The Lone Star Salvation
How Senator Beto O’Rouke could save the republic from the Republican Party
I shouldn’t hold out hope for the Democrats to take the Senate. Republicans are defending 9 seats to the Dems’ 23, the Russians are still busily convincing America to die, and even a dramatic report from Mueller likely won’t have move the needle at this point, because the presumption of presidential treason is already baked into current polling numbers.
Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, and Claire McCaskill could well lose in states Trump crushed. Robert Menendez could lose my current state of residence because he’s a crook and he totally deserves to, or Joe Manchin could stop being white. Though Dean Heller’s ass is grass, we’re just as likely to trade his seat for a Republican pickup of one of the aforementioned, keeping the Senate at a razor-thin margin at best.
However, I can’t help but hold out hope, no matter how emotionally unhealthy it is to cling to that inevitable disappointment. I simply can’t stop myself from dreaming, because if we take the Senate, Donald Trump is done.
This is a presidency that would’ve failed in three months if it started with even one chamber of Congress in the hands of the opposition. If Democrat-run committees were seated on Trump’s first day, armed with the sure knowledge that he is compromised in every conceivable way, their subpoenas would’ve started cutting bacon off Trump’s back the very moment he took office.
Luckily for him, the GOP’s anti-democratic project culminated at exactly the right moment to completely insulate the worst person on Earth from political scrutiny, and two years nestled in that insulation have allowed Trump to lay down roots that can’t be easily yanked by a Democratic House. Sure, in the not-at-all-inevitable-so-please-vote event that the House flips, the de-Nunes’d Intelligence Committee will start calling actual witnesses, and the twice-daily constitutional crises generated by the West Wing will elicit an actual response from a co-equal branch of government, instead of Paul Ryan’s stock response that “I didn’t hear what he said, but even if I did, nothing we say or do means anything and none of this actually matters.”
However, two years of invincibility have normalized enough of Trump’s depravity that he will no longer be destroyed instantly by the first hint of oversight. He’s entrenched, and as horrifying as it is to admit, we’ve gotten used to the intolerable. While taking the House will make God bleed, we can’t really kill God (per the Democratic Party platform) until we take back the House of Lords, and as it stands, that’s a big ask.
We need to sweep every Democratic seat defense, and score a series of highly-unlikely Cinderella upsets —in addition to Bresenden taking Tennessee, the home of Goldwater has to go blue, or Mississippi will need to give up one of two seats without the benefit of a mall-dwelling child predator on the GOP ticket. If there’s to be any chance of Democrats winning this thing, there is zero room for error on our part, and the other side has to mess up pretty bad.
To use an analogy from the greatest American institution that Trump has destroyed thus far: Democrats are like fans of a 8–7 team going into the last week of the regular season, all of us hopefully reciting the elaborate alignment of wins and losses in five other games that will somehow allow us to eke out the second wildcard spot, provided our boys can beat the Patriots in their last match-up. It’s foolish optimism, but there is technically a way.
However, there’s new cause for hope, because Cowboys-Texans has gone from a lock to surprisingly competitive.
Ted Cruz is a true testament to Republican voters’ now-decades-long thirst for antagonistic asses with no interest in legislating, because the only reason that a human being would possibly vote for Ted Cruz, against their very human nature, is if they reveled in the thought of subjecting Democrats to someone so insufferable. He is a humorless, smug, self-aggrandizing, elitist, universally-loathed grandstander who shut down our government for no reason, and I have a sneaking suspicion that his conservative zealot is a persona he created purely in service of his all-consuming ambition.
However, he’s zealous about the right things in the minds of the Republican base, and Texas is a Conservative state. Even someone so despicable as that camera-whoring, weasel-faced onanist, who refused to associate with the debate teams from the lesser Ivies when he was at Princeton, couldn’t lose Texas with (R) next to his name. At least, that was the conventional wisdom.
That was the conventional wisdom, in the past tense. As of yesterday, one Beto O’Rourke of El Paso, former punk bassist and current handsome Irish bastard, is in a statistical dead heat with the Senator in one poll, and lagging just a little behind in others. Everyone in the state already has an opinion about Cruz, but the Congressman from the remote wilds of truck-commercial country is still unknown to 43% of his fellow Texans, with mountains of out-of-state cash with which to boost that name recognition over the next three months.
Beto is a natural candidate, possessed of both a working-class hero vibe and Kennedy-esque presence, which makes him a Daywalker of Democrats. He’s infinitely more lovable than his opponent, who was described thusly by former colleague Al Franken: “I like Ted Cruz more than most people, and I hate Ted Cruz.” In these polarized times, as much as we hold our tribes above all else, there is still order to this universe: a candidate who is more appealing to other human beings in every possible way can still win an election.
I don’t meant to overstate my case, because Cruz is not only strong with the base, but he still has plenty of cover fire from the owner of an equally punchable face. The contest hinges on Trump’s approval, and as badly as he’s messed everything up, his command of a Republican Senate is not something Right-wingers take lightly. As long as he can fulfill their dreams of conservative court-packing, the GOP will rationalize everything Trump does, because their single-minded fixation on the judiciary predates his presidency; in fact, it nearly predates his ill-begotten presence in this mortal coil. To quote myself, because this bit was wasted on a recent piece:
Conservatives love to spout off about how Democrats began the totally one-sided Judicial Wars in like 2002, when Ted Kennedy or Pat Leahy held up some point of order that held up some appellate court nomination for a month or something (who the hell knows), but… the Judicial Wars began in 1954, when to his horror, Whitey realized that the forces of justice had somehow breached his last redoubt.
Eisenhower assumed that Earl Warren was a fellow traveler who would uphold the Supreme Court’s traditional function as an impregnable bastion of avaricious white devilry. Instead, the Chief Justice did the unthinkable, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and actually implementing the 14th Amendment for the first time. They’ll never admit it, but American Conservatism has never really recovered from the trauma of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Okay, so to be fair, there’s plenty of Roe v. Wade in there as well. Since the judiciary legalized abortion, for those single-issue voters who care about nothing else, the appeal of re-banning it via the same means is obvious (but since the non-Catholics among those conservatives only started to care about abortion at the exact moment that their previous go-to wedge issue was rendered déclassé by Brown, I don’t feel that description was too unfair).
So Cruz can count on the support of those not-at-all-white-supremacist Evangelicals, who can damn near taste the repeal of Roe now that Kavanagh is on deck for confirmation. Cruz also remains popular among the donor class that owns his party, to whom Trump remains tolerable. Though the détente between Mammon and the Mafia has taken a serious hit from the tariff fiasco, the monomaniacal cohort of America’s moneyed bastards will keep on backing Trump as long as he has the power to install judges who defy staid liberal dogmas about what is or isn’t a “drinking water supply,” and will do so for decades after Trump is tossed out of office.
However, as the boss giveth, the boss taketh away. As much as Trump’s racism charms decaying retirees throughout the Southwest, who do their best to imagine that those states were uninhabited before their integrated golf resort communities were carved from the desert in defiance of the will of God and nature, the GOP’s open bigotry has hurt them with core constituencies in Texas. I’ve always found that Texans show far more respect for their Mexican heritage than the other Latin American states, and Beto has room for some serious pick-ups since he’s only polling 54–40 with Latinos at the moment.
Trump referred to the original Tejanos as “criminals and rapists” from the jump, his Obama-baiting and pro-police-brutality stances have enraged black Texans whose ancestors’ importation is the whole reason the state exists, and he has casually proscribed one too many of the various Asian ethnic groups represented among the STEM-lovin’ immigrants of the Houston suburbs — speaking of which, I can’t help but wonder if the place where climate change denial was invented has rethought that stance, on account of that time last year when a cubic mile of water fell on the city in two days. Either way, I know that Houston society wives don’t think much of Trump’s outer-borough lack of decorum.
But the question of whether Beto can pull off the previously unthinkable is personal as much as political. In this era where we have handed the reins of power to a sagging sack of fat shit with awful hairplugs and worse clothes, purely because he has the ability to appeal to our base tribalism, can a candidate still prevail because his position on the human sexual hierarchy dwarfs that of his electoral rival? Can a guy with Justin Trudeau’s popular appeal and hotness — minus his lame, milquetoast Canadian-ness — best a lame, milquetoast Canadian whose being is a near-perfect erotic vacuum?
They say that modern American political history was born from the Kennedy-Nixon debates, and here we have as close to a rematch as we’ll ever get: on one side, the president’s jowl-faced dog of a man, toting poisonous, retrograde white rage; on the other, the outsider upstart, the champion of a new Democratic optimism, wreathed in self-assurance and Gaelic good looks. Mind you, Dick Nixon’s brand was attached to the guy who defeated Hitler, not an idiot who made his bones aping Hitler’s style (and yes, I know that was white revenge was Nixon’s platform in ’68, not ‘60).
The most tantalizing prospect about Beto’s potential victory is that, even though it would be driven mostly by his personal connection to the people of Texas and the visible softness of his hair, a national political press that must nationalize everything will not hesitate to paint a statewide loss in Texas as the breaking of Trump’s seventh seal, particularly if it gets us to 51 seats. As good as our two camps are at making competing excuses for their every misfortune, when a real panic narrative takes hold in DC, both parties get swept up in it.
If we can take the Senate, Trump has nothing to offer his rich patrons, and they’ll drop his ass like a rock. Further revelations of his moral failings will no longer have a psychological backstop in the minds of his Christian supporters, because it’s harder ignore his moral decrepitude without that transactional element. Maybe that’s naive at this point, and they’ll keep making excuses for him out of inertia, or because they’re part of the cult, or maybe QAnon told them to. Still, without judges, Trump loses the only power he has that matters to most of his supporters, and this abortion of American history could well come to its merciful conclusion two years early.
And if it does, it’ll likely be because of a sexy Mick sumbitch who hit all 254 counties in a Texas-built truck. Give ’em hell, Congressman.
