By DEXTER DUGGAN
Political fortunes rise and fall hourly, daily and weekly. As The Wanderer reaches 150 years of publication, that’s a lot of time for politics to have been gyrating. Of course, they were spinning around long before then, too. Just read the Bible.
Except kings didn’t have to ask voters to elect them. But, once elected, some politicians appear to think they’ve become kings, accountable to no one else.
Still, there were some definitive angles to the result of the Alabama Republican run-off election for a U.S. Senate seat on September 26. This diagnosis should be good for a few days anyway, until the next occasion for yet another analysis.
Another person’s name was added to Democrat House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s as an object of derision for the elephant party. That would be the name of Republican Mitch McConnell, who strongly backed the Alabama race’s loser, the briefly incumbent GOP senator, Luther Strange.
Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s reputation tied around Strange’s neck was like taking an anvil for a canoe ride. Despite all the millions of campaign dollars directed to Strange by McConnell and establishment cronies like the Chamber of Commerce, Strange sank from sight, while the considerably lower-funded, conservative Roy Moore cruised to victory.
Would disgusted GOP voters have thrown up their hands in despair and say it was useless to oppose standpatters like McConnell? Just the opposite. Voters seemed madder than ever that such captains of America’s voyage kept running people’s hopes onto the rocks. On the lower decks there were rumbles against the fumblers pretending to navigate up on the bridge.
After seven years of GOP promises, McConnell repeatedly showed this year that he was utterly incapable of moving Obamacare repeal through his chamber, while defiant Republican “moderates” like Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) thumbed their noses at him.
It also seemed clear from the Alabama race that President Trump wasn’t the Svengali that some pundits previously suggested, a mesmerizing multibillionaire who only had to bark commands to make his followers swoon into submission.
Trump made it clear that he backed Strange, even though Moore was thought to be more faithful to Trump’s agenda. This raised questions. Had Trump taken bad advice? Had McConnell, who had been more of an impediment than help to Trump, somehow persuaded the president to throw his weight behind the corrupt swamp’s choice?
As the September 26 voting day approached, Trump expressed doubts about Strange’s possibility of winning. And, when Moore submerged Strange, some anti-Trumpers suggested that the president had been the bigger loser.
But many Trump fans had the attitude that they just administered a friendly rebuke to their White House hero. They still were on board with him. In fact, they considered a vote for Moore to be an endorsement of Trump’s policies.
They weren’t blindly following Trump. They chose him in 2016 as the presidential candidate who seemed to be best-positioned to advance their ambitious policy goals. However, they weren’t swooning teenagers who would dance to whatever tune their piper piped.
Like other media buzzards, The Washington Post — which vents its fury at Trump every day — dreamed that the Alabama loss weakened and isolated the president.
Maybe, instead, this was a little slap to remind the billionaire who his friends are, and that they’re not the leftist media and political folks who long to dump him hogtied into a ditch.
Trump had the good sense to congratulate the victorious Moore and pledge his backing for the December race against a Democrat to fill the Senate seat vacated when Jeff Sessions departed it early this year to become Trump’s attorney general.
Strange had been a placeholder in the vacancy, but couldn’t seal the deal for an extended run with voters.
Just being a photo at a news site doesn’t win voters’ undying devotion. Think back a few years. When Mitt Romney picked Cong. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) as his vice-presidential running mate in 2012, many conservatives were thrilled at what seemed to be a brainy young numbers-crunching pro-life conservative alongside Romney.
As many months passed since then, Ryan delivered disappointment after disappointment as House speaker, and doesn’t even seem to have the necessary smarts about successfully cutting off hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for baby butcher Planned Parenthood every year.
Trump’s blunt assaults against the corrupt D.C. swamp are what brought disaffected, disrespected voters to his corner. If he wants to go stale with them, he merely needs to become the next forelock-tugging Paul Ryan.
If anyone lost in the Alabama runoff besides Strange, it was his patron McConnell, who saw his power and money streams as majority leader go right down the drain. The same day of the Alabama vote, gulping “moderate” GOP Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) said he wouldn’t run for that seat again next year.
Official Washington was shocked all over again, just as it had been last November at Trump’s supposedly impossible presidential victory over putatively invincible establishment honey Hillary Clinton, the deeply corrupt, radically pro-abortion Democrat.
Once D.C. and its corrupt media enablers took a ton of tranquilizers in December, they figured they’d just hang on and destroy Trump anyway.
The future, of course, is uncertain. But the swamp might be starting to fear the future is as uncertain for the slimy alligators with their overconfident plans as it is for the mere citizenry who usually get chomped on. Might the mere citizenry actually get this swamp drained for a few decades — before natural human imperfection eventually brings on the next mess?
On September 27 the Washington Examiner posted that Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist who was among conservatives backing the winning Moore, warned the president “to heed the base that propelled him to victory in November.”
In a separate story posted September 27 at the Examiner, pundit Byron York, emphasizing a corruption cloud over Strange, said: “There is a lot of morning-after psychoanalysis going on about the voters’ attitudes. With both candidates pledging support for the president’s agenda, Alabama Republicans appeared to decide that Moore was the Trumpiest candidate in the race — even if Trump himself didn’t yet realize that.”
The Los Angeles Times posted a quotation on September 27 from Moore: “Washington is watching this very closely because it’s a prelude to the 2018 elections. There’s a lot of people in these states — out West and across the South and the midsection — they’re waiting to see if someone can take on the Washington establishment. For better or worse, I’ve taken on the Washington establishment — or they’ve taken me on.”
Meanwhile, conservatives saw the collapse of yet another Senate attempt to repeal Obamacare, with McCain once again a key player to torpedo efforts. Repudiating his previous campaign promises to help lead the assault against Obamacare, McCain switched over to insisting on bipartisanship.
Bipartisanship with Democrats who don’t care how many ordinary people have been crushed under mandate-heavy Obamacare’s ballooning deductibles and premiums? Bipartisanship with the party whose president rammed his government-medicine bill through with lies, threats, bribes, and payoffs while freezing out the GOP?
Gentlemanly cooperation with street fighters determined that Obamacare never be repealed?
It was deeply sad news that McCain on September 24 said his doctors gave him a “very poor prognosis” in his fight against brain cancer. It was as sad as all those years McCain wasted as leftists’ favorite “maverick” bucking against conservatives.
Phoenix GOP activist Rob Haney, a longtime foe of McCain, told The Wanderer on September 25 that he stands by his previously expressed view that nothing significant in Trump’s agenda will pass legislatively because of opposition by Democrats and RINOs like McCain.
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