The Weekly Sift

For the Republican base, individual candidates don’t matter. The only thing on the ballot is control of the Senate.

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In living memory, all kinds of scandals could topple a candidacy, including some that today wouldn’t be scandals at all. Way back in 1972, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern had to replace his running mate, Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton, when it came out that (years before) Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression. Newt Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House for multiple hypocrisies: He profited from the same kind of shady book deal he had targeted previous Speaker Jim Wright for, and he was having an extramarital affair with a much younger woman at the same time he was impeaching Bill Clinton for doing precisely that. (None of that stopped him from being a serious presidential contender a few years later.)

Gingrich’s designated successor Bob Livingston soon resigned after his own affairs became public, giving way to Dennis Hastert, who (it later turned out) had sexually abused at least four male students when he was a high school teacher and wrestling coach.

Two New York governors have had to resign under fire: Andrew Cuomo for sexual harrassment, and Eliot Spitzer for patronizing prostitutes. Minnesota Senator Al Franken resigned after accusations of groping. Louisiana politician David Vitter survived his prostitution scandal for years, and was even reelected to the Senate, but it came back to bite him when he ran for governor. Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested for “lewd behavior” in a public restroom, and several gay men described encounters with Craig, but he backed away from his announced intention to resign from the Senate, and instead decided not to seek reelection. Mark Foley resigned from Congress after sexually suggestive texts and emails he sent to teen-aged male congressional pages became public.

But all that was in a different era. In 2016, Donald Trump toughed out the Access Hollywood scandal, along with numerous accusations from women who claimed that his “grab them by the pussy” quote was more than just the “locker room talk” he claimed it was. Later it was revealed that he paid two women (one a porn star) to keep quiet about sexual affairs while he was married to Melania. His political career not only survived, but he continues to be the hero of Evangelical Christians and other “family values” voters.

During the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal of 1998, Evangelical leader James Dobson wrote:

As it turns out, character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world! Nevertheless, our people continue to say that the President is doing a good job even if they don’t respect him personally. Those two positions are fundamentally incompatible. In the Book of James the question is posed, “Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring” (James 3:11 NIV). The answer is no.

But when Christianity Today supported Trump’s first impeachment, Dobson forgot James 3:11 and jumped to Trump’s defense with talk about policy, not character. (He also completely ignored the existence of Vice President Pence.)

The editors didn’t tell us who should take his place in the aftermath. Maybe the magazine would prefer a president who is passionately pro-abortion, anti-family, hostile to the military, dispassionate toward Israel, supports a socialist form of government, promotes confiscatory taxation, opposes school choice, favors men in women’s sports and boys in girl’s locker rooms, promotes the entire LGBTQ agenda, opposes parental rights, and distrusts evangelicals and anyone who is not politically correct.

Trump’s refusal to be shamed, and Evangelical leaders’ unwillingness to hold it against him, inaugurated the nothing-matters era, at least in the GOP. (Franken’s resignation was in 2018, and Cuomo’s in 2021. But they were Democrats.) As late as 2004, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg could title a Clinton-administration retrospective “Character Matters“, and conclude: “The man never had the character for the job.”

But character apparently doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is which side you’re on.

Herschel Walker. Walker’s candidacy to replace Raphael Warnock as one of Georgia’s senators looked sketchy from the beginning. As as Georgia’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan put it

Herschel Walker won the primary because he scored a bunch of touchdowns back in the 80’s and he’s Donald Trump’s friend.

Walker repeatedly exaggerated (or just invented) his accomplishments. He not only didn’t graduate in the top 1% of his class at the University of Georgia, he didn’t graduate at all. He didn’t work in law enforcement. He falsely claimed to “own” or to have “started” several businesses. He has a record of domestic violence. It’s not even clear that he lives in Georgia. He published a book about struggles with mental illness that dwarf anything Tom Eagleton went through.

After the primary, it came out that he has three more out-of-wedlock children than the public knew about.

But never mind: The bad stuff, he claimed, was all in the past. He got help for his dissociative personality disorder and Jesus has forgiven him, so he’s a new man now. Nothing in his past should count except for the touchdowns and his friendship with Trump.

The abortion scandal. This week serious scandal blew up again: The Daily Beast reported that Walker paid for a girlfriend’s abortion, in contradiction to the no-exceptions anti-abortion position he takes in public. Subsequently, his son went off on him on social media, raising once again the issues of Walker’s violence, lying, and hypocrisy.

Walker claimed not to know who The Daily Beast might be talking to, but a follow-up report narrowed it down for him: She’s also the mother of one of the children Walker has acknowledged.

Saturday, the NYT reported that it had independently verified the Beast’s article.

A woman who has said Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, paid for her abortion in 2009 told The New York Times that he urged her to terminate a second pregnancy two years later. They ended their relationship after she refused.

In a series of interviews, the woman said Mr. Walker had barely been involved in their now 10-year-old son’s life, offering little more than court-ordered child support and occasional gifts.

Both pregnancies took place after the 2008 book in which Walker claimed to have turned his life around.

When the first Daily Beast article came out, Walker said he would file a lawsuit “tomorrow morning”. But he hasn’t.

Parties, not individuals. One reason politicians used to respond to scandal by resigning or withdrawing was that other politicians treated them like lepers. The thing to do when someone had been tainted by scandal was to get far away from them, lest you be drawn into the scandal yourself. (As a song that turns 100 next year puts it: “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.“) That fickleness was one reason why Harry Truman famously quipped “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

But something more than public morality and judgment has changed: All elections have been nationalized. The names on the ballot may be Walker and Warnock, but what Georgia voters are really deciding is whether Republicans or Democrats will control the Senate.

And that matters, in turn, because of the increasing partisanship within the Senate. Whether or not judges will be confirmed, for example, depends less on the character or qualifications of the nominees than on the party of the president who nominated them. Whether senators are trying to boost the economy or sabotage it depends on whether or not they belong to the president’s party. (If Republicans get control of either house this year, you can expect another debt ceiling crisis in 2023. And maybe this time they’ll force the US into default.)

The result is a more tribal party that sticks together in crisis, and circles the wagons around any embattled candidate, no matter how undeserving that individual may be. And while Republicans are much further down that road than Democrats, I feel the pull myself: What could I possibly find out about his opponent that would make me root for Walker to win?

That’s the tacit message in all the “X is on the ballot” slogans. Democracy is on the ballot. Abortion is on the ballot. The planet is on the ballot. Compared to those stakes, what do Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock — or any competing pair of candidates — matter? You may not know or care who the candidates are in your district, but you should vote anyway.

Conservative radio host and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, for example, tweeted

IF true, Walker paid for one broad’s abortion compared to Warnock who wants your tax dollars to pay for EVERY broad’s abortion-as-birth control with no limitations. This isn’t a difficult choice and conservatives shouldn’t look to the left to validate their vote.

(But wait: Warnock isn’t pushing any woman to get an abortion, as Walker did. He’s just supporting women who make that decision for themselves.)

Also Loesch:

I want to control the senate and you should, too. The end.

The individual hypocrisy — for his own convenience, Walker pushed his girlfriend to exercise options he wants to take away from all the women he didn’t impregnate — doesn’t even figure. Nor does the “personhood” of a fetus matter. Republicans claim to believe fetuses are babies and that abortion is murdering a child. So if Walker had paid someone to murder one of his four breathing-and-walking-around children, would that not count either? Would conservative talking heads say “That’s just one murder. How many more murders will there be if Democrats control the Senate?”

So does anything matter? Watching Republicans circle their wagons around Walker, it’s tempting to conclude that all this, bad as it obviously is, will make no difference.

But if you think that, you’re looking in the wrong direction. OK, hardcore MAGA types are not going to change their minds. They have convinced themselves that Democrats are going to destroy America, so if the only way to prevent that is to elect grifters, hypocrites, or even outright criminals to high office, so be it.

But if the hardcore supporters of either party were the only people who voted, nobody would bother to campaign. And while it seems to be true that the number of persuadable swing voters is shrinking, there’s still a considerable pool of folks who (whatever they think) may or may not vote.

WaPo quotes conservative radio host Erick Erickson:

Every dribble of new stuff between now and the election I think increases the pool who say, ‘Screw this, let’s vote for Brian Kemp and let’s not do the other race at all.’ Those people exist in Georgia.

Those are the people who might be swayed. It’s not that some ultra-conservative Georgian is going to get pissed enough at Walker to vote for Warnock. But a sizeable number of the voters any Georgia Republican needs are racists who didn’t really want to vote for a Black guy anyway, even if he did win the Heisman. A lot are people who lean Republican, but sometimes don’t vote because they think politicians are all crooks. If they get disgusted enough with Walker, they might just forget to show up at the polls, decide at the last minute to skip the Walker/Warnock line on the ballot, or maybe write in the name of some YouTube influencer they really agree with.

Conversely, watching Christian Walker rail against his Dad on social media might convince a few young men to get off their butts and register to vote. Seeing yet another example of the hypocrisy of the religious Right might give some marginal female voters a push to go protect their bodily autonomy.

If you want to know what difference this scandal will make, you have to look there, not at the Dana Loeschs.

One final note on Christianity. Walker is responding to the scandal obliquely, with an ad his campaign calls “Grace“.

Raphael Warnock’s running a nasty, dishonest campaign. Perfect for Washington. The Reverend doesn’t even tell my full story. My true story. As everyone knows, I had a real battle with mental health. I even wrote a book about it. And by the grace of God, I’ve overcome it. Warnock’s a preacher, who doesn’t tell the truth. He doesn’t even believe in redemption. I’m Herschel Walker, saved by grace, and I approve this message.

This ad is an opportunistic mishmash of themes. On the one hand it hints at a denial: Warnock’s campaign is “dishonest”, so whatever they’re accusing me of, I didn’t do it. On the other hand, maybe I did do it, but God has forgiven me. So anyone who brings up the bad things I did or tries to hold me responsible for them “doesn’t believe in redemption”.

If there still are any Trump-era conservatives who have anything more than an opportunistic relationship with Christianity, I have a theological question: In what theory of grace does God forgive you for stuff that you still deny you did? What kind of repentance allows you to keep saying that your accusers are liars?

All the theologians I know refer to this kind of grace disdainfully as “cheap grace”, which Dietrich Bonhoeffer defined as “forgiveness without repentance”. Your sin goes away because taking responsibility for it is inconvenient. Or, as the mother of the child Walker wanted aborted put it: “He picks and chooses where it’s convenient for him to use that religious crutch.”

Amanda Marcotte points out the long-term cost Christianity is paying and will continue to pay for this kind of hypocrisy: The adults may not believe what they’re saying, but the kids do — until they realize it’s all a con.

The kids are watching. Young people raised in churches often DO believe the lies about chastity and “pro-life.” This hypocrisy exposes them to the truth before they’re too deep to extract themselves. And they turn their backs on their parents. I have met SO MANY people who became liberals because of the hypocrisy of the conservative environments they grew up in. It’s a major reason every generation is more liberal than the last. So this shit matters.

When Christians lament about the decline of their religion and the growing number of Americans with no religious affiliation, they shouldn’t vaguely blame “the culture” or “Hollywood liberals”, because they’re doing it to themselves. Christianity is losing its children because the kids see their elders saying one thing and doing something else.