Now that Stacey Abrams (D) has conceded the governorship of Georgia to (very, very recently) former Georgia Secretary of State, aka Counter Of Votes, Brian Kemp (R), the Kemp Campaign to get His Ass Re-elected as Governor has already kicked off, courtesy President Trump. CNN has made available notable parts of a transcript of Fox News‘ Chris Wallace’s interview with the President, and this tidbit comes to the fore, as a number of pundits have noticed:
“And it was all stacked against Brian, and I was the one that went for Brian and Brian won.”
Anyone paying attention knows that Georgia’s a deep-red state in which Kemp should have had an easy win. Furthermore, Kemp, in his role as Secretary of State, pushed for modifications to voter rules, purged voter roles, and in general pursued a number of changes to electoral procedures that were designed to suppress the vote, while looking like reforms. I shredded the “exact match” law into tatters and then danced on them in this post.
But I don’t read the above just as part of the usual Trump self-important fallacious braggadocio. I don’t doubt Trump needs to rain praise on himself as part of his mental disability, but I also think this is the kick-off for Kemp’s re-election campaign. The best campaigns, regardless of the Party or the quality of the candidate, tell solid stories concerning the candidate. Maybe the story is how they were a combat pilot in Iraq, and now they’re up against the terrible odds of battling the bloviating incumbent who’s held the seat for the last 30 years. There’s a good story beginning in this hypothetical case. Or the former Trump voter who was running for Congress and telling it how he saw it – that Trump was not what he claimed, but the candidate was so pissed off that, well, I think his hair caught fire. This one is more or less true. Another good story. (I forget the guy’s name and don’t know if he won or not. It was a House race in West Virginia.)
In Kemp’s case, it’s how he battled against impossible odds in order to pull off the impossible dream – a Republican winning the governor’s seat in Georgia.
Yeah, if you put it that way, and you’re a politically conscious citizen of Georgia, or someone who pays attention to politics in America, it’s a joke. That Abrams came as close as she did to beating Kemp has to leave the GOP completely shattered and, if it was rational, desperately conducting a post-mortem. They may conduct that post-mortem, but I seriously doubt much will come of it. In these situations, certain interests are typically too entrenched to easily ouster, and instead they’ll depend on their deteriorating marketing machine to pull them through 2020 and 2022.
But back on point, notice that Trump didn’t mention Georgia, didn’t mention anything that’ll work against the story he’s crafting. He’s focused on Kemp, on the alleged (and false) odds that he faced, and, boy, with just a smidgen of help from his buddy Trump, Kemp won.
In fact, I’m missing something here. It’s never Kemp. It’s Brian. It’s that friendly touch, using the given name rather than the colder surname. Surnames are impersonal, unless they’ve been mutilated, such as Brownie for Brown. That practice, however, may not be used for a generation because it’ll remind voters of the mismanagement of the response to Hurricane Katrina, the responsibility, deserved or not, of FEMA Director Michael “Brownie” Brown, who worked for President Bush (R), whose name shall only be spoken through gritted teeth by the GOP Faithful.
This is all part of an ongoing effort to shape the narrative of the Georgia electoral battle. The GOP is well aware that it has done its best to shape how the electorate votes, from gerrymandering (not applicable here) to purging voter roles and the whole “exact match” imminent disaster, without regard to “fairness” or even legality. They want to make the next go around into personal battles against the “cheating” of the Democrats, a word that has already been deployed a number of times on the GOP side, in order to distract attention from their own peccadilloes.
It’s easy to write off Trump’s utterances as utterly self-serving and the sign of a deteriorating mind, even the mark of dementia. And they may be. But they are also the opening salvos in the next 4 years of campaigning.
And keeping that campaigning honest will take the strongest efforts of our free press.
