When an underwhelming primary rival to Brian Kemp announced his candidacy I took a look at the Georgia governor’s comeback strategy and wrote it up at New York.
Until March 25, Georgia governor Brian Kemp was looking pretty finished politically. Very publicly and vociferously blamed by Donald Trump for ratifying Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s certification of Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia on November 20, Kemp was persona non grata in MAGA country. He had already been periodically in Trump’s doghouse over his handling of the pandemic in his state, and before that, over his rejection of the Boss’s instruction that he appoint Representative Doug Collins to an open U.S. Senate seat. But getting in the way of the 45th president’s attempted election coup was the final straw: Trump has been publicly and privately vowing to take down Kemp in next year’s Republican gubernatorial primary, as recently as the RNC donor retreat in Florida last weekend. During his brief campaign appearance in Georgia before the January Senate runoffs that ended in defeat for his party, Trump even called on Collins to challenge Kemp in 2022, which wasn’t exactly a Georgia GOP talking point. Nor was Trump’s later suggestion that Kemp should resign.
Kemp managed to keep his mouth shut in the face of all these provocations, grimly promising to support Trump in 2024 and generally taking his medicine. But his comeback strategy became apparent when he made a big show of signing Georgia’s highly controversial new election law on March 25. It’s unclear whether he deliberately courted the appearance of racist impropriety, though he did sign the bill under a painting of a plantation and barred a Black Democratic legislator from his office during his remarks on the bill. (State Representative Park Cannon was subsequently manhandled by state troopers who wrestled her out of the Georgia Capitol to be arrested on multiple felony counts.)
As anger over the legislation mounted (echoing the anger over
Kemp’s own voter-suppression measures as Georgia’s secretary of State, the job he insisted on keeping during his narrowly successful 2018 gubernatorial campaign) and major corporations joined the criticism of the law, Kemp was able to adopt a pose that is legal tender for a GOP pol at present: victim of “race card” politics backed by “woke” corporations. As the Associated Press
reported, it was very clear to Georgia Republicans what the man who had
labeled himself a “politically incorrect conservative” in 2018 was up to:
“[T]he sweeping
election law could be one of Kemp’s last hopes to rekindle a bond with Republicans who remain fiercely loyal to Trump and will be a critical force in next year’s GOP primary. The legislation, which Kemp signed into law, could give him an opening to persuade Republicans that he is an outsider, willing to stand up to Democrats, corporate leaders, and sports leagues who have derided the measure as an affront to democracy that is based on false claims and needs to be rewritten.
“’This is an absolute godsend for Brian Kemp,’ said Brian Robinson, a Republican consultant and former top aide to Kemp’s predecessor, Nathan Deal.”
Kemp has eagerly been making the rounds of conservative media outlets to defend the new law, struggling, no doubt, to hide his glee at the liberal criticism it has attracted. The furor is helping him back home where it matters as well, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein observes:
“In recent weeks, Kemp has been a mainstay on conservative cable TV shows and enjoyed raucous receptions at grassroots meetings across the state, seemingly dissuading better-known Republican rivals such as former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, whom Trump once recruited to run.”
Morning Consult reports that Kemp’s job-approval rating among Georgia Republicans rose from 59 percent in mid-March to 74 percent in early April. Nonetheless, a well-known Georgia pol close to Trump has now announced a 2022 primary bid against the governor. But his identity could be a blessing in disguise to the incumbent.
Vernon Jones is a Black former state legislator and county CEO who endorsed Trump’s reelection last year and has more recently switched parties. He got a lot of MAGA attention, particularly after his featured role at the GOP National Convention. He has really taken to his new career in Republican politics, speaking at the notorious January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington and basking in the affection of the Big Man (“When are you announcing? When are you announcing?” Trump said to Jones at Mar-a-Lago last week).
Jones’s announcement made it clear that he’s the former president’s surrogate.
Jones, however, is a risky proposition as Trump’s instrument of vengeance against Kemp. Aside from the fact that he’s a career Democratic politician from a jurisdiction (the Atlanta inner suburb of Dekalb County) that your average rural Republican wouldn’t visit on a bet, he has always had some issues, as Bluestein explains, calling him “a uniquely polarizing figure in state politics”:
“Jones launched his political career in the early 1990s in the Georgia House before winning the first of two terms as DeKalb County’s chief executive officer in 2000. His stint was marked by controversy …
“[H]is angry outbursts and clashes with other local officials dominated headlines, as did more serious allegations …
“[A] wide-ranging special grand jury report released in 2013, after Jones left office, recommended an investigation against Jones and other DeKalb officials into possible bid-rigging and theft when he was chief executive, painting a picture of a culture of corruption that spanned from his office to workers and contractors in the watershed department.”
Worse yet, Jones was accused of rape in 2005. His successful defense was that the intercourse in question was part of a consensual three-way sexual encounter. This is still not a great look for candidates in the Christian-right- dominated Georgia GOP. And speaking of the Christian right, Jones had a problem with a vote in the legislature against a “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban Kemp had championed in 2019. On the eve of his candidacy, Jones executed a straight-out flip-flop on abortion, stating he now believed zygotes should be protected “from the moment of conception.”
You get the sense that Jones will serve as an irritant to Kemp but not a serious threat unless Trump himself forcefully intervenes in the race (and/or if a more formidable Trump-backed candidate, like Collins, who is reportedly mulling a Senate race, jumps in). And even then, Georgia Republicans will remember that Trump had strongly endorsed Kemp during the last gubernatorial primary. MAGA bravos looking for a pound of flesh may instead focus on Raffensperger, who has drawn an actual member of Congress as his 2022 primary opponent, along with the rival he barely defeated in 2018.
If Kemp does escape, he will likely face a rematch with his nemesis, voting-rights activist Stacey Abrams. And in that contest, all the treasure he has stored up in Republican circles by boasting of his commitment to “election integrity” may earn him a backlash from the voters he and his party have sought to bedevil.
We fight for TODAY, and we always do.
Every election we hear “maybe it would be better if ….” Hell, I’ve said it and thought it myself.
But that kind of thinking gets Reagan a second term, gets us the Supreme Court we have now, the one that crowned Bush.
No, we fight today. And the day after November 2nd, we start fighting for 2006.
Bah, Andrew Sullivan is deluding himself if he thinks re-electing Bush will force him to take responsibility. He never has about anything else, we’d just get more of the same Rovian misdirection, distraction, and denials we’ve gotten for the last 4 years.
I personally think Sullivan, as a man with conflicting political needs (he is a gay, pro-gay marriage conservative) is trying to rationalize a reason to support Bush, so he frames it in the sense of “punishing Bush by re-electing him.”
It is true that Kerry will get the full brunt of the conservakooks wrath when he gets in, but that never stopped Bill Clinton.
Whenever peolle cite the popularity of conservative outlets like Fox News, it’s worth noting that nearly all conservatives (1/3 of the oublic it would seem at least) get their news exclusively from places like this. As Ron Reagan said, conservatives don’t usually like the debate-style news that liberals watch. They prefer echo chambers of their own beliefs. The conservatives’ power only seems greater because all the eggs are in one basket.
“Security moms…” Let’s assume Kerry wins the election. What next? The Republicans have made a big deal out of the fact there hasn’t been a repeat of 9/11 so far. Many observers regard it as mere luck, citing the generally inept handling of homeland security by this Administration plus the huge difficulty of protecting a huge country such as the United States. The likelihood of another attack in 2005-08 is regarded as fairly high.
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Kerry will of course do his best to clean up the mess both at home as well as in Iraq, but we can be sure the usual suspects (FoxNews, Limbaugh, Coulter, WSJ etc.) will blame him for every single thing that goes wrong from the day that he enters the Oval Office. If there is another 9/11, you can be sure these guys will say it “proves” Democrats cannot be trusted to protect America. The Kerry presidency will be written off as another Carter parenthesis, plagued by big problems and a Democratic president who could not successfully solve them.
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Under these circumstances, maybe it won’t be an unmitigated disaster if “Shrub” is reelected… As a consolation prize, we get to see him stubbornly dig an even deeper hole for the Republican party during his second term in office. The credibility of neoconservatism has already suffered a fatal blow in Iraq, and increasingly few voters believe the GOP stands for “fiscal responsibility” anymore. By 2008, it seems quite likely that Iraq will be in a state of near-civil war, there will be enormous budget deficits thanks to his tax cuts, no credible plan to handle the retirement of the baby boomer generation, the “we’re safer because we invaded Iraq” theory will most likely have been disproved in a most violent fashion… And all this while Republicans were controlling the White House as well as both chambers of Congress! Heck, even president Hillary Clinton does not sound like a far-fetched idea under such circumstances…
Andrew Sullivan writes:
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BUSH-HATERS FOR BUSH: Once you’ve absorbed the chutzpah, it’s a pretty powerful argument. It’s a bit like Bush saying, after bankrupting our fiscal future in three short years, that we cannot afford Kerry’s big spending instincts. No shit, brother. So we’re torn between holding Bush accountable and re-electing him. But here’s another brilliant Bush counter-argument: wouldn’t we actually be holding him accountable by re-electing him? For the first time in his entire life, Bush may actually be forced to take responsibility for his own actions if he is re-elected and becomes the LBJ of the Iraq war. I wonder why Bush-haters haven’t thought of this: that the way to punish Bush is to force him to live through the consequences of his own policies. Why, after all, should Kerry take the fall? If he gets elected, can you imagine what Fox News and NRO are going to do to him the minute he brushes his teeth in January? He’ll be destroyed by the chaos in Iraq, whatever he does. The right will give him no lee-way at all. Maybe this is simply another version of the notion that we shouldn’t change horses in the middle of a cliche. But there’s an upside: if Bush fails in Iraq, at least he will be punished for his own failures; if he succeeds (and, of course I hope he does), we all win. Am I persuading myself to endorse Bush? Or am I finding some kind of silver lining in the increasingly likely event of his re-election? I blog. You decide.
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I am certainly not advocating defeat (that would be irresponsible given the magnitude of the problems facing us), but at least there is a silver lining if “Shrub” wins. Sometimes, good things happen to those who wait.
MARCU$
The first time I heard the pubs use “security moms” I knew we were in for this fraud. And I knew it wouldn’t be long before the corporate media lap dogs would be lapping it up.
How many times this week has some pretty airheaded news reader intoned “Are security moms giving Bush a new edge with women? Are they replacing the soccer moms?”
Nonsense. It’s a marketing slogan and nothing more. Like saying our laundry detergent is new and improved.
The Rove machine knows that the modern middle voter responds to repeated phrases, the grist of the marketing mill. As long as the term is used, it helps Bush. The whole point of the term is to make the absurd statement that women are moving to Bush because they are concerned about terror and Bush allegedly makes them feel safe.
Hogwash.