By DEXTER DUGGAN
After the highest-spending race for a single U.S. House seat ever, more than $50 million, what was to result from outspent Republican Karen Handel’s victory in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District contest?
The symbolism weighed ten tons. Democrats and their media allies were desperate to prove that President Trump is despised by a nation aching to rebuke him, including when voting to fill congressional seats.
The outcome weighed in for them at zero ounces. They failed. Bitterness and back-biting.
As for a practical, not emotional, result, stay tuned.
Early and strong Trump supporter Laura Ingraham told her national radio audience the morning after the June 20 victory, “I’m so happy I can barely see straight.” Handel won by about four points.
The previous morning the conservative Ingraham predicted Handel would win, but by two points, and didn’t exactly seem to be exuding confidence, perhaps because of the media barrage.
Meanwhile, conservative national radio host Mark Levin saw nothing to be excited about. Before a winner was declared on election day, Levin said Handel was just another Republican In Name Only. The following day, with Handel as the declared victor, Levin said she’ll just be absorbed into Speaker Paul Ryan’s disappointing ranks in the House, to vote how she’s told.
The powerful administrative state that keeps growing and regulating will continue on its path, said Levin, who’s not a Never Trumper but supports the president just when he thinks it’s called for. Which, however, can be pretty frequent as Trump continues to be battered daily by all the expected hostile left-wing power punchers.
Look, Levin said, the Republicans have controlled the House since the start of 2011, the Senate since the start of 2015, and now the White House, too, but what have they done?
Talkmeister Rush Limbaugh told his national radio audience on June 21 that with Handel’s victory, congressional Republicans “really have no excuse now” for delaying to push forward Trump’s agenda.
In the D.C. miasma, Republicans, worrying about Democrats and the media, lack the confidence that Trump’s supporters have about what needs to get done, Limbaugh said.
But how much longer can they dodge enacting his program when Republicans have won every special congressional election since Trump entered the White House, despite massive howling opposition by the dominant media and their political allies?
Rob Haney, a strong Trump supporter and retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, based in Phoenix, told The Wanderer on June 21 that he didn’t expect the president’s foes to end their attacks, despite the GOP Georgia victory.
“I do not expect the Democrats or Republicans In Name Only (RINOs) to let up with their attacks on Trump. The Communists, socialists, and Islamists have never abandoned their key objectives, and neither will the RINOs,” Haney said.
“Even though the Arizona Republican RINO senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, are among the lowest-rated politicians by the American people, they still launch their incessant attacks on Trump and his agenda.
“The RINOs are leftist ideologues opposed to a smaller, responsive, conservative government. They will deceive, but they will not change. They can only be defeated,” Haney said.
It would help to pass Trump’s program, of course, if conservatives felt assured about some details of a reform agenda. Conservative Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) chatted with talk host Levin on June 20 about the GOP health-care bill being prepared behind the Senate’s closed doors.
Cruz said he assiduously had been trying to influence what’s being written, but he wouldn’t rule out that he could vote against the legislation.
If voters see that the GOP can’t get its health-care job done, Cruz said, Democrat-majority rule of Congress could return.
The draft of the health bill was to be released June 22, the day this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press.
The symbol of the city of liberal San Francisco can serve as a useful guide to Republican political paralysis, or at least to conservatives being outflanked by the administrative state — bureaucrats and the judiciary — decade after decade.
Back in 1984, at the Republican National Convention to nominate Ronald Reagan to a second term as president, pro-Reagan Democrat intellectual Jeane Kirkpatrick denounced “San Francisco Democrats,” touching a nerve with voters across the nation who saw the City by the Bay as everything they wanted to avoid, except for the pretty scenery.
These days, who would care to argue that the nation has grown less like San Francisco since 1984? Or that judges, bureaucrats, and conniving liberal politicians have twisted the U.S. into being more like it — think the old Alcatraz penitentiary to restrict freedom — but minus the pretty scenery?
And what was a winning point in Handel’s just-concluded successful campaign against liberal Democrat Jon Ossoff? That despite his attempts to cast himself as a moderate, Ossoff’s true loyalties lay with San Francisco!
It already was a local issue that Ossoff didn’t even live within Georgia’s Sixth District. In a race where every vote might have been important, he and his live-in girlfriend didn’t care enough to be able to cast their own votes for him?
But, as Handel smoothly pointed out in a televised debate on Atlanta’s WSB-TV, Ossoff was burdened with even more of an issue by being tied philosophically to a location way off by the Pacific Ocean.
“Your values are nearly 3,000 miles away in San Francisco,” Handel told him, “and that’s why so many of your (financial) contributions have come from liberals in California, New York, and Massachusetts. It’s why you’re supported by Nancy Pelosi” — left-wing, pro-abortion Pelosi being a market-tested example of what conservatives consider drastically wrong in the U.S.
One campaign ad showed Democrat Pelosi removing an Ossoff mask that had covered her face. Another said, “Don’t let Jon Ossoff and Nancy Pelosi throw away our future.”
A different familiar face that also suffered a blow was that of Hillary Clinton, Limbaugh said — grown tedious by her excuses that despite her mountains of cash, she couldn’t attain her presidential aspirations because of anti-female bias.
Somehow that hadn’t prevented women from winning just about every other sort of electoral office across the nation — including Handel, outspent by Ossoff and distinctively at a disadvantage in media coverage. However, desperate Clintons are known to grab for whatever relief they can get their hands on.
On June 21 talk host Ingraham suggested that Handel could have had a bigger victory by tying herself more closely to Trump. When Handel mentioned Trump’s name at her victory rally, the Georgia crowd burst into cheers and started chanting “Trump! Trump!”
In the same WSB-TV debate with Ossoff, Handel calmly refuted his claim she was trying to deprive women of health care by defunding Planned Parenthood. No matter how often Ossoff said it, she said, the claim had been debunked over and over that PP does mammograms
LifeSiteNews.com reported that the Planned Parenthood Action Fund was the second-largest financial backer of Ossoff’s race, at nearly $750,000.
The pro-life news service recalled that Handel came to many pro-lifers’ attention after PP launched a strong campaign in 2012 to have funding restored by Susan G. Komen for the Cure after the breast-cancer organization concluded its grants weren’t effective.
Handel, a Komen executive, resigned then, LifeSiteNews said, and “documented the abortion lobby’s well-orchestrated public-relations blitz in Planned Bullyhood: The Truth Behind the Headlines about the Planned Parenthood Funding Battle with Susan G. Komen for the Cure.”
Will Dr. Tom Price’s successor in Congress, Handel, break the fever of Trump-hatred?
Price, a physician and congressman representing the affluent, well-educated Sixth District, started working behind a different desk when President Trump named the pro-life doctor as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, thereby initiating the Sixth District contest.
In Ossoff with his young-professor — although aloof — type of image, these media thought they had a delightful dream candidate to promote, certain to chase Handel into ignominy with a Trump lump stuck on her back. But the writers and editors still failed.
If even Ossoff couldn’t parade to victory with media cheerleaders, isn’t it about time for that propaganda profession to reform itself and try to recover its lost reputation for reliability? To stop its feverish anti-Trump sickness?
The same night, another open congressional seat was won by Republican Ralph Norman in South Carolina. It had been vacated when Republican Cong. Mick Mulvaney took the job of Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Out Of Touch, Inconsequential
Trump is only a human being, certain to make some real political errors that merit examination. But that’ll never happen as long as The Washington Post, New York Times, and kindred major print and electronic outlets are accurately regarded by the public as obsessively partisan hit men.
Will they insist on being so out of touch until they’re utterly inconsequential?
On June 17 the Axios political site posted speculation on whom new President Mike Pence might pick to fill his veep spot if only Trump can be driven from the White House.
Among the helpfully suggested names: To “return to normal,” Mitt Romney. To “help ease the nerves of an anxious nation,” John Boehner. To “calm the country,” Joe Biden or Michael Bloomberg. Or to “double down” with “Trumpism”? “The problem is it’s thin pickings.”
But not nearly as thin as the thinking of an elite media class still burning with resentment that it doesn’t get to call so many of the shots, and unable to grasp how badly such a power play would go down among voters who already turned to Trump in desperation to break these shackles.
As columnist Kurt Schlichter posted at Townhall on June 19: “Now, pulling off the soft coup is going to be harder than they think. The establishment has not thought this out. They sort of assume that if they squelch Trump then everything somehow just goes back to them being in unchallenged control. Wrong.”
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