Category: political challengers

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political challengers

Message or Money?

Edward Durr, New Jersey

“I don’t know if I truly am fearless,” Edward Durr remarked to an NJ.com reporter, “or stupid.”

“Because who in their right mind would take on a person with that kind of power and clout?” he asked rhetorically, before he answered, “But his power, his clout, did not scare me.”

Durr, a Republican, is the 58-year-old truck driver who last Tuesday defeated one of the most powerful politicians in New Jersey, State Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Democrat. Durr has never before held public office and spent just a smidgen over $2,000 in the entire race. His campaign video was filmed on his smartphone.

On the other hand, Sweeney was the longest serving legislative leader in the Garden State’s history. The powerful teachers’ union attempted to take Sweeney out four years ago, spending a whopping $5 million, but he still won handily by 18 percentage points.

Was it a conservative-leaning district? This southern Jersey district “has reliably elected a Democrat since its creation in 1973, save for one year when the Democratic incumbent switched parties,” reported The New York Times.

At Reason, Rob Soave called it “one of the biggest political upsets in American history,” offering this important takeaway: “Durr’s victory is another reminder that for all the pearl clutching about money in politics, contemporary American campaigns are less determined by big piles of cash — to pay for massive ad blitzes, expensive consultants, and the like — than ever.”

Clearly, message meant more than money.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency political challengers

Louder in Loudoun

Winsome Sears, Virginia

“The drama that played out in upscale Loudoun County, Virginia over the last year or so,” Matt Taibbi writes at Substack, “cost Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe the governorship. . . .”

McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and previously governor (2014-2017) under Virginia’s one-term consecutive limit, lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin by 2 percentage points in Tuesday’s off-year election. That’s big news because Virginia is a blue state where just a year ago Democrat Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump by a 10-point margin.*

“[T]he Loudoun County story,” notes Taibbi, “involves furious disputes between local parents and the school board over a variety of issues, including a pair of sexual assaults.”

Those two attacks involve a “skirt-wearing teen who raped a female classmate in [the] girls’ bathroom.” Convicted in juvenile court on two counts of sexual assault for the first incident, the lad has been accused of attacking another young female student — also in a school bathroom, but in a different school (having been transferred). 

Yet, during a school board meeting discussion on transgender bathroom policies, one month after the assault occurred, school officials claimed there had been no incidents. 

The lie was exposed only after the girl’s father, in attendance, became angry.

And was arrested.

“It was the woke cover-up that electrified the Virginia governor’s race,” declares the UK’s Daily Mail headline on their Election Day exclusive interview with the rapist’s mother.

That school officials would attempt to hide such incidents speaks to the crying need for accountability. 

And for the right of parents to control their kids’ education.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Republicans triumphed across the board, sweeping all three statewide offices — which breaks a Democratic Party streak dating back to 2012 — as well as winning back the Virginia House of Delegates. The GOP Lieutenant Governor-elect Winsome Sears will be the first black woman in that position and the Attorney General-elect Jason Miyares will become the state’s first Latino AG.

NOTE: Decided is this question: “How much say should parents have in what their child’s school teaches?” In a Washington Post exit poll, a majority of Virginians answered, “A lot.” Of those, 77 percent voted for Youngkin.

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political challengers social media

Ron Paul & the Fascisti

Ron Paul

Yes, you can make this stuff up. 

But long before you could add your implausible idea to your farfetched script about the weird dystopian future or recent tyrannical past, some big-tech social-media company will have galumphingly implemented that notion.

Former Congressman Ron Paul said the following on Facebook, reprinting a column on his site:

“Last week’s massive social media purges — starting with President Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets — were shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas.

“The justifications given for the silencing of wide swaths of public opinion made no sense, and the process was anything but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump’s two ‘offending’ Tweets, for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly. It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.”

Then Facebook blocked Dr. Paul.

“With no explanation other than ‘repeatedly going against our community standards,’ Facebook has blocked me from managing my page,” he reported on Twitter, itself no sturdy redoubt. “Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified.”

Can humongous corporations really jerk people around so dishonestly? Is it legal? 

Paul further argued that “this assault on social media” is not merely “a liberal or Democrat attack on conservatives and Republicans.” 

“As progressives like Glenn Greenwald have pointed out,” explains the doctor, “this is a wider assault on any opinion that veers from the acceptable parameters of the mainstream elite, which is made up of both Democrats and Republicans.”

The narrowing of opinion down to what elites find acceptable is one definition of fascism: a no-opposition-allowed corporatist state.

I’m not making this up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Right at the Top of the Stairs

Orange Man

“I’m appalled by the choice that we have been delivered,” political humorist P.J. O’Rourke told Reason TV last week, referring to the two major-party presidential nominees.

“Biden’s campaign platform is 564 pages long. It promises everything to everybody,” bemoans the 72-year-old author of a new book of essays, A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land. “It’s full of unicorns and flying ponies and candy-flavored rainbows and pixie dust.”

As for President Trump, “I think we’re done with this experiment of having the inmates run the asylum,” O’Rourke jabs, calling Trump a “dangerous and unpredictable man” and “rude.” 

“It isn’t so much exactly what Trump has done,” admits the comedic writer, who while panning Trump’s immigration policies, lauded his lowering of corporate tax rates and his raising of “awareness that China is not our friend.”

Instead, O’Rourke argues “it’s a matter of what [Trump] can do” in a second term, calling him “a toddler at the top of the stairs.”

Speaking of . . . P.J. turned back to the Democratic ticket: “They seem to be wrong, all wrong, quite wrong, about everything.” 

He’s not wrong.

“But” of Biden and Harris, O’Rourke contends they are “wrong between normal parameters of wrong.” Adding that, “There’s wrong and there’s damn wrong.” Meaning Trump is “damn wrong.” 

But not wrong on taxes, right P.J.? Or China. Or picking Supreme Court justices — Trump has the best batting average for nominating to the High Court of any president in the last five decades. 

And Mr. Trump is the first president in two decades not to drag the U.S. into a regime change war.

“Wrong on everything” or “a toddler at the top of the stairs”?

This P.J. thinks the better choice is Common Sense. 

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The Devil Is in the Seat Cushion

Nancy Pelosi, debates, Trump

A few weeks ago, I suggested setting up a betting pool for the upcoming presidential debates. How many would there be?

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe predicted that there would be three — “no more, no less” — but prescribed zero: “America’s quadrennial presidential debates have become an absurdity,” he wrote. 

“They long ago devolved into shallow ‘gotcha’ contests, prime-time entertainments designed to elicit memorable soundbites — tart put-downs rehearsed in advance or the unforced error of an unexpected gaffe,” which is about right, though President Donald J. Trump excels at the spontaneous put-down. 

Advisability to the side, Jacoby surmised what we all have surmised: that Democrats shouldn’t be pushing debates. That is, if they want their candidate, Joe Biden, to win the election. He is too off his game. Biden should take a hint from the name given to his generation: Silent.

Enter Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and very rarely silent herself — and indeed older than Biden but as sharp as the proverbial tack the Devil is said to need to sit upon. She says that Biden should not debate President Trump. 

“Don’t tell anybody I told you this,” she jests. “Especially don’t tell Joe Biden. But I don’t think there should be any debates.”

The president, she argues, has not “comported himself in a way . . . with truth, evidence, data, and facts. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him, nor a debate in terms of the presidency of the United States.” 

She dubs a debate with Trump “an exercise in skullduggery.” 

Good politics — realpolitik — but also horrific politics — setting up a transparent-but-serviceable CYA excuse. 

But it is definitely 2020 politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Biden’s Big Lie

Joe Biden, good people hoax, liar, lies, DNC

“In war,” Aeschylus wrote in the fifth century BC, “truth is the first casualty.”

So, too, these days, in political campaigns. 

Last week, in accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Joe Biden promised to “draw on the best of us” and “be an ally of the light.” But then the 47-year Washington veteran pivoted, waving the bloody shirt from Charlottesville by claiming that President Donald Trump had declared “neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists” to be “very fine people,” and therefore “we were in a battle for the soul of this nation.”

Did Trump dub some neo-Nazis “very fine people”?

“And you had some very bad people in that group,” the president explained to a reporter. “But you also had people that were very fine people — on both sides. You had people in that group who were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statute and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

Noting that “George Washington was a slave-owner,” Mr. Trump asked, “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? . . . 

“It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people,” he continued. “And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Unequivocal.

Outraged by the Democratic contender’s false contention, cartoonist and podcaster Scott Adams called Biden a “Brain-Dead Race Hoaxer” . . . and worse.

But Biden is hardly alone. The Democrats and most of the media join in ignoring Trump’s explicit statements, pushing their myopically malevolent misinterpretation. 

Should this smear defeat Trump in November, an era of political truth-telling will not be ushered in.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Months ago, the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org determined that Mr. Biden, in asserting that President Trump had failed to condemn neo-Nazis, had made false claims against the president — ignoring numerous recordings in living color of the president making those exact censures.

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