The time for Kari Lake to become a laughingstock may have arrived.
A lot of people are laughing at her, after she posted the tweet below. To see some of the comments, go to the story here.
Okay, folks, contain yourselves. It’s only a tweet, not an offer of proof in her lawsuit against Maricopa County election officials. At least not yet.
But even taking it as political rhetoric, or at a lower level, the sour-grapes ranting of a delusional sore loser, it’s embarrassing.
Arizona voters get her, all right; they elected her opponent. Granted, it was close, but what that really shows is her embrace of Trump and his election lies, and election denialism in general, cost her the election. A critical number of Arizona voters, undoubtedly some of them Republicans, concluded she couldn’t be trusted to run their state.
County officials and winning candidate Katie Hobbs will ask a judge to dismiss Lake’s lawsuit this Friday, December 16, 2022 (see story here). My guess is that motion will be granted. But if it isn’t, the “UPS guy” (some wags wonder if he even exists, but let’s assume he does) won’t make it to a witness stand, because his hurt feelings don’t count.
(Update: The judge dismissed 8 of Lake’s 10 allegations, but allowed trial on the other two, see details here.)
Nor does he get to choose Arizona’s governor. He’s entitled to his opinions and feelings, but he doesn’t get to override the votes of the 1,287,891 Arizonans who elected Hobbs over the 1,270,774 who choose Lake (see results here). He has a constitutional right to fume, sputter, and go off in a corner to throw a tantrum. Those rights are unlimited; the influence of his 1 vote is not.
You won’t hear me say Lake is “unqualified” to be governor, because voters have a right to elect a crank and clown if they want to. Of course, that doesn’t meant they will. This time the laughingstock lost. Good for Arizona’s voters.
The serious message from the 2022 election results in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and other places is that the GOP has to do better than this to be taken seriously again. Nearly all objective political observers — and even prominent GOP politicians — agree the party missed opportunities in those elections by nominating bad candidates like Lake in Arizona, Mastriano and Oz in Pennsylvania, and Herschel Walker in Georgia.
Grassroots Republican voters, many of them still bonding to Trump, are the cause of that. Those voters also are responsible for dragging the GOP away from its small-government, pro-business, roots by making a mockery of the “individual responsibility” the party once advocated and turning it into a violent revolutionary movement to overthrow America’s hard-won democracy.
So it’s not as simple as finding a way to fend off candidates like Lake who can’t win elections because they repulse a majority of voters, including some Republicans. The GOP also has to get rid of its present-day voters, or at least re-educate them.
Trump brought a lot of people with grievances, arguably more imagined than real, out of the woodwork who didn’t previously vote. All I can say is, the GOP got along without them in the past, and if it can’t civilize them, the party should plan a future that doesn’t require their support. Otherwise, they should continue losing elections, and probably will, because the majority of Americans don’t like what Trump’s mob is up to.