Irresistible Georgia’s Karen Handel pins another defeat on the anti-Trump left.By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/irresistible-1498064020
Last night viewers of cable news were the first to learn that Republican Karen Handel had defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff in the special election to fill a U.S. House seat in Georgia. Long before any news outlet formally declared Ms. Handel’s victory, CNN and MSNBC regulars disclosed the outcome with their funereal tones and cheerless visages. It’s becoming a competitive advantage for the two cable nets on election nights, allowing viewers to learn unofficial results with one glance at the screen.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow seems to have been so distraught over the emerging defeat in Georgia that she abandoned the subject and resumed “connecting the dots” among people President Trump or his acquaintances may have known. Your humble correspondent did not stay on the channel long enough to know if she made it all the way to Kevin Bacon, but found it useful to learn her unequivocal if unspoken statement about Georgia.
Ms. Maddow’s implicit forecast was accurate. Ms. Handel ended up winning by four percentage points, a bigger margin than Republican Ralph Norman enjoyed in winning Tuesday’s South Carolina special election that nobody expected to be close. Now what?
Liberals may need some time and space to get over the Georgia result. In the New York Times , Frank Bruni captures the anguish of Democrats—and not just the ones who work in the media industry:
They ached for this seat. They fought for it fiercely. They reasoned that Ossoff had a real chance: Donald Trump, after all, won this district by just 1.5 percentage points. Donations for Ossoff flooded in, helping to make this the most expensive House race in history by far.
Democrats came up empty-handed nonetheless. So a party sorely demoralized in November is demoralized yet again — and left to wonder if the intense anti-Trump passion visible in protests, marches, money and new volunteers isn’t just some theatrical, symbolic, abstract thing.
Good question. Maybe it’s not a majority-building, vote-winning, concrete thing. Democrats might start by asking whether they can persuade moderate voters to join their coalition by preaching “resistance” to a legitimate government and—without a shred of evidence—accusing a duly-elected president of treason.
Comments are closed.
