Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.
--Daniel Patrick Moynihan

August 15, 2020

The Golden Rule of Politics

 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?