Republicans will pull out the stops they haven’t already
As I was saying, there is no safe harbor for Democratic candidates for what’s coming at them this year.
Jane Mayer reports on just one of the dark money groups bent on sliming Democrats. The American Accountability Foundation (A.A.F.) targets Democrats nominated for adminstration jobs. Candidates will fare no better, no matter how squeaky clean:
Late last year, Saule Omarova—a leading academic in the field of financial regulation, who is a law professor at Cornell and holds doctorates in law and political science—withdrew her name from consideration as Biden’s Comptroller of the Currency. She did so, she told me, because an opposition-research campaign against her, which the A.A.F. took credit for, had, among other things, falsely portrayed her as a secret communist.
Born in Kazakhstan, in what was then the Soviet Union, Omarova received an undergraduate degree from Moscow State University, but she became a naturalized American citizen in 2005. Yet, during her confirmation hearing, in a moment reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy era, the Republican Senator John Kennedy, of Louisiana, declared that he didn’t know whether to call her “professor or comrade.” Omarova replied, “Senator, I am not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova’s résumé is hardly anti-capitalist: she worked at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and served in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department.
Omarova told me, “There were so many accusations. A.A.F. was at the forefront of making my life extremely and unnecessarily difficult.” The group discovered that Omarova, after she’d read an article in The Economist about potatoes, had tweeted fondly about a time she helped farmers harvest potatoes outside Moscow. The A.A.F. proclaimed that the Biden Administration had “nominated a woman who waxes nostalgic for the good ole days of poverty, hunger, and forced labor in communist Russia.” Conservative outlets pounced on similar tweets about her past. “The A.A.F. made it into this big deal,” she told me. “They said, ‘She wants to make America into the Soviet Union.’ It was a complete absurdity. But people who have no idea who I am jumped in and said, ‘Go back to the Soviet Union!’ ”
Mayer recounts more victims of this scandal-mining. And yes, that Vanderbilt- and Oxford-educated, faux-hayseed Sen. Kennedy (R-La.) from the O’Donnell tweet above. Omarova withdrew her nomination.
Kennedy is working the commie and “woke” angles against Democrats as a group. His Republican colleagues are teasing QAnon followers’ lizard brains with liberals-as-pedophiles nonsense of the sort that sent Edgar Maddison Welch of North Carolina to D.C. with an AR-15 loaded for Dermocrats. It’s take-no-prisoners politics flirting with provoking violence. Ask the D.C. and Capitol police injured in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Democrats had best show some spine and not turn the other cheek. Here’s how it’s done.
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