Chris Churchill: Kavanaugh fight deepened national chasm.
Fifty years ago this week, George Wallace came to Albany. The fiery segregationist, then the governor of Alabama, was running for president in 1968, and his rally on the steps of the Capitol was as tumultuous as you would expect. Among the crowd of 5,000 were protesters gathered across the street at Academy Park.
“Sieg Heil!” they chanted. “Down with Wallace!”
The man with the slicked hair didn’t let the taunts go unanswered. “You are through in this country when I’m elected president,” Wallace bellowed during a speech in which he claimed polls showing Richard Nixon ahead in the race were “rigged” by the “eastern money establishment.”
The more things change... If nothing else, the anniversary of Wallace’s visit is a reminder that the division and rancor of the moment are hardly new. Given
that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated in 1968, and Wallace himself was shot four years later, you could convincingly argue the animus was much worse then.
But it is bad now. Really bad.
The fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination was a national black eye that made our chasm obvious and deeper. With the sexual-assault allegation by Christine Blasey Ford viewed entirely through partisan lenses, few involved were fair-minded — least of all Democrats who assumed it must be true, despite the lack of corroboration, largely because they objected to Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy.
Just in case Ford’s testimony might not be enough to finish Kavanaugh, the allegations shifted toward the trivial. He once threw ice at somebody! He joked about puking! A classmate may have seen him sloppy drunk! He was no choir boy!
The stuff from decades ago, much of it heresay, was repeated gleefully on CNN and MSNBC, but was irrelevant to Ford’s allegation or the Supreme Court. It was character assassination.
Kavanaugh was also accused of lacking the proper judicial temperament, given that he had angrily defended himself. Here’s a question: How would former Supreme Court justices — Antonin Scalia, say, or Earl Warren — have reacted to being accused of systematic gang rape, as Kavanaugh was by Michael Avenatti’s unreliable client?
Thankfully, we will never know.
Some of the attacks worked to Kavanaugh’s benefit, because they drew attention away from Ford’s allegations and made the whole process seem suspect. Others tainted the attackers far more than the nominee.
Consider that the ACLU, an organization that has long defended due process, spent $1 million on appalling ads that compared Kavanaugh to Bill Cosby, a convicted sexual predator. What in God’s name has happened? Has everybody forgotten Atticus Finch?
You don’t have to like Kavanaugh or the man who chose him to be troubled by all this. You can support the #Metoo movement and think the groupthink aimed at Kavanaugh was largely unfair. You don’t have to believe Ford was lying to concede that she could just possibly be wrong.
Our memories, after all, are fallible. We are human.
The divide isn’t the fault of Democrats alone, of course. President Trump sprinkles gasoline on the fires of division daily. He mocked Ford’s testimony, despite the evidence of her pain. It was mean, unnecessary. And some in the crowd laughed.
I’m writing this on Friday evening, not long after Susan Collins, the moderate and principled senator from Maine, all but assured Kavanaugh’s nomination by announcing she would vote for him. Collins did so only after imploring us, in her rational and remarkable speech, to be more civil, to take sexual assault allegations seriously and to remember our long-standing values.
“The Senate confirmation process is not a trial,” Collins said. “But certain fundamental legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence and fairness do bear on my thinking and I cannot abandon them.”
Collins said what had become obvious: There wasn’t evidence to back Ford’s words.
“The four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events of that evening gathering where she says the assault occurred,” she said. “None of the individuals Professor Ford says were at the party has any recollection at all of that night.”
It would have been nice if everyone had paused when Collins was done to think about what she’d said and consider her points. Of course, that isn’t what happened. The Twitter mob brimmed with rage.
“Never let Collins have a moment of peace in public again,” wrote a person who should know better.
“She’s a traitor to her country and her gender,” tweeted another, a man repeating a common refrain.
A traitor to her gender? Isn’t it a bit sexist for a man to suggest that all women must think alike?
It is easy to be pessimistic about where we are headed. The poison in our politics is making everyone sick. It might not be as bad as 1968, but it is close.