Do they all just blatantly lie about everything?
The Ohio race for Senate is pivotal. And the GOP has put up yet another phony:
He is running for the Senate as an immigrant who made good, reaching out to Ohio voters with a stirring, only-in-America bootstraps story: arriving as a child from Colombia, taking a risk on a struggling business, and then turning it into a smashing success and himself into a millionaire 100 times over.
Running under the banner of Donald J. Trump’s populist political movement, Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown, humbly calls himself a “car guy from Cleveland” and recounts the modest circumstances of his childhood, when his immigrant family started over from scratch in the United States. “We came here with absolutely nothing — we came here legally — but we came here, nine of us in a two-bedroom apartment,” Mr. Moreno said in 2023, in what became his signature pitch. His father “had to leave everything behind,” he has said, remembering what he called his family’s “lower-middle-class status.”
But there is much more that Mr. Moreno does not say about his background, his upbringing and his very powerful present-day ties in the country where he was born.
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.
Give me a break. He didn’t come from “communist Cuba” where they confiscated the wealthy citizens’ fortunes. He came from Colombia and they obviously had plenty of financial support from the family back in the home country.
All these richie riches pretending to have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps is absurd and I’m sure plenty of Ohio Republicans see through it — and most of them just don’t care. They admire liars. It means they’re smart. But maybe some of those vaunted Independents might be a little bit skeptical of this sort of lie and will stick with Sherrod Brown as they have since 2007. I would hope so. Brown is a real populist, in his bones, and in the best sense of the word. I hope at least a few of those blue collar indies recognize that. He really is their champion. This dishonest scion of a wealthy Colombian family is anything but.