By David K. Shipler
According
to the Golden Rule of politics—Do Unto Others As They Have Done Unto You—Democrats now have
an opportunity to smear all Republicans, just as Republicans have smeared them,
with a fringe candidate likely to go to Congress. She is Marjorie Taylor
Greene, who won her Republican primary in a Georgia district so extreme that
she’s bound to be elected to the House of Representatives in November, and then
carry into the halls of the Capitol her anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, racist rants
about Trump’s opposition by Satan-worshiping child sex traffickers. She is an
aficionado of QAnon, the inchoate association of conspiracy theorists that the
FBI regards as having the potential for domestic terrorism.
The fact that Greene’s attitudes
are not shared across the Republican spectrum—albeit the narrowing Republican
spectrum—would not deter astute Democratic campaign operatives from casting
them as representative, as they’ve already begun to do. “Georgia Republicans,
and Republican candidates running across the country, will have to answer for
her hateful views in their own campaigns,” said the chair of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee, Cheri Bustos.
In this they’ve had help from
President Trump, who called her a “future Republican star.” So too, the
Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, first denounced her statements
but then rebuffed pleas from some of his colleagues to support her opponent in
the primary, John Cowan, a conservative physician. The minority whip, Steve
Scalise, did campaign and raise money for Cowan. Still, funding help for Greene
reportedly came from other prominent Republicans, including Mark Meadows, now
Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, and Congressman Jim Jordan, the outspoken
Trump defender.
Democrats have traction here to discredit the Republican establishment as moving in the opposite direction of most Americans in an age of heightened consciousness about racial injustice and yearning for national healing. Should they do it?
