, parents in many states were turning against Democrats because moms and dads viewed that political party and its allied teacher unions as prioritizing themselves instead of educationally suffering children.
On October 26, Washington Examiner commentary writer Kaylee McGhee White posted: “Fetterman will lose, and there’s a very good chance Whitmer and Hochul lose as well. They are out of touch, inept, and at a significant disadvantage thanks to President Joe Biden’s unpopularity. But if and when they lose, it will be no one’s fault but their own.”
Arizona’s Lake was one of a number of campaigning Republicans around the nation crying for reform, including Dixon in Michigan and Tiffany Smiley in Washington state — new names who wanted to take advantage of repellent Democratic Party radicalism while hoping that Dems’ reputation for election cheating wouldn’t deprive the GOP of deserved November victories.
Lake had a few added advantages, like her familiarity to TV audiences, meaning she wasn’t having to introduce herself to the public in the Grand Canyon State, and the fact that looking into the glare of lights and lenses daily was business as usual to her.
And when unpopular turncoat Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming told a Texas interviewer on September 24 that she would do everything she could to prevent Lake from being elected, even if this meant campaigning for Democrats, Cheney probably hurt herself while helping Lake.
The Personality Of A Chair
Another advantage for Lake was that her Democrat gubernatorial opponent, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, had made herself into a joke by repeatedly fleeing every opportunity to appear on the same debate stage with Lake.
The hectoring Hobbs — who tweeted in 2017 that President Donald Trump had a “neo-Nazi base” of supporters — has been described as having the personality of a chair and currently being the worst candidate in the U.S.
But, by being the secretary of state, who oversees election integrity, Hobbs is in a powerful position when she’s on the ballot versus Lake.
As a Democrat campaigner this year, the plain-featured Hobbs is typically a radical pro-abortionist, while Lake said she wants to save as many lives as possible from abortion and let mothers know there are options besides the abortion clinic.
A long Washington Post feature about Lake posted October 16 said it was easy to view Hobbs as the opposite of Lake. Lake speaks in crisp words and complete sentences, the feature said, but Hobbs can be difficult to comprehend.
Although Hobbs had been Democrat minority leader in the Arizona Senate, the Post said, she “struggles as a messenger on the trail. At the Arizona Capitol, reporters would often ask her to repeat her answers because sentences would trail off, making her meaning difficult to decipher, one reporter said.”
It was hard to think Hobbs helped herself this year by going absent repeatedly when she could have tried to appear as Lake’s equal by joining her on a debate stage. How did this coward, as Lake had called her, think she was fit to govern a state of about 7.3 million people, the sixth-largest state in area in the U.S.?
That left Lake on October 23 to chat by herself on TV with interviewer Mike Broomhead for what would have been a rescheduled Citizens Clean Elections Commission debate for governor.
The commission traditionally sponsors this Arizona gubernatorial face-off, but it recently canceled one with Lake when Hobbs failed to show up for it but deviously scheduled her own solitary interview with Arizona PBS.
The commission scheduled a new debate but Hobbs skipped that one, too, on October 23, so the elections commission proceeded to allow Lake all the airtime then.
Hobbs hardly was alone as a Democrat candidate hoping to avoid the public in potentially challenging venues and thereby either sit on a supposed lead in the polls or not speak embarrassing errors.
Lake’s interviewer Broomhead, a talk host at KTAR Radio (92.3 FM) here, soon after told his audience the morning of October 25 that Republican U.S. senatorial candidate Blake Masters would join him to talk in a few minutes.
Broomhead hastened to explain that he wasn’t being preferential by giving Masters airtime, but Masters’ Democratic foe, incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, wouldn’t consent to be a guest. Broomhead said Kelly repeatedly was invited to appear but he usually didn’t respond, and when he did, he declined.
Like other prominent Democrats around the nation, Kelly tried to minimize directly facing the other side, as he did by agreeing to just one debate with Masters, on October 6, a debate that Masters was regarded as winning.
The less that Kelly had to reveal he was in virtual lockstep with radical leftist Joe Biden, the better for his campaign.
On October 25 the conservative Project Veritas Action video enterprise released a video showing a paid Kelly staffer advising another woman to conceal Kelly’s positions from voters, including on the abortion issue
Just say “something stupid” about Kelly really being pro-life, the staffer says, even though, “Absolutely he is not pro-life.”
Here was one of the issues where Kelly tried to pose as a “moderate,” not one of those extremist Democrat guys.
As Democratic Party leaders and strategists increasingly dashed to the left under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, they seemed to think that shouting out their radical pro-abortion stand would be a winner.
Why they believed that bragging of dismembering, poisoning, or otherwise torturing helpless infants by the millions was good campaign strategy is an illustration of the sick thinking in their political fantasyland.
They wouldn’t have talked of slaughtering puppies or kittens this way. They wouldn’t even have bragged of taking a blowtorch to fields of bright flowers. But just say “abortion” and they expected the public to swoon with delight.
An MSNBC article posted October 24 said, “In political races around the country, Democrats have focused their advertising dollars on abortion. An Associated Press analysis of data from AdImpact, a nonpartisan research firm, estimated that by mid-September the party had sunk $124 million into ads referring to the issue.
“ ‘That’s more than twice as much money as the Democrats’ next top issue this year, “character,” and almost 20 times more than Democrats spent on abortion-related ads in the 2018 midterms,’ the AP reported,” the MSNBC article said.
However, permissive abortion wasn’t proving to be the Democrats’ magic bullet, or magic suction machine. Being strongly pro-abortion wasn’t even a priority with many “pro-choice” people who saw the nation collapsing on issue after issue under the intentional stubborn radicalism of pro-abortion Biden and his Dems.
The New York Post posted an opinion column on October 24 by Maud Maron, a woman proud of her “pro-choice” credentials but tired of Hochul harping on the issue as a tactic to deflect from her failures.
“So every time Hochul talks about abortion, it just reminds me that she is not talking about the most pressing issue in our state: rising crime,” Maron wrote. “Or how many New Yorkers are leaving our state to move to places with lower taxes and safer streets. Or the state’s devastating education results revealed in National Assessment of Educational Progress scores — some of the worst in the country.
“And she is definitely not telling us how she will make our city safer, more affordable, and a place people want to keep living in,” Maron wrote.
This is the last hardcopy issue of The Wanderer to go to press that is dated before the November 8 elections. Indications point to voters strongly rebuking the radicalism of Biden and his party.
Unless, as investigative journalist Mollie Hemingway among others has warned, the practiced party of fraud has some surprises awaiting us.
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