Georgia Rhythm - 2022 Edition

The 2022 midterms are finally over.  Last week, in the Georgia runoff, Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock won a full six-year term against Republican challenger Herschel Walker.  Warnock's victory gives the Democrats a solid majority (including Kyrsten Sinema, who just became an independent - more on that later)  that doesn't have to share committee seats equally with Republicans, doesn't need Republican permission for subpoena power, and doesn't have to rely on Kamala Harris casting a tie-breaking vote over and over.

It also gives the Republicans a valuable lesson in the fact that putting up a guy against a black Democratic candidate just because the GOP candidate is also black does not endear you to black voters, who were offended at the idea that they were expected to vote for Walker on the basis of his race while white Republican voters voted for him on the basis of his political affiliation.  

It makes since that Warnock, as pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, was elected primarily because people judged him on the standard a guy who had Warnock's job - Martin Luther King, Jr. - elevated . . . the content of one's character, not the color of one's skin.

It turns out that Herschel Walker had a bit of character himself, in that he conceded graciously and that he said he saw himself and his supporters as winners because they participated in the democratic process.  (Only an athlete could say that the most important thing about politics is not winning but taking part.)   Still, I don't know why Donald Trump recruited his old United States Football League pal to run for the Senate.  If Trump wanted to foil Warnock with a black opponent, couldn't he have found a black Republican in Georgia who at least looked - and sounded - the part of a U.S. Senator? 

Pay No Attention To The Quack Behind The Curtain

Is there a doctor in the house?

A real doctor?  

Okay, Mehmet Oz is a real doctor, but, given his embrace of pseudoscience and alternative medicines, it's a wonder he hasn't lost his license.  He also proved in his U.S. Senate campaign in Pennsylvania that he's as good a politician as he is a doctor, claiming that carbon isn't so bad when it's only four-one hundredths of a percent of the partleices in the air and finding no fault in extending the Second Amendment to not-so-well-regulated militias. His incompetence as a doctor and his incompetence as a public servant coincided when he suggested that hydroxychloroquine could cure COVID.

And, just to show how extreme he isn't ("I'm a moderate!"), he attended a rally just before the election with Donald Trump and failed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Douglas Mastriano, two guys not known for moderation.

CNN's Jake Tapper, who grew up in Philadelphia, said that knowing a thing or two about Pennsylvania politics, he could not imagine Democratic senatorial candidate John Fetterman being a viable contender.  He obviously knew absolutely nothing about Mehmet Oz. 

Striking Silver

Democrats clinched the Senate majority for the 118th Congress late last night with Democratic  U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto winning a second term and narrowly edging out Republican challenger Adam Laxalt.  Laxalt is the grandson of the late and revered U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt, who served in the same seat Senator Cortez Masto now holds (from 1975 to 1987), but he's hardly as august; he supports the rigged-election theory that Trump won the 2020 presidential election and he based his entire candidacy "the radical left, rich elites, woke corporations, academia and the media" were "taking over America."

Voters in the Silver State rejected Laxalt's raging paranoia, and Democrats struck Senate-majority gold.  

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee put a good chunk of its money in defending vulnerable seats like Cortez Masto's, limiting its  efforts at flipping Republican seats to just one - outgoing Senator Pat Toomey's seat in Pennsylvania (which Democrat John Fetterman won). By gambling on Nevada (see what I did there?), the DSCC was taking a grave chance, sacrificing potential pickups in states like Ohio, where Democrat Tim Ryan ran a great campaign but couldn't get the DSCC to give him a cent.  He lost to venture capitalist and memoirist  J.D.Vance, who campaigned on the same fear-based platform Laxalt had espoused.  If Cortez Masto had lost, Democratic control of the Senate would have been decided in the coming runoff in Georgia, and as that already happened in 2020, no one really wanted to go through that again.  

I'm still ticked off about what happened to Tim Ryan in Ohio, by the way, and I'll get to that later. 

Fetterman Does The Oz

John Fetterman bombed completely in his one and only debate with Dr. Mehmet Oz in the U.S. Senate election campaign in Pennsylvania.  Or so you might think after reading headlines like this one from the Associated Press:

Fetterman struggles in Senate debate against Oz after stroke

Or how about this one from the New York Times?

Fetterman’s Debate Showing Raises Democratic Anxieties in Senate Battle 

Here's one from Politico! 

Fetterman’s debate performance prompts Democratic handwringing 

And from NBC News . . .

Fetterman's debate performance has Democrats on edge in crucial Pennsylvania Senate race 

Really!

Listen, people . . . Democrats are worry-warts by nature.  You'd be, too, if your party kept losing one or both houses of Congress two years into the administration of a President of your party.  You'd certainly be nervous if the opposition party nominated a telegenic celebrity to run against your guy.  And you'd certainly wring your hands knowing your best issues are the issues voters care about the least.   

To play up Fetterman's struggles in Tuesday night is to suggest that no one knew that Fetterman was recovering from a stroke.  He made it clear that no one should expect him to do as well as Dr. Oz because of what he called "the elephant in the room" - not Oz's wife but the issue of his health, which Fetterman's doctor - unlike Oz, a practicing doctor - says is good and improving every day.   So they poor guy flubbed a bit on the fracking issues.  Big deal.

As for Oz, who owns nearly a dozen homes and none of them in Pennsylvania (a few of them are in Turkey), he showed about as much intelligence about abortion as he does toward diet supplements. He proposed that abortion rights should not be decided on by the federal government by "women, their doctors, and local political leaders" . . . as if local political leaders had anything resembling the medical expertise Oz allegedly has.

Oh yeah, if Fetterman is finished, why did he rake in half a million bucks after the debate?

Chill out, Dems, you should do just fine in Pennsylvania.

It's states like Nevada and Georgia, where Democrats actually hold those seats up for election as opposed to the open GOP-held seat in Pennsylvania, that you should worry about!

(P.S. I was only kidding about Oz's wife Lisa, I'm sure she's a lovely person.)

Peachy Keen

In a closely watched U.S, Senate campaign in Georgia, a state with two black Senate candidates form the two major parties, the Democratic incumbent is an articulate, well-spoken intellectual Baptist minister who pastors Martin Luther King, Jr.'s congregation and walks his faith like he talks it and his Republican opponent is an Heisman Trophy-winning idiot football player who played for Donald Trump's New Jersey Generals team in the United States Football League (created, according to Paul Slansky, under "the assumption that what America needs is more football") before going to the NFL and the Dallas Cowboys, fathered numerous children with different women with a sexual bravado that would embarrass Stephen Stills, cannot put a single sentence together, and supports pushing "bad air" to China to deal with global warming in America.  So you would think the Democrat would win going away, right?

Wrong.  Senator Raphael Warnock is so barely ahead of Republican Herschel Walker in the U.S. Senate election campaign that the margin is statistically insignificant.  How can that be?  Because this is Georgia, not New Jersey.  If the original United States Football League had succeeded, and Walker, a native Georgian, had made his home in New Jersey, and had run for Senate against Cory Booker - like Warnock, black, intentionally bald, well-spoken, and better dressed than Walker - it would be Booker by a mile.

Warnock has held his own against Walker on the campaign trail and in the debates, citing economic concerns and crime (unlike most Democratic candidates this year) against Walker's failed businesses and honorary law enforcement badge, but he's been slipping lately.  Left with no choice to take the low road, Warnock has released ads bashing Walker for his hypocrisy on being anti-abortion buy paying for one of his baby mamas to abort a child, a charge Walker denies despite the evidence against him.  And Walker supporters are sticking by him, despite the evidence against him - because the Republicans need to flip this Senate seat if they want the Senate majority they are now so tantalizingly close to. 

Warnock may actually be in a better position for November, because of the black vote in Fulton County, where Atlanta, the most populous city in Georgia, is, and because Georgia black voters in general don't want a nimrod like Walker discrediting, not uplifting, the race.  But thanks to a third-party candidate in the campaign, the election my go to a runoff if no candidate gets a majority. 

If Warnock loses, he can always go back to his day job as pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.  If Walker loses, well, maybe a future Republican President will give him a diplomatic post.  Maybe he'll make him ambassador to Georgia - but then what happens when Walker shows up in Atlanta instead of Tbilisi? 😄

O-H! I-O!

You have to hand it to U.S. Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio.  The Democratic lawmaker never gives up, even when the odds are against him and pundits and partisans are jeering him.  (Sound familiar?)  He ran against Nancy Pelosi for House Democratic leader in 2016 and became persona non grata with her and her chief deputies.  He ran for President in 2020 and never made it to the first caucus or primary.  Now's he's running for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, a state which Democrats haven't carried in a presidential election since 2012 and in which they've have only won two elections for statewide office since 2006 . . . and both were won by Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown.

Now Ryan is running to serve in the U.S. Senate alongside Brown and have Ohio's U.S. Senate delegation embody proletarian Democratic centrism just as Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, as Massachusetts's Senate delegation, embody elitist Democratic progressivism.  Ryan is running as a working man's candidate, advocating more manufacturing at home and incentives to keep jobs here while siding with labor unions on workers' rights.  He's railed against President Biden's student loan debt forgiveness plan for not acknowledging the struggle of lunch-pail workers who didn't go to college, and he's supported Donald Trump's tariffs.  What could possibly stand in Ryan's way?

The answer: J.D. Vance.

Vance, the author of the memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," is Ryan's Republican opponent an advocate of the forgotten working man who was left behind in the digital age. There's just one problem - though a native Ohioan, Vance has made a fortune as a venture capitalist in California's Silicon Valley, and he undoubtedly has lost whatever connection he had to midwestern proletarian culture that Ryan, who never left Ohio, still maintains.  Yet the polls show the race even.

Why?  Three reasons.  First, Vance, a man who once described Trump as a poisonous influence, sought and won his endorsement, which goes a long way with Trump supporters.  Second, Ohio is an increasingly Republican state, and even the least "woke" Democrat who understands the needs of the factory workers lucky enough to have jobs has trouble being taken seriously by voters simply because of his or her party affiliation.  Third, Ryan isn't getting any support from the national Democratic Party - which is focusing its attention on other Senate races - while Vance, after running such a lackluster campaign after winning the Republican Senate nomination,  is getting tons of money from the national  GOP.  Many pundits believe that, because Ryan won the Democratic Senate nomination with little effort and still has plenty of money, he doesn't need national Democratic support.  Others suggest that national Democrats see Ohio as a lost cause. I, however, suspect that national Democrats aren't supporting Ryan because, after trying to unseat Pelosi and distancing himself from Biden on student loan debts, Ryan's name is still mud in Washington.

Ryan still has a chance.  By all accounts, he's running a great campaign.  This election is one of many in the country that no poll can possibly predict.  If Vance wins, though, Ryan's political career is likely over.  He had to give up his House seat to run for the Senate, so there's no going back.  Having shot himself in the foot by challenging Pelosi's House leadership and having run a zombie presidential campaign, he must know that a loss in this Senate campaign would mean three strikes and out. 

One last thing: Some pundits have also suggested that the presence of Sherrod Brown in Senate hurts Ryan because Ohioans would prefer Vance to keep the Ohio U.S. Senate bipartisan after retiring Republican Senator Rob Portman leaves.  The best reason for vote for Ryan is this - Ohio doesn't need two senators who are going to cancel out each others votes.   

Not Going Forward

The Senate election in Wisconsin looked to be the one that would finally send incumbent Republican Ron Johnson packing.  Democratic Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes (below) was ahead in earlier polls.  Now it appears that he's falling behind.

It appears that Johnson has - successfully, alas - tied Barnes to the rise in crime mainly due to the fact that he once voiced skepticism about policing and the fact that - hey, why don't I come out and say it? - Barnes is black.  Not to mention the fact that Barnes was named after the most famous black political prisoner of the twenty-first century, which makes for a pretty good dog whistle for Johnson to use in Wisconsin, the whitest state in the Great Lakes region.

Meanwhile, Johnson is on record as saying that the January 6 rioters were not in fact violent insurrectionists but in fact rioters who simply got a littel out of control. But hey, they stayed within the velvet ropes in the Rotunda, right? 

I can't believe that Johnson could be on his way to a third term on the issue of fighting crime when he's perfectly comfortable with the crimes the January 6 insurrectionists committed at the Capitol!

I gotta check my passport again . . .