Power players don’t always have bootstraps
In a turnabout, many well-to-do people seem to be without proper footwear this winter. It’s no holiday season for them. They’re discovering how hard it is to pull themselves up by the bootstraps when there’s nothing to grab onto.
Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller heads the list of those grasping for something, anything, to claim as progress.
Keller, a Democrat, resembles an unflattering character from the old television series The Wire, in which a fictional mayor manipulated crime statistics to advance his career. It worked on HBO, but real life is rougher.
Keller claimed there were big drops in Albuquerque’s crime rate, only to be humiliated later for providing inaccurate statistics.
He looked like an upwardly mobile politician when he was a state senator and then the state auditor. As a 42-year-old mayor, Keller is at sea in a landlocked city.
Wealthy Republicans in New Mexico are the largest group of comfortable but deprived people. They’re stuck in quicksand under Steve Pearce, their babbling party chairman.
Pearce’s office recently distributed an unsigned, incendiary statement calling Democratic U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján “unfit to serve in Washington.”
It was strange strategy. With Pearce in charge, the Republican Party already has ceded New Mexico’s 2020 U.S. Senate election to Luján.
Three patsies on the Republican side are competing for the chance to be routed by Luján. With Republicans doomed in what should have been a competitive race for an open Senate seat, Pearce continues the trend he was supposed to stop. He has New Mexico on its way to becoming a one-party state.
Santa Fe-area District Attorney Marco Serna is spending workweeks campaigning to succeed Luján in the U.S. House of Representatives. Serna, a Democrat, wants to talk about sweeping issues, such as opioid addiction and the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
Voters, though, can’t help but notice Serna’s ineffectiveness as a prosecutor. His staff just lost another high-profile case. The defendant was acquitted of slashing a homeless man with a machete.
Serna is finding that winning a seat in Congress gets harder when a candidate has no record of accomplishment.
Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii voted “present” on Trump’s impeachment. She gets an F for decisiveness.
Gabbard’s campaign for president was dying anyway. Now all that’s left is the autopsy. Voters don’t send politicians to Congress to duck decisions, especially on whether to charge Trump with corruption.
The impeachment proceedings against Trump did more than shine a momentary light on Gabbard before she fades away. They showed how extreme the country is politically since the days of Watergate.
Republicans in that era were instrumental in driving Richard Nixon from the presidency, even though he was the leader of their party.
Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and other elected leaders of the GOP told Nixon he had so little support in Congress he could not survive an impeachment proceeding. That was the tipping point in August 1974. Nixon seemed ready to resign rather than be thrown out of office.
But Goldwater went further. He asked the Washington Post to hold off reporting on the president being on the brink of quitting. Goldwater didn’t want Nixon to to be inflamed by a news story and then announce he would fight to stay in office.
The Post editor, Ben Bradlee, said Goldwater’s judgment in the matter was keener than his own. Nixon resigned two days after his meeting with Goldwater.
That was 45 years ago, but a millennium in the world of politics.
Now Trump is secure in believing he would be acquitted in a trial before a Republican-controlled Senate. Already his onetime antagonist, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has announced he would be a partial juror who would keep Trump in office.
Trump’s hold on his party is stronger than Nixon’s was, even though Nixon won 49 states in his 1972 reelection. Trump won the election of 2016 while losing the popular vote.
With Trump standing for reelection next year, no more than 10 swing states will decide whether he gets a second term.
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Virginia and Florida might be won either by Trump or whatever Democrat he faces. Maybe North Carolina and Nevada will be in play.
The rest of the states are locked in, one way or the other.
Pearce, of course, keeps saying Trump has a path to victory in New Mexico.
With Republicans headed for defeat in at least three of four upcoming congressional races in New Mexico, Pearce has to toe the party line. Trump is all he has.