Tuesday, February 27, 2018

So what kind of moment is it?

New York Daily News, via Business Insider. May 2016.

A justified complaint from Steve:
"Post-partisan moment" indeed!

But it's kind of interesting all the same, if it's anything at all. This new "Unite America" centrist-nonpartisan-unlabeled concoction is seemingly less oriented to getting itself onto the op-ed pages and more to getting onto the ballot than the usual run of such experiments, and there's something interesting about where it's active, in the first place: states where the Republican Party has been failing in some especially peculiar way, and who they're choosing to do something about it:


  • Kansas, systematically bankrupted by now ex-Governor Sam Brownback and a Republican legislature that's been regretting its complicity, and four 16- and 17-year-old boys seem to be running against vile vote-suppressor Kris Kobach for the Republican nomination to succeed the current administration, while the group is backing their ideological leader, entrepreneur Greg Orman, author of their manifesto Declaration of Independents, on a truly unlabeled platform of no policy but "bringing people together" because "the system is not working";
  • Missouri, with a young governor, Eric Greitens, who appears to tie up naked women in his basement and photograph them as a way of ensuring that they don't tell anybody about his proclivity for tying up naked women in his basement, and the Republican legislature is getting nervous, and the group is sponsoring a lawyer, Craig O'Dear, to run against vulnerable Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill and an as yet unnamed Republican;
  • Maine, with appalling governor Paul LePage on his term-limited way out this year, and the group is backing the candidacy of ex-Democrat Terry Hayes, who was elected state treasurer as an independent but through a Republican assault on a Democratic incumbent in 2014;
  • Alaska, where they are with incumbent ex-Republican governor Bill Walker, elected as an independent in 2014 out of the ruins of Sarah Palin's party;
  • Wyoming, where they've dumped their Senate candidate David Dodson because they disapprove of his interest in "cleaning up the Republican Party";
  • and normally Blue Maryland, where they're fielding a candidate not against vulnerable Republican governor Larry Hogan (who was elected in 2014 by failure of Democrats to go to the polls), but against Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, who is really not likely to lose

That is, I think Dovere just spelled "post-Republican political moment" wrong; these people are hoping to build a new party of the (moderate) right in the wake of the Trump castastrophe.

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