One of the only reasons we have been partially saved from uniform Republican government over the past two decades is the fact that serious whackadoos have been winning GOP Senate primaries. They've felt compelled to assure us that they are not witches, and talked about paying your medical bills with chickens. Last time around, they came up with the comically terrible Dr. Oz and the terribly comic Herschel Walker. In New Hampshire, Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan was thought to be vulnerable, but the Republican primary coughed up Don Bolduc, a retired general who believed that there were litter boxes in public school classrooms. Hassan won from here to there. In the aftermath, the Republicans announced that they would be vetting their candidates with more care in 2024, when the Senate map seemed tilted in their favor.
Good luck with that. There were soup kitchens in the Depression that did a better job vetting their clientele.
This time, it seems, the GOP has settled on candidates who are not quite as outwardly bananas as Christine O'Donnell or poor old Herschel. But scratch off a little bit of the veneer, however, and the inner wingnut and/or incompetent shines right through. Take, for example, Eric Hovde, the California gozillionnaire whom the Wisconsin Republicans parachuted in to take on incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin. On the surface, Hovde looked ideal—young, handsome, and rich, and the whole carpetbagger thing doesn't seem to bite anywhere as hard as it once did. Unless, of course, the candidate turns out to be such a klutz that carpetbagging becomes just another example of the candidate's inability to tell his arse from his elbow. So meet Eric Hovde. He really likes you, Meemaw. He just doesn't think you should vote. From Wisconsin Public Radio:
“Well, if you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy. Almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote, and you had … adult children showing up and saying, ‘Who voted for my 85- or 90-year-old father or mother?’” Hovde said.
This all came by way of Hovde's attempt to have his bratwurst and eat it too on the subject of the 2020 election. He accepts the results, he said, but he also accepts many of the "voter fraud" fantasies that have been repeatedly debunked in courtrooms far and wide. This is Hovde's second crack at this job. In 2012, he lost in the Republican primary to former governor—and railroad enthusiast—Tommy Thompson. Alas for Hovde, that campaign has come back to haunt him in this one. From Upnorthnews:
In the 36-minute WisconsinEye interview from July 31, 2012, the owner of a California bank talks about his belief that the workers of days gone by—farmers included—worked harder and faced more hazards. “We don’t engage in hard labor like we did,” Hovde said. “We don’t have as many accidents on the job, most of us. Now we’re involved in some type of white collar profession or even professions that are involved in manual labor, it’s much safer, much more protective. Think of farming, look at the old physical toll that it would take on the body. Now you’re largely driving around a tractor.”
Having endeared himself to America's Dairyland, Hovde moved on to old people.
Hovde referenced the increase in average life expectancy as a reason to boost the retirement age to preserve Social Security and Medicare—programs he has referred to as “entitlements,” rather than earned benefits that Americans pay into throughout their working lives. In the WisconsinEye interview as well as a videotaped meeting with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board, Hovde expressed his view that benefits “absolutely” need to be trimmed. He proposed a retirement age of 72 for workers in their 20s before they could qualify for retiree benefits.
And, also, die on your own dime, ya bastids.
On the subject of healthcare, Hovde again reiterated his view that the Affordable Care Act needs to be “completely repealed” and blamed some Americans for their own health issues such as obesity—even suggesting overweight people should pay more for health insurance.“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now,” Hovde said. “Obesity is off the charts. We’re removing people from being responsible for their own health. If they all started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by, you know, consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavior patterns.”
As I said, Hovde lost this campaign. Bear this in mind.
“You’re a first-time candidate,” Walters asks. “If you don’t win the primary, do you plan to run for public office again?”
“No,” Hovde replied. “No. I’m doing this for a very simple reason. I know my economic skills and my background is something that is desperately needed in the United States Senate right now. I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life in politics.”
OK, so that's conventional political weaselspeak. But, if Hovde learned anything about being a candidate over the decade between Senate campaigns, it is not readily apparent. For further example, Hovde did a lame Old West-themed commercial for his Utah-based bank that served only to solidify the perception that he has run as far from his Wisconsin boyhood and his UW education as he could without falling into the Pacific. From the Patrick Murphy at Urban Milwaukee:
Here’s a guy the Democrats have been pounding as a carpetbagger, identifying him as “Eric Hovde (R-Laguna Beach),” who owns an ocean-view mansion there. He’s also been named one of Orange County’s most influential people three years in a row and is a local California celebrity with his popular California TV commercials. Meanwhile, he has failed to vote in Wisconsin for 17 of the last 30 elections.
(Dave McCormick, the Republican running against Democratic incumbent Bob Casey in Pennsylvania has a similar problem. He lives in Connecticut. He's also a hedge fund gazillionnaire, which should be disqualifying enough. Like Hovde, McCormick grew up in Pennsylvania, and this is McCormick's second try at a Senate seat from Pennsylvania.)
Or we can look at Ohio, which already has inflicted J.D. Vance on the Senate and the nation. Its nominee against Sherrod Brown is one Bernie Moreno, a wealthy car-dealer from Cleveland and a Colombian emigre who has pitched himself as a rags-to-riches immigrant story. This is...how you say?...incomplete. From the New York Times:
Mr. Moreno was born into a rich and politically connected family in Bogotá, a city that it never completely left behind, where some members continue to enjoy great wealth and status. While his parents left Colombia in 1971 to start over in the United States, where Mr. Moreno fully transplanted, some of his siblings eventually returned. One of his brothers served as Bogotá’s ambassador to the United States. Another founded a development and construction empire that stretches across the Andes from the Colombian interior to its Caribbean shores.
Like Hovde and McCormick, Moreno is a retread, having folded a primary campaign in 2022.
In Montana, where Democratic incumbent Jon Tester is perennially thought to be imperiled, the Republicans found a winner in Tim Sheehy, a millionaire retired Navy SEAL. Except that Sheehy got himself entangled in one of the strangest biographical bumbles I've ever seen. From the Washington Post:
“I got thick skin — though it’s not thick enough. I have a bullet stuck in this arm still from Afghanistan,” Sheehy said in a video of a December campaign event posted on social media, pointing to his right forearm. It was one of several inconsistent accounts Sheehy has shared about being shot while deployed. And in October 2015, more than a year after he left active duty, he told a different story.
Boy howdy, did he ever.
After a family visit to Montana’s Glacier National Park, he told a National Park Service ranger that he accidentally shot himself in the right arm that day when his Colt .45 revolver fell and discharged while he was loading his vehicle in the park, according to a record of the episode filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana. The self-inflicted gunshot left a bullet lodged in Sheehy’s right forearm, according to the written description accompanying the federal citation that the ranger, a federal law enforcement officer, gave Sheehy for illegally discharging his weapon in a national park. The citation said the description was based on Sheehy’s telling of events.
Asked by the Post about this episode, Sheehy produced the mother of all alibis.
Asked this week about the citation, which has not been previously reported, Sheehy told The Washington Post that the statement he gave the ranger was a lie. He said he made up the story about the gun going off to protect himself and his former platoon mates from facing a potential military investigation into an old bullet wound that he said he got in Afghanistan in 2012. He said he did not know for certain whether the wound was the result of friendly fire or from enemy ammunition, and said he never reported the incident to his superiors.
Even the Republicans nominated to run in races they cannot possibly win are an interesting crew. Over the weekend, the Minnesota GOP state convention endorsed Royce White, a former NBA benchwarmer who made himself famous on the right by being a Black man who flipped in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, which gained him the patronage of Steve Bannon. Media Matters has a compendium of the candidate's greatest hits, and Mother Jones has been on the case for a couple of years.
He believes that the Democrats, Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, President Xi Jinping, the CCP, non-MAGA Republicans, George Soros, “millennial purple-haired white liberal women,” “the Church of LGBTQ,” the National Basketball Association, and various government agencies all act on behalf of the same “global corporate community.”
Perhaps he can chat things over with Hung Cao, who is running for the GOP nomination for the Senate in Virginia on a very strict anti-witchcraft platform. From Business Insider:
In the interview with Sean Feucht — a California-based far-right pastor who led a movement against COVID-19 health restrictions and has rallied against "wokeness" at Disney — Cao lamented that Christianity has declined in influence in the United States over time, before referencing Wiccan communities in California..."There's a place in Monterey, California called 'Lover's Point,'" Cao said. "The original name was 'Lovers of Christ Point, but now it's become — they took out the Christ, it's 'Lover's Point,' and it's really — Monterey's a very dark place now, a lot of witchcraft, and the Wiccan community has really taken over there." "We can't let that happen in Virginia," he added.
Leave Christine O'Donnell alone, dammit.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
