Playing With Fire

Boy, did I call the U.S. Senate Republican primary in Pennsylvania or what?  The race between Mehmet Oz and David McCormick is still too close to call, and it may not be decided for days.  Kathy Barnette wasn't even much of a factor.  But as entertaining as all that is, I must divert your attention to something far more serious that came out of the Pennsylvania gubernatorial primary.

On the Republican side, State Senator Doug Mastriano won the nomination, while Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is the Democratic candidate.  Mastriano is a dangerous right-wing pro-Trump ideologue who was instrumental in bringing protesters to Washington on January 6, 2021 to demonstrate against the electoral vote count for the Presidency to help Trump stay in office.  He's also been subpoenaed by the January 6 House committee over his role in the demonstration.  The Shapiro campaign actually sent out flyers and ran TV ads to play up Mastriano because it figured that he was the easiest Republican gubernatorial candidate to defeat.

I can only draw one conclusion from this:  Democrats are incredibly stupid.  

Doesn't anyone remember how President Carter's 1980 re-election campaign wanted Ronald Reagan as the Republican opponent because the Carter campaign thought he was unelectable?  Didn't I bring up just recently that Hillary Clinton played up Donald Trump to ensure his nomination for President by the Republicans because she thought he'd be easy to defeat?  And, like Hillary with the Presidency, Shapiro was so formidable in his bid for governor of Pennsylvania that potential Democratic gubernatorial candidates decided not to run.  Unlike with Hillary, Shapiro had no opposition whatsoever.  His election to succeed term-limited, outgoing governor Tom Wolf is seen as - shhh!  - "inevitable."

Yeah, right.  Shapiro is playing a dangerous game.  Mastriano has a chance as long as Pennsylvania voters, like votes in other states, are dissatisfied with the way things are in the country, and polls show that they're not only dissatisfied, they're disgusted.  And they blame Democrats because they are the ones in power, including the leadership of Pennsylvania.  But if Mastriano wins the Pennsylvania governorship, he'll use the levers of power to ensure that Pennsylvania voters, if they vote for the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, will have their choice overturned by a Republican Secretary of State (secretaries of state serve at the pleasure of the governor in Pennsylvania, not elected by the people) and a Republican legislature (the GOP has been successful in keeping the Pennsylvania legislature under their control), who will send electoral votes for the 2024 Republican presidential candidate to Washington to be tallied on January 6, 2025. 

As Lawrence O'Donnell noted this past week, Pennsylvania was where American democracy was started, and now it could be the place where American democracy ends.