Are We Witnessing The Collapse of The GOP?
Are We Witnessing The Collapse of The GOP?
No good options going forward...
Daniel Cameron, dimming political star with Donald Trump, currently facing 91 counts.
It’s hard to overstate how much Tuesday’s election was a resounding defeat for the Republican Party all over the country.
In Kentucky Leonard Leo’s and Senator Mitch McConnell’s candidate — Daniel Cameron — was crushed by Governor Andy Beshear who cruised to re-election in deeply red Kentucky.
I met Daniel Cameron in South Carolina at a Republican Attorney General Association meeting. I found him deeply unimpressive but I could see why boomers tended to like him. Cameron made them feel less racist. Leonard Leo could trot out Cameron as one of the good ones while McConnell could continue to pretend that McConnell was a champion of civil rights — “why I have a black protégé!” — despite doing everything he could to create a federal judiciary that curtailed them.
This stuff doesn’t work anymore. Leo will almost certainly be subpoenaed by the U.S. Senate in the coming days. It won’t get much better for him from there.
There’s a pretty good documentary from Frontline about Senator McConnell and his legacy. It doesn’t really go there on McConnell’s ties to China through his corrupt wife Elaine Chao but then Frontline never is quite on the front lines of these sorts of things. We are.
What makes this Kentucky election so interesting is that should McConnell step down now his replacement will almost certainly be a Democrat. That eventuality seems almost certain now that McConnell has glitched out a few times on camera. Not a good look! A smart Gaetz-like player in the Senate could challenge McConnell for the leadership but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
In Virginia Glenn Youngkin has been revealed to be nothing more than an empty sweater vest. His party failed to win the Senate and even lost the House. So much for the Glenn Youngkin presidency.
There’s no there there but maybe there was never any there there when we looked at Youngkin’s career in private equity. The Chinese cash brought him to the dance but he sure doesn’t know the tune. He’s just not very good at this.
The obvious beneficiary of Youngkin’s collapse is Chris Christie who will almost certainly be the nominee if Trump is indicted. I don’t make the rules but it’s hard to see how anyone else rising to the occasion. Are we really going to nominate a slut like Nikki Haley whose business experience is running a lingerie shop? Really?
Meanwhile, in Ohio, abortion won decisively. The best the pro-life camp can hope for is banning it in the second and third trimester but it looks like social conservatism is dead. I suspect we will see our politics move from pro-life to pro-child and that’ll mean taking care of child welfare. Why aren’t we sequencing all the kids in foster care again?
President Biden has the Republican Party exactly where he wants them going into the 2024 election. It’s hard to imagine a better position for him.
Sure, the polls have him down in a hypothetical match up with Trump but if you look closely at the cross tabs it’s all the liberals dissatisfied with Biden's moves on Israel. (For what it’s worth I’m reserving judgment but Biden must understand it’s either him or Netanyahu.)
By voting to censure Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib the party established itself as a pro-Israel party—and nothing else. Good luck appealing to immigrants when you beat up on a first generation congresswoman for your pro-Israel donors. I agree with Peter Beinart: Tlaib reveals how little the Democratic Party really believes its own rhetoric. She’s inconvenient and twenty-two other Democrats voted to censure her.
As the Chisraeli cash dries up there’s no way forward for the GOP. Were I Biden I’d want the logjam to continue. The longer it takes for Bibi to get his cash, the better it is for Biden and the worst for Bibi’s assets. You’ll start to see his assets in venture capital fall in the coming months and I’ll increasingly be vindicated that most of them are simply foreign intelligence fronts. Whether this’ll make the official conversation I can’t say but it’ll still be true.
There’s only a handful of things the GOP could do now to stem the losses and it’ll do precisely none of them.