Kari quakes, and other lessons along campaign trails' tryout moments
Will Trump still be the effective vehicle to achieve conservatives' goals? Or will he order them around like other misguided Republican officials who thought they knew better what voters deserve?
PHOENIX — What got into Arizona GOP U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, a self-described fighting conservative, and her fast-shifting stands on permissive abortion in April? Was someone else making decisions for her? And I don’t mean her own campaign manager. Let’s chew this over as we think about some other political players first.
One reason for political campaigns is to try out what works and what doesn’t as the candidate makes a pitch. Another reason is to see how and if the candidate could handle the job in office. If he or she can’t even respond to a few cutting remarks at the debate lectern, it’s harder to think of the candidate running a successful team as a victorious incumbent.
If campaigns were intended to acquaint voters with the candidates, there’d be no need for debates at the presidential level this year, assuming the two major-party nominees are Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden. Is there more than a handful of voters who haven’t already formed an impression sufficient in their own judgment for them to make their decision for November?
This isn’t around 150 years ago, when a whistle-stopping politician at the rear of a train car crossing the Plains provided the only opportunity for voters actually to look at and listen to a character they otherwise knew only from their grainy newspapers. If that candidate had promised them that not so far in the future, their descendants could carry around something smaller than a box of playing cards that would enable them to watch and research countless events in color in real time around the entire world, they’d think he lost his mind or was lying better than any politician ever had.
Whether to have 21st century debates for various levels of political candidates often is decided for the purely tactical reason of who is expected to be helped and who isn’t. In Republican primaries for 2024, Trump avoided debates because, to a large extent, as the best known of the hopefuls, he didn’t want to help his GOP foes get attention for themselves. But once Trump had his nomination pretty much secured, he was eager to debate Joe Biden for the general election.
Anyone having observed what a pitiful spectacle the cognitively impaired Biden was when merely trying to make sense of the prepared words on a teleprompter, and read aloud the stage directions just for his eyes, could see why Trump was eager for some give-and-take with the Democrat who absolutely should not have been, and did not deserve to be, his radicalized party’s presidential candidate.
But perhaps it could be said that his party deserved to be stuck with Biden. Just don’t let Biden debate, in other words, lest he destroy himself at the ballot box.
Or at least be destroyed if it’s an honestly handled ballot box. This feeble, elderly Biden literally could fall over dead at an event four months before Election Day and still get more votes through his party’s cheating machine. I’m NOT asking for his demise this way. But who, actually, would be shocked if it occurred, considering his obviously ill health and his 82nd birthday approaching later in November? He was born the very year after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the U.S. into WWII.
Is Trump still the guy voters want?
Anyone knows Trump is a take-charge guy who can run the executive department at the highest levels in business, and also did it from the White House. But is Trump the guy who voters want taking charge now? Sickly Biden, on the other hand, although only a few years older than Trump, couldn’t even manage running one fast-food restaurant on the corner, much less the U.S. government. Why should you let Biden manage the local food stand? Assuming that he thinks the eatery is important enough for his attention, his reason would be that HE WANTS TO! HE DESERVES TO! DON’T MEDDLE WITH JOEY’S PLANS! No matter in what way he comes up with them.
No wonder Biden ran his 2020 campaign hiding in the basement. And would like to do the same this year.
The U.S. has been blessed by God that Biden hasn’t already destroyed this nation or a number of nations in a nuclear war — although Biden’s team is busy destroying the U.S. every other way it can. It’s plain that befuddled Biden isn’t and couldn’t be the one really running the White House circus. Maybe it’s Barack Obama, maybe it’s chief of staff Jeff Zients, maybe it’s both Barack and Jeff, maybe it’s Biden’s wife — although that’s over her head. Over her head, over his head, over both of their heads, Biden is just a figurehead out by the front door. He’s lucky if they even give him a key to the door.
Anyone planning to vote to reelect Joe Biden as president has some other reason, and none of them justifiable or defensible.
As for Trump, no doubt he’d be attracting a sympathy vote as a defendant very obviously under a dirty Democrat lawfare siege in four courts. But is he still the responsive outsider who voters feeling ignored took a chance on in 2016, then felt he proved himself at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? Voters didn’t choose him just to be their entertainment showman, but their political do-man. If he got out front to lead their parade, they at least wanted to be in it with him. But if it becomes his parade that they’re just permitted to show up for, does he become a drum major without a parade behind him, or even a drum to carry?
In late 2023 Louisiana GOP Cong. Mike Johnson came to many voters’ attention for the first time when his U.S. House colleagues chose him to be their Speaker. In early January 2024 Johnson was joined by more than 60 other House members as they went right to Texas’ border with Mexico. Johnson pledged that the U.S.’s own border security, not distant nations’, would take priority, despite Joe Biden’s delusional globalism. Mike Johnson said, in part:
“What we saw today only made House Republicans more resolved to stand for sanity and the American people and we will do it. If President Biden wants a supplemental spending bill focused on national security, it better begin by defending America’s national security. It begins right here on our southern border.”
Haha. Fooled ya again, sez Johnson before long.
As I posted here at Substack.com on April 26, less than four months after Johnson’s pledge at the border:
Impressive-sounding GOP hero Johnson soon abandoned his position on U.S. border security while helping Biden and the Democratic Party secure the tens of billions of tax dollars they wanted to fund Biden's manipulative overseas agenda -- even though badly impaired Biden kept the U.S. border ripped wide open.
And immediately after that, Johnson dashed off to New York City so he could sound tough against lawless demonstrators around Columbia University who favored the Palestinian cause.
Did Johnson figure that the U.S. voter has such a short attention span, he'd be awed at Johnson doing a different pantomime act this time -- even while the voter maybe forgot that foreign terrorists love to violate the U.S. border that Johnson so quickly had lost interest in?
Many fellow politicians and voters felt badly betrayed that Johnson so soon proved that he could doubletalk and deceive with the trickiest of them. But Trump jumped in to defend Johnson from voter wrath.
I wrote in that Substack.com post to note that simulcasting Arizona conservative radio talk host James T. Harris (KFYI in Phoenix, KNST in Tucson) on April 24
noted that Trump was throwing his support to Mike Johnson -- despite Johnson's turncoat role. Harris said the Establishment needs Trump to calm down conservatives, while Trump needs the Establishment's presidential campaign contributions…
The New York Post posted on April 23: "Former President Donald Trump has again backed House Speaker Mike Johnson following the weekend passage of $95 billion in aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan...
"Johnson (R., La.) bucked the majority of his [GOP] conference ... and joined with 210 House Democrats to pass $60.8 billion that will assist Ukraine in its war against Russia," the Post added.
A different prominent newspaper named the Post, the left-wing Washington Post, posted over May 4-5 that at a large private luncheon at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, May 4, Trump made “wide-ranging” comments that lasted “for about 90 minutes” and included this:
He spent time musing about who would be his vice president, with a number of the potential contenders in the room. And he offered unequivocal praise for the embattled House speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), who was in the crowd, telling him that “you’re doing a very good job.” He added that other Republicans should “leave him alone,” even as one of Trump’s allies, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), is preparing a seemingly doomed effort to oust Johnson from his job next week.
Is betrayal of his key backers to become Trump’s style? Which brings us to some damaging behavior — “puzzling” behavior would be too weak a word — by staunch Trump ally Kari Lake.
Background gives Lake experience for persuading voters
I don’t have any insider connections to Lake’s campaign or to keys guiding her thinking. But she, due to her public professional experience, might well be best suited for the work of explaining to and persuading voters, especially in a case where they may know so little of the facts that they’re like people being asked to speak a foreign language they’ve never studied. Indeed, given the weights cultural, social, political and otherwise against conservatism, just being a conservative candidate in many locations requires an educator’s skills, abilities and dedication.
Really successful candidates like Ronald Reagan and Trump didn’t throw up their hands in surrender but relished the opportunity to make a change. “Oh, people aren’t ready for a governor of California like me!” “I’m too conservative to run for the presidency! People won’t be in my corner for a long time!” Hmm, I don’t seem to recall losers’ words like that from them.
Lake didn’t have a political track record when she surprisingly quit her job as a veteran Arizona major television news anchor in 2021. It hadn’t been her task, after all, to argue for certain political positions from the studio. But now freed from job constraints, she said she was fed up with the media bias, and she espoused conservative stands.
She said she soon was asked to enter politics to champion these views, so she did as a Trump conservative running for Arizona governor in 2022.
Hardly had MAGA Republicans including Lake won their primaries here in early August 2022 than Republican Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, expressed his horror. Politico posted on August 3, 2022:
“I think the only way back is by humiliation at the ballot box, and the problem is the Democrats aren’t strong enough to do that,” said Bill Gates, a Republican Maricopa County supervisor.
Of the Republicans, he said, “I think they are electable, which is frightening.”
“The election last night was a catastrophe for the Arizona Republican Party,” Gates said, “and, I would argue, our democracy.”
Major Phoenix-area radio news station KTAR (92.3 FM) posted similarly about Gates on August 5, 2022, citing the Politico article and running its own interview. Gates lamented the serious damage to “our democracy … our democracy” by the MAGA victors. KTAR posted Gates’ words including:
“I don’t want Republicans to lose elections, but I also don’t want candidates who stated that they’re not going to accept the wishes and the will of the voters to be serving in office.
“Sometimes it does take going through a difficult situation like that for a party to find itself again and to again nominate people who are focused more on all of the constituents and not just a few on one far extreme or the other….
“I don’t know where my party went astray, but we’ve got to get back to focusing on the issues that we could beat the Democrats on, issues like free markets, about property tax cuts,” he said.”
Gates was one Maricopa County official responsible for overseeing ballot results, as was Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who, of all things, established, and remained with, the anti-MAGA PAC Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona.
Of course Lake and other MAGA nominees lost their November 2022 elections fair and square to extremist Democrats like pro-abortion fanatics Katie Hobbs and Kris Mayes, who campaigned low-key from their basements and narrowly won. Simply the innocent breeze of Supervisors’ Chairman Gates and Recorder Richer walking behind the MAGA nominees at the edge of the losers’ abyss shoved them into it.
Donald Trump made some remarkable achievements on behalf of innocent preborn babies while in the White House. But he often later sounded as if he approached the pro-life issue as if it were as much of an abstraction to him as to pro-abortionists. Six weeks, 15 weeks, 20 weeks were just numbers about when legislators might think of restricting permissive abortion. Sort of like painting by-the-foot immersion numbers on a ship’s hull.
Pro-life issue now no more tangible to Trump than to Planned Parenthood?
Babies having their bodies destroyed after their mothers were propagandized into regarding them as “the enemy” didn’t seem more tangible now to Trump than to the president of Planned Parenthood. Trump repeatedly expressed concern about permissive abortion being a losing issue — but he meant losing for the Republicans and other pro-lifers who wanted to protect the babies and their mothers, not for the slaughterhouse Democratic Party that never got its fill of blood.
Sounds like there was a prime educational opportunity for Republicans reaching to the broader public here. It shouldn’t be any harder than telling people it isn’t a good idea to light themselves on fire.
Except that the broader public had been force-fed propaganda since the latter 1960s along the same lines that lighting oneself on fire is a very private and personal choice best made by the suicidally inclined. Oh, you’d never have to light yourself on fire, but you have no business poking your nose into the lives of those who sincerely felt it was best for them, maybe the only answer — even if the flames might jump onto onlookers sometimes, too.
The message against permissive abortion, expressed with courage and conviction, has to be a winning one, even though some of that courage means standing against a dominant media obsessed with pushing this slaughter. As a youngster in daily media in 1972, I saw signs of this obsession on the job back then, although somewhat restrained. But, like many avalanches, when the rocks get rolling, the restraint is lost. As recently as Democrat Bill Clinton’s presidency, permissive abortion was treated gingerly for public consumption. No longer!
Lake hurt herself by taking bad Trump advice?
In recent weeks at Substack.com I’ve reported Kari Lake’s backflip away from an assumed strong pro-life stand, then trying to edge back in that direction. A couple of national bloggers of pro-life sympathy who know I live in Arizona sought my thinking on Lake’s — would we call it a lack of courage? But as time passed recently, I wondered how much the decision was Lake’s own, and how much might have come from Trump telling her what to do.
And then Lake trying to recover her own Senate candidacy after bowing to bad guidance from Trump about what to do in Arizona.
In a May 3 news release Lake challenged her Democratic Senate opponent, Ruben Gallego, to a one-on-one debate on abortion. The radical pro-abortionist Gallego of course declined. Lake told reporters:
“I am officially challenging my opponent Ruben Gallego to a one-on-one debate on the issue of abortion. We owe it to the people of this state, not just to state our policy but to defend our policies. And I'm willing to do that.”
Her news release also said: “Today, just like he did when he abandoned his wife days before she gave birth to their son, Ruben Gallego walked out on a woman. Ruben was given the opportunity to tell the people of Arizona where he stands on this issue, but unfortunately, he doesn’t have the testicular fortitude to take it. We hope that the Gallego campaign will reconsider Kari’s offer.”
His former wife is Kate Gallego, the left-wing, pro-abortion Democratic mayor of Phoenix.
A story posted May 3 at the Arizona Sun Times website said that Lake
called on Gallego to defend partial-birth abortion, abortion up to the minute of birth, and sending taxpayer money overseas for abortion in foreign nations; and characterized Gallego’s stance as “radical,” stressing the immediate need to debate…
In her remarks, Lake emphasized the importance of providing comprehensive support for young women navigating the challenges of motherhood, including prenatal care, parenting classes, and financial aid. She stressed the significance of empowering women with choices beyond abortion, as many later regret the decision, contrasting it with the enduring fulfillment of motherhood.
I asked conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard about providing information to the public. Querard replied on May 5:
We need to change a lot more hearts and minds to win this issue nationally. Until then there will be pro-life states and pro-choice states. It seems like an obvious civil-rights and human-rights issue to pro-lifers, much like Abolition did back in the day. But even then the seemingly obvious sin of slavery had plenty of public support around the country, with higher support in Southern, heavily Democratic states.
I'd wager plenty of Abolitionists felt like we did and wondered why everyone hadn't yet figured out that human beings weren't property. So we shouldn't be surprised that we are where we are today.