Donald Trump may be going to Korea! Also, to Moon Township, Pa.!
While the president’s plan to have direct talks with the North Koreans is fascinating, in a sort of unnerving way, right now we’re going to look at the Moon Township angle. There’s a special House election coming up on Tuesday, and it’s perfectly possible that when it comes to international détente versus the 18th Congressional District, the White House’s real fixation is western Pennsylvania.
The 18th C.D. is at the heart of the white, working-class vote that won Trump the Electoral College. It also has wildly gerrymandered borders aimed at guaranteeing Republican control unless the incumbent does something incredible, like championing anti-abortion legislation after hinting to his mistress that she ought to get an abortion if she’s pregnant.
Whoops. That was Representative Tim Murphy. Gone but not forgotten.
So there’s this special election, which features Democrat Conor Lamb, a handsome young former federal prosecutor, versus Rick Saccone, a Republican state representative who is hanging onto Donald Trump like — um, we will not say Stormy Daniels. That would be totally tacky, and this is a serious political moment. We’ll just say that Saccone says he wants to go to Washington and be the president’s “wingman.”
The current district is going to vanish in November when new, less-outrageous boundary lines go into effect. So the only thing that’s really at stake here is whether the voters are going to send an epic, albeit mainly symbolic, rejection letter to Trump. The president is obsessed. He’s scheduled to appear at a rally there this weekend, and he’s sending every possible White House warrior — from Kellyanne Conway to Donald Jr. — to the front lines.
People, do you think Pennsylvanians are going to get out and vote in the middle of March because Donald Jr. asked them to? Just wondering.
The 18th C.D. is very connected to steel making. (Democrat Lamb, when asked about trade issues, tends to say that he thinks whatever the president of the steelworkers’ union thinks.) Last week, as the race got tighter and tighter, Trump suddenly announced he was imposing a ginormous tariff on imported steel and aluminum, triggering the resignation of his chief economic adviser and something as close to a rebellion as you could imagine among the little weenies who make up the Republican members of Congress.
Do you think it could possibly have all been for western Pennsylvania? Duh.
The Republicans have been complaining that Saccone is a terrible candidate, which is a good way of getting off the hook themselves if he loses. It’s also sort of true. His ads are boring, and his previous social media was worse.
“We’re here at The Hangar bar,” Saccone yells in a Facebook video from Moon Township itself. “Look at all the happy people here!” Actually, there seemed to be a goodly number of empty seats, even though Saccone was giving away free food (“ … we got pizzas, we got wings …”).
In the state legislature, Saccone was a conservative who did not always behave like a guy who expected a congressional seat to open up in his backyard. He once voted against a bill strengthening Pennsylvania’s animal cruelty laws, which passed the House 167 to 20. It was called Libre’s Law in honor of a young Boston terrier abuse victim. Saccone never mentions Libre, although Lamb seems to bring that puppy up quite a bit.
Lamb is selling himself as a bipartisan new-broom guy who would vote to get rid of Nancy Pelosi as Democratic House leader. (Coincidentally, he’s getting very little money from the official Democratic money stream, for which Pelosi is a tireless fund-raiser.)
He’s driving right down the middle — pressing for stronger gun background checks while constantly mentioning that he’s a former Marine who “still loves to shoot.” One Lamb ad features him firing at a target with a semiautomatic rifle. Many Democrats attempt to get some gun cred by showing pictures of themselves at least pretending to be hunting, but when you’re chopping away with an AR-15 that’s serious business.
Meanwhile Saccone, who started by attempting to pummel Lamb as an enemy of the Trump tax cuts, has pulled way back on that issue. If the race is an upset, or even very close, people are going to start re-evaluating the Republican theory that cutting taxes is a selling point so stupendous that it resembles a political Second Coming.
Now instead, the Republican attack ads howl that as a prosecutor, Lamb made a plea bargain deal with a drug dealer.
“People are laughing at you, Rick,” retorted Lamb in a debate, pointing out that the dealer in question went up the river for a decade and lost his two houses. “Ten years is a serious sentence.”
He then demanded that the Republican say the ads were false.
“Your ads are false,” retorted Saccone. It was that sort of encounter.
Perhaps the most interesting moment came when Saccone dismissed Lamb as “someone who’s young and idealistic, who still hopes he can change the world.” Which may go down as the most depressing political attack in modern history.
So … bottom line seems to be that it’s the idealist or the wingman. Guess who’s the Donald Trump candidate.
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