By Jack Bernard
PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. | “Snooker: To make a dupe of, hoodwink” (Merriam-Webster dictionary).
When I was in high school, my father moved my family to a small North Georgia town. I had little to do, so I hung out at the local pool halls with the good old boys. Sometimes, an out-of-town foolish braggart would come in, bet big on a game of pool and be taken to the cleaners by a local pool shark. The guys would just laugh at him and say he had been “snookered.”
That town was very close to Margorie Taylor Greene’s district, where she is snookering the Democrats.
Understand that Republican Margorie Taylor Greene is a QAnon fanatic who believes in destructive conspiracy theories. She is an anti-semitic racist who says that the election was somehow stolen, that President Biden is a threat to national security, that there are Jewish space lasers, that Muslims should not hold elected positions, that people of color are drug dealing criminals, and that a rifle is the answer to every dispute.
Once upon a time, the Grand Old Party had a big tent. There were liberal GOP governors like Nelson Rockefeller and Senators like Jacob Javits. But Richard Nixon’s race-based Southern strategy successfully wooed the conservative Dixiecrats into the GOP. So, that big tent gradually disappeared. The GOP has lost its soul and become the party of misogynists, bigots… and kooks like Ms. Greene.
So, how has Ms. Greene snookered the Democrats? The answer is she has them wasting their time trying to get her defeated rather than placing their efforts on swing districts.
I’m on both GOP and Democratic donor lists. I’m absolutely inundated with requests to contribute to this campaign or that one. But the one candidate that I hear from most frequently is Marcus Flowers, an African American Democrat competing for Greene’s seat in a district that is one of the nation’s most conservative and 90 percent white.
He has every right to run, even though he has never held any political office and appears unqualified (just like Ms. Greene). And I would vote for him if I lived in his district. Further, because Democrats are frustrated with his opponent, he has raised over $ 8 million.
But Flowers is not a good old boy white conservative, who would be the only electable Democrats in most rural Southern districts. Does the Democratic Party think that Flowers has any chance at all of actually winning? Has a black Democrat ever been elected to Congress in a conservative solid GOP Southern district like this one?
You wonder why the Democrats nominated him? Was it to make a political statement of some sort? If so, it is the kind that relieves frustration but produces no results!
I was an elected official, elected twice as a Republican. But I personally despise what the GOP is becoming, a radical, anti-democracy party characterized by conservative zealotry, religious extremism, and bigotry.
But I am a pragmatist, not a “woke” type. In very reactionary districts like the one Ms. Greene represents, the situation will not change in my lifetime. In the meantime, she and her ilk are snookering the Democrats who put their time, effort and money into losing campaigns like Flowers ($8 million). Instead, they should concentrate on getting local Democratic parties more active, recruit good candidates and place more effort and money into swing districts where they actually have a chance of winning.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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