-by Patrick Toomey
It’s October, which means that the mercury and the leaves are falling in most of the country, and we’re looking forward to the end of hurricane season here in Florida. Since it’s an even-numbered October, it’s also GOP attack ad season. Dark money-funded ads from “independent” organizations like “Citizens for Sanity” tell viewers that donkey is allowing dark hordes of immigrants and drug mules to overwhelm our borders. Senate nominee Val Demings, a fairly moderate Democrat who has spent her entire campaign touting her decades of experience in law enforcement, stands accused of wanting to defund the police and encouraging kids to become transgender.
It’s par for the course with today’s GOP. Last cycle, ads ran locally that basically implied that Hugo Chavez was Biden’s running mate. Some of the ads were so over the top that I assumed that they would get no traction. On election night, results indicated that my assumptions were sadly unfounded.
This conscious media strategy of distortion, distraction and destruction is part and parcel of a party that believes in the acquisition/exercise of power and the skewing of societal rewards to a tiny favored few as its sole reasons for existence. I thought that the GOP had gone too far in the Reagan eighties. I was certain that they had done so when Newt brought in his firebrand brigade in the mid-nineties. I was thoroughly convinced when I saw them (mis)use my profession to openly steal the 2000 presidential election in my state.
One thing that the past four decades has taught me is that, as bad as the GOP may be today, it can always be worse tomorrow. With all due respect to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, looking for Good Germans in today’s GOP is like looking for advocates of Gospel teachings on poverty and peace at a suburban megachurch. Finding them will be even harder come January.
A party that has spent my adult lifetime starting with hints of fascism and slowly but steadily sliding downward ever since desperately needs to be confronted at its core. Sadly, waiting for such a confrontation to occur has been like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive. I was out there for more Democratic candidates than I care to recall— (Sen.) Paul Simon, Tom Harkin, Bill Bradley, Howard Dean. None of it stiffened the spine or steeled the resolve of the donkey.
In 2008, I threw my lot in with Obama after Edwards flamed out. Having grown up in Chicagoland, I was familiar with the Paul Douglas-Adlai III-Simon-Durbin-Obama line of Illinois reform Democratic senators. I figured that, like his forebears in that lineage, Obama would push for procedural reforms, support labor, and pursue peace while freeing the party from the clutches of Clinton, Inc. and its trap of triangulation. As it turned out, I ended up figuring wrong pretty much across the board.
In 2016, I was out there for Bernie. Somewhere in my deeper recesses, I intuitively understood that the party mandarins were going to nominate HRC by hook or by crook, but I had respected and admired Bernie for far too long to NOT be out there. I was out there for him again in 2020. On the very Sunday that my son and I were canvassing locally, the mandarins rallied ‘round a senescent never was senator/VP whose sole noteworthy career achievement had been chairing the Bork hearings 33 years earlier. Like Bernie himself, I ultimately went along with this astroturf Biden “movement” while recognizing its hollowness.
Like everyone here, I sat in shock while a ragtag mob sacked the Capitol building and tried to thwart government by the people, of the people, and for the people on 1/6/21. I later learned that members of the House (including, allegedly, the Ranking Judiciary member) helped the insurrectionists case the joint the day before. I also learned that the wife of a SCOTUS justice (who never should have been confirmed) sent multiple texts to state legislators urging them to openly thwart popular sovereignty. Over 20 months later, I still await the first indictment of a planner, strategist, or inciter of this insurrection attempt. The small fish have been arrested, indicted, and convicted by the dozens. The big fish, however, remain at large.
With an election looming, I’m told that, while the Senate remains salvageable, the House is apparently gone. My governor, Quey Long, is all but assured re-election, and he will be the designated default option for Trumpism without Trump. Come January, an alleged accessory before the fact to the storming of the Capitol will likely chair House Judiciary. Biden will (officially) become a lame duck. The current House QAnon cabal will be more like a QAnon Caucus. It will be a very trying time for the republic.
It still remains hard to believe that a country that once defeated fascism abroad, put men on the moon, built a thriving middle class, (belatedly) shook off the shackles left from slavery, and did so many other great things during the dominance of the donkey has found itself in such a sorry state now. It’s equally hard to believe that the nominal opposition party could be so incompetent, ineffective, and uninspiring in the face of existential threats for so long. Even now, the depth of this threat does not appear to be perceived by the DSCC, the DCCC, the DNC, and MSNBC.
Maybe the donkey will actually listen to the content of Bernie’s contemporary New Deal message and not obsess on the messenger. Maybe The Squad will be taken more seriously in the House Dem Caucus. Maybe the stirrings of labor will grow and start to affect the broader political dynamic. Maybe the adage attributed to Bismarck that providence looks out for “idiots, children, drunkards, and the United States of America” will come to pass. Barring that, I don’t like where this country is now, and I like where it appears to be headed even less.