After 2 Decades in Ascent, A Stunning Breakdown
The George Allen who conceded defeat…in Virginia’s nasty U.S. Senate campaign was the one who revitalized Virginia’s Republican Party and the one who was considered a front-runner for the White House, with his folksy, football-and-cowboy charm….But it was an Allen who was rarely seen on the campaign trail this year. Instead, the relentlessly cheery politician who was an up-and-comer in the national GOP spent most of the fall during his campaign against challenger James Webb in a defensive crouch, trying to deflect accusations that, down deep, he is a bully or a racist.
It was said that George Allen could have become the junior senator from Virginia even if he hadn’t bothered to mount a campaign. He could have stayed home, grabbed a few cases of beer, a few dozen bags of chips, and parked himself in front of a television to watch football and Deal or No Deal until Election Day. It’s just too bad for him he didn’t do exactly that; he probably would have been better off in the long run.
Allen, perhaps the least intellectually-gifted Governor in Virginia history, was seen as a rising star in national Republican circles, perhaps even the heir apparent to Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader (Republicans seem big on stupid these days.). With his boyish good looks and charm, his naturally sunny disposition, and his reliably Conservative orientation, GOP leaders saw in George Allen the next Great White Conservative Hope.
His opponent, Republican-turned-Democrat (and former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan) James Webb, who once said he was infuriated when former President Bill Clinton returned a Marine’s salute, was hardly taken seriously at first by anyone in Virginia. After all, Webb is to charisma and bonhomie what Machiavelli was to Liberalism.
Yep, all Allen really had to do this campaign season was smile, shake a few hands…
AND SHUT THE HELL UP.
Thankfully for Democrats, he just couldn’t execute even that simple task…and it made for one of the most entertaining and yet highly disturbing campaigns in recent memory. Once Allen introduced a Webb campaign worker as “Macaca”…an appellation I’m not certain any of us had ever even heard before, all bets were off. The media shitstorm took on a life all its’ own, and before anyone really knew what had happened, the Virginia senatorial campaign became ugly and uglier with each passing day.
Before anyone really knew what had happened, we were subjected to Allen’s campaign regaling us with sordid tales of man-on-boy oral sex from one of James Webb’s novels. What exactly this had to do with ANYTHING was impossible to say, but the Allen campaign was desperate. In the time it took to shove his cowboy boots into his esophagus, George Allen had gone from unquestioned frontrunner to mean-spirited racist.
Once the gloves were off, the debate became less about issues than Allen’s previously unknown Jewish heritage, his racial slurs when he played football at UVA, and the severed animal head he alleged put into someone’s mail box.
Allen began the campaign with a 16-point lead in the polls. As a wildly popular governor and then senator, he was considered a shoo-in for reelection. As Allen visited Iowa and New Hampshire and prepared for a 2008 presidential bid, the conventional wisdom in August was that a stunning victory in the Senate race would position him as the darling of the party.
Then came the now-legendary “macaca moment.” He called a Webb volunteer of Indian descent “macaca” and welcomed him to “America and the real world of Virginia.” That was followed by his awkward handling of revelations about his Jewish heritage and accusations that he used racial epithets during and after college. He also got caught up in a tide of anti-GOP sentiment that cost Republicans control of the House and the Senate.
Twenty years ago, Allen’s “macaca moment” might have passed unnoticed. Now, thanks to the magic of the Internet and the compression of the news cycle to the length of a burp, news organizations are hungry for any shred of information that can be twisted, massaged, or converted into a story. This isn’t to say that George Allen didn’t torpedo his electoral prospects through his inability to keep his mouth shut, but did his overarching inability to self-edit disqualify him to be a US Senator? Who knows.
“George Allen, I think, singularly, turned around the fortunes of the Republican Party in Virginia,” said George Mason University political science professor Mark J. Rozell. “He unabashedly reached out to the religious conservatives. Yet, he still had that nice smile, that charisma, that sunny disposition that made him appeal to moderate and independent voters.”
Allen rode that appeal first into the Virginia governor’s mansion and then into the nation’s most exclusive club, the Senate. From there, he hoped it might be a short hop to the White House….
Now, Rozell said, “no one talks seriously about George Allen being presidential timber.”
Luckily for Democrats, George Allen is a deserving DUMB@$$…because it’s not as if James Webb actually did anything to warrant winning the election. Left to his own devices, Webb probably couldn’t be elected county dogcatcher in Virginia if he was the only candidate on the ballot. Today, James Webb is no doubt thanking his lucky stars that a litte DUMB@$$ fell into his lap.
Sometimes, it really IS better to be lucky than good, eh?
