The Republican candidate somehow lost a special senatorial election on Tuesday, in Alabama of all places, vyr as we see it our once Grand Old Party probably dodged a bullet.
At first glance, of course, it’s a unmitigated disaster for the Republicans. Although he party had won several special congressional elections in reliably Republican states to replace the popular Republicans who had joined the administration of President Donald Trump, they were all by embarrassingly close margins, and the party got blown-out by bigger than usual margins a in off year elections in couple of reliably Democratic states, so losing a Senate race in such an especially reliably Republican state as Alabama does not bode well for future camapigns. The loss also pares the Republican majority in Senate down to a mere 51 votes, and given Trump’s ongoing wars of words with far more than two Republican senators that’s going to make it even harder for him to get his legislative agenda passed.
There’s been no looking away from this Southern Gothic novel of an election, though, and on second and third glance it always looked to us that the Republicans could only win by losing. The Republican nominee was Roy Moore, who was already a controversial figure even in Alabama even before several small-town and Republican-voting women stepped forward to quite credibly accuse him of inappropriate sexual behavior behavior toward them when he was a 30-something prosecutor and they were in there early- to mid-teens. His denials of the allegations on such friendly media as Fox New’s “Sean Hannity Show” were entirely unconvincing, and in the final days of the campaign he doubled down on all the things that had made him controversial even in Alabama even before those allegations surfaced.
Moore was always a theocratic figure that our old=fashioned Republican and Christian couldn’t quite stand, n the finals days of the campaign there was some old audio footage of Moore saying that America was last great back when human slavery was still tolerated, because at least families we’re still together back then, even if black families were routinely torn apart by the sale of their progeny to distant states. There was also tape of Moore grousing that every single constitutional amendment after those first ten in the Bill of Rights was a horrible mistake, even though they include the 13th amendment that abolished slavery and the 14th amendment that recognized the full civic rights of all citizens including those former slaves, and the 19th amendment that granted women the right to vote. On election eve Moore’s wife refuted allegations of anti-semitism by noting that “We have a jew lawyer,” which one late night comic likened to saying that “we’re not anti-black because we’re always glad to have them on their basketball team.”
We doubt that the Jewish vote very much influenced Moore’s loss in Alabama, but it’s clear it can be largely attributed to a higher-than-expected turnout by black voters and lower-than-expected support from Republican women, and if that was enough to cause an upset in such a state as Alabama it does not bode well for Republican prospects in the upcoming elections elsewhere. Trump and the rest of his slightly more reluctant Republican party seem intent seem intent on doubling down on such divisive rhetoric, no matter how badly it’s provably polling at the moment even in such a reliably Republican state as Alabama.
Which is why we figure the Republicans won by losing. If Moore had won the race he would have surely faced several weeks of headline-grabbing hearings about his fitness for office, with all his formerly-teenaged accusers on nationally-aired videotape giving their sworn testimony to a congressional committee’s investigation of the matter, all while the Republican president was “tweeting” nonsense about it during the renewed talk about all the credible accusations of his own sexual misbehavior. Our Republican party will still have to endure will still have endure have to endure the public’s current intolerance of sexual misbehavior and outright craziness by either party, but at least it won’t have to make many convoluted excuses for the likes of Moore.
The Democratic victor is Doug Jones, who is a bit too enthusiastic about abortion right up to moment of birth for our tastes, along with most Alabama voters, but on gun rights and law and order immigration and the rest of it he doesn’t seem likely to do much damage in the couple of of years he has replacing now Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the job. Sessions is now frequently criticized by Trump for recusing himself from that “Russia thing” and senior Alabama Sen. ichard Shelby had already announced that he cast his vote for a write-in Republican candidate other than Moore, as we would have done, and we agree that a Moore victory would have proved worse.
Trump is still stuck with his full-throated endorsement of Moore, and his increasingly implausible insistence that all the credible accusations of sexual misbehavior are fake news, but thanks to higher-than-expected black turnout and a decisive number of Republican Alabama women the GOP won’t have to spend the next weeks of news cycles defending a Senator who’s pro-slavery and anti-women’s suffrage and stands credibly accused of hitting on teenaged girls when he was a 30-something prosecutor. Defending Trump’s bragged-about-on-tape sexual misbehavior is hard enough, especially when the Democrats are willing to toss out party members accused of less, so even Trump should hope that Moore is soon forgotten.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 