Please disable your Ad Blocker to better interact with this website.

Opinion

How Many Seats Did Lindsey Graham’s Political Bumbling Cost Conservatives In The Midterms?

Become a Clash Insider!

Don’t let Big Tech pre-chew your news. Sign up for our free email newsletter, and we’ll keep you in the loop.

As the dust settles from the Primaries, there is plenty of fingerpointing to go around. Partisans on either side look for reasons that specific races didn’t break as they expected.

AOC is raging at Democratic party leadership, MAGA Republicans are blaming establishment conseratives, Dems and moderates blame Trump. Round and round we go.

The buzzards will be picking through data from this post-mortem for weeks, months, and possibly even years to come.

But with a race still pending, it’s not a bad idea to take a quick survey of lessons we can apply with a fast turnaround time. And with a disproportionate percentage of Democrat support being carried on the back of unmarried women, that’s something we should take note of. If we can recalibrate our strategy or message to speak directly to what made them break blue, we should.

Democrats have lied about who we are and what we want to achieve almost as freely as they lie about who they themselves are and what they want to achieve. (The truth — like Obama’s position on same-sex marriage or Biden’s hard-left policies — is kept quiet until power has been taken and the public has no way to oppose them.)

But sometimes we hand them a gift that makes their lies seem credible. With so many races tilting blue by just a few percentage points, the Dems and their media lapdogs don’t have to work too hard to amplify any errors on our side.

One unforced error that may turn out to have been pivotal to many close races came from the mouth of Senator Lindsey Graham.

Initial public reaction to the Dobbs Ruling

Before he had opened his mouth, the left had spent a lot of energy in trying to turn the abortion issue into a fenzy. It got some traction, but never quite became a central issue.

Media overhyped the Dobbs decision because they thought they saw a vulnerability and something that could rally their base. They painted wild scenarios that were specifically excluded from the scope of this decison, ranging from same-sex marriage, to interracial marriage, to birth control issues.

Biden himself led the charge with these wild-eyed lies (of course he would) because they suited his political purposes, deliberately misinterpreting the words of a dissenting opinion suggesting that some of our other Supreme Court decisions may have been correctly decided, while being written on a foundation of poor precedent that — like the Dobbs Decision — could be misinterpreted.

You know Dems are lying because they tried to push legislation allowing unlimited abortion from conception to the last instant before birth while claiming to ‘codify Roe’. But that’s impossible. First, Roe was shot down by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, so the left had already admitted that the original ruling needed improvement.

Second, the original Roe Ruling did what no Democrat today would DARE to do… it acknowledged that there were TWO rights under consideration here, that of the mother and that of the unborn child. At some point in the pregnancy when the baby could be properly called ‘alive’, it bacame the government’s interest to protect that life like it would the life of any other living person.

There was party discipline for a while. The ruling would defer to Federalism. Blue states would have support of very aggressively pro-aboriton legislation, Red States would follow the example of almost every other country in the world and limit abortion to early in the pregnancy, if at all. This was not going to be a Federal decision, stop trying to whip up fear.

Then, in September, Lindsey Graham gave the left a rhetorical win

There was nothing to be gained by putting forward legislation they had no political capital to pass. Even if the House and Senate had the votes, Biden would NEVER pass legislation that would hurt the Democrat’ Planed Parenthood cash cow. Whether it was excitement, ego, or virtue signaling, Graham handed them the stick they would use to thrash us.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham introduced a bill Tuesday that would ban most abortions nationwide starting at 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The South Carolina senator introduced the bill less than three months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that established the constitutional right to abortion. The measure would sharply narrow abortion access in numerous states — especially blue states, which tend to have more abortion rights protections.
The legislation has little chance of passing Congress as it currently stands, as Democrats hold slim majorities in both the House and Senate.
— CNBC

Cue the old Leroy Jenkins meme.

What do we learn from this?

Message discipline matters. Anticipate both the lies lies the other side will say about you and the traps they will try to corner you in.

Remind voters that their STATE legislators will listen to Georgians — not faraway DC — for diretion on where to draw Georgia’s line of viability. The clinic is too narrow for 100 Senators, 435 Reps from Congress, and the Oval Office to fit inside.

That’s an example of what defense looks like.

Next is offense: expose their lie by turning their own arguments against them.

If Democrats claim they want to ‘codify Roe’, ask them whether they will codify the parts of Roe that recognize the State’s obligation (‘interest’ in legalese) to protect in-utero life, and what point of the pregnancy they recognize the government’s responsibility to protect the little darling.

The fact is, for most people Roe is little more than a catch-phrase that means abortion, not a sophisticated attempt by SCOTUS to find a sweet spot that balances the competing moral goods of the life of the child and the autonomy of the mother.

Make THEM answer the difficult questions that expose logical inconsistencies. Make THEM seem uncertain and confused about the issues.

If you’re going to defend life in today’s hostile environment, it will take a deft hand of a political knife-fighter, not a ham-handed swing with an improvised club.

If you prefer a more high-minded metaphor, take the words of Jesus, who calls us to be wise as serpents yet as harmless as doves.


The Wildman Devotional: A 50 Day Devotional for Men

Dear Warriors. The Wildman Devotional: A 50 Day Devotional for Men will fuel your inner wildman with solid meat from the scripture. In these 200+ pages, you’ll feast on the wealth, the walk, and the warfare of the Christian that’ll prepare you for maximum usefulness on this side of the grave. This book is fire! A great gift for all the men in your life. BTW, women will love this devotional as well.

Wes Walker

Wes Walker is the author of "Blueprint For a Government that Doesn't Suck". He has been lighting up Clashdaily.com since its inception in July of 2012. Follow on twitter: @Republicanuck