It’s not just the Democrats

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, a Ron DeSantis-mold conservative Republican, may have just coughed up an unforced fumble wrapped in an unforced interception.

Implications for the midterm elections are … let us say, at this point, potentially interesting. What’s clear is that political ineptitude is bipartisan.

Devoted Democrats, plenty beleaguered already, have expressed exasperation at the focus in this space on the tactical ineptitude of national Democrats. They ask: Why choose to assail Democrats when Republicans defend insurrection, restrict voting and undercut public education?

The answer begins with the fact that America’s current political and cultural sensibilities are so perverted that the only way to win an election anymore is to explain that the other guy is even scarier than you.

With Republicans having just lost a vote against their frightfully megalomaniacal leader, and as they persist in allegiance to that creature, the only way Democrats could lose would be to give people something fresh to fear from them as well, or at least for Republicans to exploit with ease.

On cue, Democrats have given Republicans a tone-deaf move to the left that over-reaches their tiniest victory margins. Now Republicans could reap worsening inflation, supply-chain failures and rising gasoline prices—entirely matters of luck—to close their deal.

On the current seesaw, each party depends for success solely on the ineptitude of the other, assured that any loss will be short-term because few Americans want either of these parties for long.

The last thing Republicans would need with the seesaw teetering their way for 2022 is to propose actual policies revealing their true and frightful beliefs. That is where the aforementioned Rick Scott comes in with spectacular blunder.

As chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, he has decided unilaterally that his party colleagues who are on the ballot this year need to run on something, not merely rope the Democratic dopes.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a fine if cynical tactician, is beside himself. He wants 51 or more Republican votes in the Senate. And he knows the way to get them is to sit idly while Democrats donate them.

He said it clearly the other day, as if on truth serum. The only time for Republicans to outline a policy agenda for a Senate majority, McConnell said, is after they get one.

When it’s your turn to go up on the American political playground’s seesaw, by all means sit still.

Scott merely happens to be taking a turn as RSCC chairman. In that largely ceremonial and fundraising role, he has disastrously assigned to himself this advancement of an actual agenda that reads like the kook-right manifesto.

His 11-point midterm promise to voters in supposed behalf of Republican Senate candidates—he calls it “Rescue America”—wants the border wall finished and named for Donald Trump. It wants the federal Education Department abolished and for students to have free choice to attend the school that best meets for them a new mandate to assure that no children ever go home feeling guilty about something the history teacher said about what their country once did.

We will “rescue America” by explaining in our schools that the slaves were always free to go, that Rosa Parks always sat in the front row and that Trump killed Osama bin Laden with his tiny bare hands.

Scott’s plan wants all federal services sunsetted in five years and forced to remake the cases for their continued existences. As written, that would include Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

It wants all low-income persons to pay something in federal income taxes, which, depending on how that is structured, could raise taxes on the bottom economic half of the country.

Already Democrats are out with a commercial urging voters to fear that Social Security and Medicare might end and stand for judgment before modern-day Republicans who don’t believe in them.

Many economically disadvantaged seniors indeed might worry about a double-whammy—that Scott seems to be saying they should start paying some amount of federal income taxes on Social Security that would be imperiled and is all they have to live on, so meager in their cases that, after the standard deduction, it doesn’t reach the level of income subject to taxation under current law.

We need to extract some skin for our game from those freeloaders, Scott’s manifesto declares.

Please understand that none of that is likely to happen, thank goodness. That’s not the point.

The point is that Democrats’ best hope is for midterm swing voters to conclude that, while they don’t like the job Democrats have done, they fear the Republicans will end Social Security and raise taxes.

Scott thus is the Democrats’ best weapon.

He’ll probably soon announce at McConnell’s direction that radical leftists hacked his computer and contrived the whole thing. And he’ll be widely believed.