What MTG Got Right
What MTG Got Right
No, not a fan. But there's something she understood other GOP Belles in the past didn't
Yeah, I know. She’s an extremist nut. She’s a fanatical, QAnon preaching, radical right wing crazy. No disagreements there. She’s one in a long line of GOP female flashes in the pan that drive page clicks, twitter memes and 4chan comment boards. Yup, 100% agreement with you there. The very position has become somewhat of a cliche; “The GOP Belle.” Even though sexist, you cannot deny that there is a very particular role there in the modern Republican party for this. When they lose, resign or just plain go away, there is a palpable void to be filled, and nature abhors a vacuum.
But this picture above underscores something that MGT gets that her previous Republican Tea Party/MAGA/”Burn it all down” forebearers didn’t or don’t. To comprehend it, you just have to look at the ones who came before and what happened to them. The common thread is that either they are held at arms length from establishment members who recognize their electoral toxicity or they flame out in drastic fashion.
Katherine Harris
Katherine Harris was the first to set the standard in it’s current form. Sure, the GOP had elected women to higher office before, but they were qualified and intellectual. Think Kay Bailey Hutchinson. The current standard of vapid, stumbling, misspeaking elected GOP female began with Katherine Harris.
Her rise had a lot to do with being the right person in the right place at the right time more than anything, but how she got that position is a big reason she’s included here. First, she was instrumental in the 1990s of introducing a shady financier to Florida GOP circles. She ran in the Secretary of State race in 1998 as a more conservative candidate than the current GOP incumbent and won. Once Jeb Bush won as Governor, further investigations into the financier (who went to jail) were quashed, but from then on other state GOP officials kept their distance from Harris.
Then, of course, came the 2000 Bush v Gore election, putting a huge spotlight on the Florida Secretary of State. She had purged 173k people prior to the election, and made decisions favorable to the Bush team. The result was a 537 vote win for Bush, when she ended the recounts and the campaigns focused on resolving things in court. This ended up being the final official margin of victory when the Supreme Court made its decision. 1
During her shortened term as Secretary of State, she spent $106k on travel, going to eight different countries on ten foreign trips. She eventually resigned the job to focus on a successful run for Congress in 2002 to a very Republican seat. She was also re-elected in 2004.
However, in 2005 it became public that a major financial backer was involved in a bribery scandal. She was also implicated in an ethics violation accepting a $2800 dinner with a defense contractor (along with $32k in campaign donations) when the Congressional limit was $50. Her campaign advisor seemed to infer that Harris was either inept or ignorant (and incompetent) to understand what the job entailed and the staff quit in early 2006.
Despite all that, in 2006 she announced she was running for Senate against Democrat Bill Nelson. The campaign was a mess from the start and completely underfunded. Despite declaring numerous times about how she was injecting millions of her own money into the campaign (which she never did), she lost ignominiously, barely getting 39% of the vote.
Michelle Bachmann
If Harris was the template, Bachmann was the clone. A hard right Republican in the Minnesota state legislature for years, she won a House seat in 2006, just as Harris was leaving hers. With Harris no longer receiving all the attention from GOP AM radio and scorn from liberal Air America, Bachmann stepped in perfectly to fill the void.
Aside from the ideological cohesion with the far right, she effortlessly demonstrated all the subtleties that irritated liberals and drew adoration from the right. At a State of the Union as President George W. Bush walked down the aisle, she gave him a huge kiss right in front of the camera. Karl Rove praised the enthusiasm; Keith Olbermann’s head exploded.
From the get-go she was a case study in faux pas and misunderstanding of basic facts. However, with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, she became a lightning rod for attention when she preached in favor of the anti-establishment Tea Party in 2009-10. As one of its most prominent and vocal proponents, she was a fixture on FOX News throughout the campaign. When asked about specific issues or details she didn’t have any, but could routinely throw a verbal haymaker at a rally or a soundbite for television coverage.
After the successful 2010 election for the GOP, she decided to run for President in 2012, announcing her candidacy in the city of her birth, Waterloo, IA. She even was the first woman ever to win the Ames Straw Poll in the summer of 2011. But her over the top rhetoric was outlandish, and party insiders were happy to ostracize her to the fringe, triangulating to a more advantageous political position. At the Iowa caucuses she placed a dismal 6th and bowed out. Her star was already on the wane.
She ran for Congress instead and completed two more relatively quiet terms before retiring.
Sarah Palin
Overlapping with the rise of Bachmann is the brief political tenure of Alaska’s Sarah Palin. Oh, Sarah.
On August 28th, 2008, Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Nomination for President in Denver. By all accounts, the entire week had been a complete success for Democrats; great coverage, unity, approval rating skyrocketing. Obama’s speech was probably the best acceptance speech since Reagan’s and people were openly wondering how on earth the GOP could compete with what was shaping up to be a blowout.
Coverage continued into the next day, until 10 am when everyone managed to forget the speech and the convention altogether and started googling the name “Sarah Palin.” It was like a political bomb had gone off. This political unknown had become the center of a media firestorm. It seemed like either a stroke of genius or a last desperate attempt at winning. Who was this novelty that John McCain put on the ticket to potentially be next in line for the Presidency?
Well, it was apparent she could handle herself verbally. An adept rabble-rouser, she paused her VP acceptance speech at the GOP Convention in St. Paul to tell a joke; “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick.” The crowds ate it up. Coming out of the St. Paul convention, McCain’s campaign was on the rise. Her crowds wherever she spoke were huge and McCain’s paled in comparison. Palin-mania swept the GOP and the country. She was a big bomb of kerosene for the base that blew up everything.
And then the bottom came out.
Despite the shiny veneer, it became quickly apparent that there was zero substance underneath. It was like a top of the line lamborghini without an engine. She lacked basic understanding of issues. She would respond to serious questions with unserious, even ignorant soundbytes, clear lies or pivot to a strawman stemwinder against liberals. The ultra-conservative Republican base didn’t care; to them she was the ideal, to be put on a pedastal. Who cares if it was accurate or not?—just stick it to the liberals! To the center-right, or to those that care about governing, she was a disgrace and couldn’t be taken seriously. She quickly developed animosity among the Established GOP operatives running the McCain campaign, who quickly regretted putting her on the ticket and have denounced her ever since.
After losing the election she went back to Alaska. She didn’t even finish her governorship, quitting 6 months later. Now that she had a taste for what was outside of Juneau, larger dreams awaited. But her reality show was a dud, her family became a laughingstock, and she retreated back to Alaska. Her endorsement and appearances still carried some weight with the anti-establishment GOP, and it helped lend credibility to then candidate Donald Trump in 2016. However, her run for at large congressperson from Alaska failed (twice) in 2022. People had had enough of Sarah Palin.
Lauren Boebert
Boebert’s resume, positions and even personal history are almost a complete doppleganger to Palin’s. She’s a hard right, gun-totin’, liberal angst stokin’, vapid candidate from a western state. Even the kind of sketchy personal history seems to be part of the template. She can throw out right wing red meat rhetorically with the best of them, but in reality she has no real sense of what she is saying or advocating. She’s just a mouthpiece.
Like Marjorie Taylor Greene, she was first elected in 2020 as part of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. In reality, this is just the same anti-establishment group of right wing conservatives who were part of the Tea Party in 2010 and part of Pat Buchanan’s campaign in 1996 (and to a smaller extent Ross Perot’s failed Presidential bids in 1992 and 1996). They’re political iconoclasts by nature. They don’t know what they hate, but whatever the established political class is trying to do, that’s what they’ll rail against.
Running in a pretty red district, she almost managed to lose to a Democrat in 2022, during a Democratic Presidential Midterm. You have to be a pretty awful candidate for that to happen.
Which brings us to where Boebert stood last week, consistently voting againt Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. Her and 19 other “renegades” prevented McCarthy from attaining the position, and completely embarrassed him and the party in the process. Eventually, they recanted, voting “present” to give McCarthy the Speakership. But they were able to draw concessions that look to turn the House of Representatives into a laughable house of cards. Governance is going to suffer greatly.
Finally, the point of all this
Which brings us to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Politically, she’s like everything Boebert is, just moreso. Not only is she a hard right MAGA Republican, she’s a QAnon conspiracy theorist to boot. When she speaks on the floor of the House, it has more in common with someone addressing a City Council Meeting complaining about keeping pedophile demons away from her dog than it does sensible national public policy discourse. She spent most of her first term kicked off committees and losing connections to the party’s fundraising and campaign apparatus, as smart party managers tried to distance themselves from the firebrand.
But that doesn’t mean people can’t learn from their mistakes. And the most important lesson is that once you are elected to Congress, you ARE the establishment, no matter how much you love to think that you’re not.
Unlike ALL the others listed above, MGT didn’t stay in the anti-establishment this last week. Sure, she hasn’t changed an iota on any of her positions or ideas. But she’s softened her rhetoric some, and has eased up on criticizing her own party’s leadership. What she understands now is that in order to get anything done in politics, or accumulate some measure of power, she has to swim with the current, not against it. And from McCarthy’s standpoint, its better to ease up to MGT and have her in the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing on it.
So as vote after vote occurred this week on McCarthy’s speakership happened, MGT was McCarthy’s most vocal and visible hard right supporter. It’s mutually beneficial to both of them. She’s collected a very valuable chit with the most powerful House member she can use to cash in later when she needs to. Contrast that with Boebert, who only gained favor with ally-less Matt Gaetz and is likely to face some form of consequences, either within Congress or her campaign, for her very visible beligerence.
I’m not hopeful MGT is suddenly going to turn into a normal politician; she just isn’t. I don’t expect her to turn around and become sensible; she’s not. Besides, this may only be a temporary alliance of convenience with a bomb-thrower for McCarthy until he need help again.
But it is notable that when the road diverged in the woods, Boebert went one way, MGT went the other, and that has made all the difference in their trajectories.
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Parting Thoughts
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PurpleAmerica considers this the single worst decision in the last half century. It’s particularly egregious when you consider the justices who voted for it specifically stated it shouldn’t be used as precedent, meaning they understood it’s lacking of legal justification. Nonetheless, the world we have lived in since harkens back to this terrible outcome.