“Mr. Douglas, wanna buy my pig?” plays in my head every time Sen. John Kennedy (R) of Louisiana appears.
We all know Kennedy is a phony. In our guts we know it. But those who’ve watched his evolution from “brainy graduate of Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia Law School and Oxford University’s Magdalen College,” and formerly somewhat progressive Democrat in 2004, know it by experience (Mediaite 2019):
Conservative columnist Quin Hillyer went to school with Sen. Kennedy. The pair were fellows in the same class at the Loyola University New Orleans Institute of Politics in 1990. In a new column for the Washington Examiner, Hillyer explains to those unfamiliar with Kennedy’s career that he is simply “a habitual shape-shifter.”
What’s more, that whimsical accent Kennedy uses to deploy metaphors that simply can’t exist? Hillyer says it’s made up:
Kennedy had a mild Southern accent but still sounded rather patrician, befitting his record both at Oxford and as former executive editor of the University of Virginia’s Law Review. His folksy, exaggerated Southern-cornpone accent now is an affectation, mere political theater to stand out among the Senate’s bevy of stuffed shirts. It’s about as authentic as a cow in a camel costume.
Robert Mann, a mass communication professor at Louisiana State University and former Hill staffer, tells all in the Washington Post. The occasion was Kennedy’s red-baiting smear of Saule Omarova, a Cornell Law School professor, in her confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee. The Kazakh-American is President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
But what Kennedy saw before him was a non-white, Asian female who, as they say with a drawl down South, ain’t from around here.
“I don’t know whether to call you ‘professor’ or ‘comrade,’” Kennedy told Omarova:
When Kennedy asked if she had a resignation letter from the Communist youth group the Soviet-controlled Kazakhstan government forced her to join as a child, Omarova responded, “Senator, I’m not a Communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova told Kennedy the Communist regime persecuted her family, adding, “That’s who I am. I remember that history. I came to this country. I’m proud to be an American.”
Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. What he did instead was drain his party. Of ethics and ideas, and of respect for the law, democracy, and common decency. Now, following Trump’s lead, his vapid followers have fallen back on Joe McCarthy-style red-baiting, freely accusing any political opponents of being communists, hoping to evoke a Pavlovian response from the Republican base.
Remember Republicans? The people who claimed Ronald Reagan defeated communism when the Soviet Union collapsed? Red-baiting, xenophobia, and a will to power is all they’ve got left.
Kennedy is a particular oddity, says Mann:
An acerbic Biden critic, Kennedy is a fount of sharp-but-folksy one-liners. He punctuated his 2016 Senate campaign spots with, “I will not let you down. I’d rather drink weedkiller.” With his exaggerated Southern accent, he affects a mixture of Mr. Haney, the con artist of the 1960s CBS sitcom “Green Acres,” and the bombastic Looney Tunes rooster, Foghorn J. Leghorn.
Kennedy is a shape-shifter, accentuating his drawl and countrifying his persona:
In preparing this piece, I found a lengthy interview Kennedy did in October 2004 with the Shreveport Times. In pitching his Democratic Senate candidacy, he was articulate, restrained and progressive. He scorned the tax cuts for wealthy Americans that then-President George W. Bush had signed. He favored increasing the federal minimum wage.
He was no Bernie Sanders liberal, but he was the progressive Democrat in the race — so much so that some prominent Black leaders, including our congressional delegation’s most liberal member, Rep. William J. Jefferson of New Orleans, backed him.
But what stood out in that 2004 interview was the absence of the homey sayings, abusive zingers and character assassinations that have become Kennedy trademarks. He was nothing like the man you see these days insulting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — “It must suck to be that dumb” — or vilifying then-Interior secretary nominee Deb Haaland as “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin whack job.”
When people outside Louisiana ask me about Kennedy, I tell them he’s not the folksy bumpkin you see on TV, but a wealthy, well-educated attorney with an Oxford degree. Just like Pat Buttram, who portrayed Mr. Haney in “Green Acres,” Kennedy is acting. He’s a shape-shifting, attention-hungry politician who found a role — wily country boy — that brings him some fame.
Maybe after the Senate , Kennedy can get a job bussing at a Cracker Barrel.