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Lake’s Democratic opponent this year, Rep. Ruben Gallego, is a Marine Corps veteran of combat in Iraq but otherwise a standard-issue progressive who dismays conservatives regarding almost everything. Lake dismays Arizona conservatives who are political legatees of Arizona’s Sen. Barry Goldwater, whose 1964 presidential nomination prepared his party for Reaganism: limited government, military strength, collective security through sturdy alliances and a general inclination toward a sunny Sun Belt libertarianism — everything the Trump-saturated GOP rejects.
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In Ohio, three-term Democratic Senate incumbent Sherrod Brown is a progressive reliably wrong — and indistinguishable from Trump — regarding many matters. These include ignoring the unsustainable trajectories of Social Security and Medicare. And embracing the nonsensical notion that national security will be jeopardized if a superior steel company (Nippon) from an allied nation (Japan) buys U.S. Steel, which has a market capitalization about equal to the Skechers shoe company and fewer employees than BJ’s Wholesale Club. Brown is, however, a progressive more concerned about practicalities (e.g., jobs) than pronoun protocols.
His Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, once called Trump a “maniac” and a “lunatic” akin to “a car accident that makes you sick.” He scoffed at Trump’s claims of election fraud and called the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters “morons” and “criminals.” But Trump, like a marsupial, has tucked Moreno into his pouch, and the amazingly malleable Moreno calls (as does Lake) the Jan. 6 defendants “political prisoners” and says the 2020 election was “stolen,” Joe Biden should be impeached and Trump is swell.
Moreno, who projects the Trumpkins’ chest-thumping faux toughness, disdains bipartisanship. Evidently, he plans to advance his agenda with 60 Republican votes. There have not been 60 Republican senators since 1910.
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Granted, if elected senators, Lake and Moreno would be votes against ending the Senate filibuster, a Democratic aspiration that would unleash even more statism than Trumpian “national conservatives” favor. And Lake and Moreno would be obedient votes for sound judges. Both would, however, impede a larger, longer-term conservative objective.
The nation no longer has a reliably conservative party of sound ideas and good manners. If conservatism is again to be ascendant in their party, Republicans must stop electing the likes of Lake and Moreno. They would join other chips-off-the-orange-block in a Senate caucus increasingly characterized by members who have anti-conservative agendas, from industrial policy (government allocation of capital, which is socialism) to isolationism. And whose unconservative temperaments celebrate coarseness as an indicator of political authenticity and treat performative poses as substitutes for governance.
Gallego and Brown are mistaken about much, but they are not repulsive. Conservatives can refute them and, by persuading electoral majorities, repeal or modify progressive mischief. The new breed of anti-conservative Republicans think persuasion, and the patience of politics, is for “squishes,” a favorite epithet of proudly loutish Trumpkins, who, like Lake and Moreno, seem to think the lungs are the location of wisdom.
The current version of Moreno says: About my talk regarding the maniac, lunatic, sickening-car-accident Trump? Oh, never mind. Moreno and Lake are useful, if only as indexes of today’s political squalor. Neither, however, should be a senator.
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PHOENIX — From Herbert Hoover’s “a chicken for every pot” (1928) to Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” (1984), some campaign slogans have been humdingers. The slogan of Republican Kari Lake’s Senate campaign could be: “Oh, never mind.”
Here in Arizona and in Ohio, GOP Senate candidates force conservatives to choose between awful outcomes: the consequences of losing the Senate, or the disappearance of the conservative party.
Running for Arizona’s governorship in 2022, Lake practiced the kamikaze politics of subtraction. Today, she says she was joking when she told John McCain voters — they elected him to two House and six Senate terms — to “get the hell out” of a GOP event. McCain voters were not amused. She lost, then mimicked her hero, saying that her election was stolen. Courts disagreed.
Today, she seems intermittently aware that many Arizonans are weary of her high-decibel imitation of Donald Trump’s sour, self-absorbed, backward-looking, fact-free, sore-loser, endless grievance tour. So, she sometimes seems to say of her protracted harping on 2022: Oh, never mind.
A former local TV news whiz, Lake has the sheen of Limoges porcelain, and the manners of Al Capone. It was revealed in January that she secretly taped the state Republican chairman, then accused him of bribery because he suggested finding her a job pending her run another year. Seasoned Republicans here believe that the candidate she defeated in the 2022 gubernatorial primary would have easily won, and today school choice and other conservative achievements would not be endangered.
Lake’s Democratic opponent this year, Rep. Ruben Gallego, is a Marine Corps veteran of combat in Iraq but otherwise a standard-issue progressive who dismays conservatives regarding almost everything. Lake dismays Arizona conservatives who are political legatees of Arizona’s Sen. Barry Goldwater, whose 1964 presidential nomination prepared his party for Reaganism: limited government, military strength, collective security through sturdy alliances and a general inclination toward a sunny Sun Belt libertarianism — everything the Trump-saturated GOP rejects.
In Ohio, three-term Democratic Senate incumbent Sherrod Brown is a progressive reliably wrong — and indistinguishable from Trump — regarding many matters. These include ignoring the unsustainable trajectories of Social Security and Medicare. And embracing the nonsensical notion that national security will be jeopardized if a superior steel company (Nippon) from an allied nation (Japan) buys U.S. Steel, which has a market capitalization about equal to the Skechers shoe company and fewer employees than BJ’s Wholesale Club. Brown is, however, a progressive more concerned about practicalities (e.g., jobs) than pronoun protocols.
His Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, once called Trump a “maniac” and a “lunatic” akin to “a car accident that makes you sick.” He scoffed at Trump’s claims of election fraud and called the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters “morons” and “criminals.” But Trump, like a marsupial, has tucked Moreno into his pouch, and the amazingly malleable Moreno calls (as does Lake) the Jan. 6 defendants “political prisoners” and says the 2020 election was “stolen,” Joe Biden should be impeached and Trump is swell.
Moreno, who projects the Trumpkins’ chest-thumping faux toughness, disdains bipartisanship. Evidently, he plans to advance his agenda with 60 Republican votes. There have not been 60 Republican senators since 1910.
Granted, if elected senators, Lake and Moreno would be votes against ending the Senate filibuster, a Democratic aspiration that would unleash even more statism than Trumpian “national conservatives” favor. And Lake and Moreno would be obedient votes for sound judges. Both would, however, impede a larger, longer-term conservative objective.
The nation no longer has a reliably conservative party of sound ideas and good manners. If conservatism is again to be ascendant in their party, Republicans must stop electing the likes of Lake and Moreno. They would join other chips-off-the-orange-block in a Senate caucus increasingly characterized by members who have anti-conservative agendas, from industrial policy (government allocation of capital, which is socialism) to isolationism. And whose unconservative temperaments celebrate coarseness as an indicator of political authenticity and treat performative poses as substitutes for governance.
Gallego and Brown are mistaken about much, but they are not repulsive. Conservatives can refute them and, by persuading electoral majorities, repeal or modify progressive mischief. The new breed of anti-conservative Republicans think persuasion, and the patience of politics, is for “squishes,” a favorite epithet of proudly loutish Trumpkins, who, like Lake and Moreno, seem to think the lungs are the location of wisdom.
The current version of Moreno says: About my talk regarding the maniac, lunatic, sickening-car-accident Trump? Oh, never mind. Moreno and Lake are useful, if only as indexes of today’s political squalor. Neither, however, should be a senator.
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