Bannon oversells his clout
AWashington lobbyist once told me that the first rule of rainmakers is: “If it starts to rain, dance!” In other words, if you’re hired to get something done, by all means take credit for it if it happens, even if you had nothing to do with it.
Another version of the same principle is Ferris Buellerism. In the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” the precocious teen sees a parade in downtown Chicago and proceeds to run in front of it as if he’d been leading it all along.
Fired White House aide Steve Bannon is a quintessential Ferris
Bueller. My late friend
Andrew Breitbart created the media empire that regrettably still bears his name. When he died, Bannon took over the parade Andrew launched.
Bannon followed the same playbook in the 2016 presidential race. He boarded the Trump train late and pretended he’d been the conductor all along.
In the recent Alabama GOP runoff for U.S. Senate, President Trump and Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell supported incumbent Sen. Luther Strange, whose weakness as a candidate could be attributed to his near-total lack of charisma and the dodgy circumstances of his appointment to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ former Senate seat.
Strange’s opponent in the runoff was former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, a well-known and controversial figure in the state. Moore was always way ahead in the polls. But Bannon parachuted in and backed the likely winner, insisting that a vote for Moore was a vote for Trump’s agenda and would serve as a thumb in the eye of the Washington establishment, particularly McConnell. Moore won, and rainmaker Bannon danced, taking credit for something that would have happened anyway.
Now, Bannon is claiming he will back candidates to challenge every incumbent senator up for re-election in 2018, save for Ted Cruz, who is supported by the billionaire Mercer family, patrons of Bannon and Breitbart News.
It’s understandable that Bannon and his employees at Breitbart would want to perpetuate the myth of Bannon’s rainmaking skills. Less forgivable is the eagerness of the political press to perpetuate the myth that Bannon is a master political strategist and a kingmaker in Republican politics.
In 2016, at the height of Trump’s popularity with grassroots Republicans, Bannon tried his “fight the establishment” shtick and failed miserably. He backed Trump copycat Paul Nehlen’s bid to topple House Speaker Paul Ryan in the Wisconsin GOP primary. Nehlen lost by 68 percentage points. Bannon tried the same thing in Senate primaries in Alabama, Arizona and Indiana and got shellacked in each of them.
“Watching Bannon make threats against entrenched Republican senators is like watching an armchair fantasy football player manage a professional football team,” National Journal political editor Josh Kraushaar writes.
Or maybe not. Given the anger at the GOP “establishment,” the Bannon-backed challengers might win their primary fights. Those candidates might then go on to lose in the general election, as McConnell recently warned in a Rose Garden appearance with the president. “Bannonism” — to the extent that it’s an “ism” — may not appeal to the traditional conservatives and swing voters needed to win a general election.
If the Bannonistas lose, you can be sure Bannon will insist they were stabbed in the back by the “establishment” and “disloyal” Republicans. And if they win in the primaries or the general elections, it will certainly be due to their own merits and the anger of the GOP base at the Washington dysfunction that fuels right-wing populism these days. When it rains he’ll dance, taking credit for wins he didn’t earn, and he’ll blame losses on the dysfunction he helps fuel.
Clearly we have to continue to fight against the Taliban, against others, in order for them to understand they will never win a military victory.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson during a surprise visit Monday to Afghanistan