What Country Is the Wall Street Journal Living In? - The Bulwark
By: Mona Charen (The Bulwark)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The paper's editorial board deludes itself with its endorsement of Kari Lake. byMona Charen September 28, 2022 5:30 am Republican candidate for Arizona Governor Kari Lake holds up a sledgehammer as she speaks to supporters on August 03, 2022 in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare via emailPrint
The headline of a Wall Street Journaleditorial caught my eye: "Arizona's School Choice Election." Rubbing my eyes, I read it again. School choice is the defining issue in the Arizona governor's race? According to the leading voice of highbrow conservatism, yes.
Writing as if nothing had changed in American politics since 2011, the editorial board assailed Katie Hobbs, the Democratic candidate for governor, as a tool of the teachers' unions for her opposition to school choice. Noting that the race is neck and neck, the Journal advised that parents would be well advised to vote Republican if they hope to save their kids' educational vouchers.
There you have it: The failure of the intellectual leaders of conservatism in one editorial. The once magisterial voice of the conservative worldview looked at the race for governor in Arizona and airily overlooked reality. School choice? Are they out of their minds?
Now, I happen to agree with the Journal's editorial board about school choice. I too believe that the teachers' unions often stand athwart education reform that would benefit students because their priority is the best interests of union members, not the best interests of children. But it requires the skills of a contortionist to look at Arizona and declare that the November election is all about school choice.
Disturbing, extremist, and otherwise unfit candidates dot the national landscape in 2022 like monkeypox, from Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania to J.D. Vance in Ohio to Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, but Arizona surely takes the highest honors for the sheer concentration of ranting incompetents who threaten the democratic process.
Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, whom the Journal is endorsing, may be in favor of school choice, but that's a little beside the point when you consider the larger picture. Kari Lake has declared that the 2020 election was "corrupt and stolen." Regarding the current president of the United States, she has expressed pity, urging that "Deep down, I think we all know this illegitimate fool in the White House—I feel sorry for him—didn't win. I hope Americans are smart enough to know that." She has no patience for temporizers. "It is not enough to say you are for 'Election Integrity' if you are not for DECERTIFYING the 2020 election if wrongdoing, fraud or different results are revealed," she tweeted last year. She then boasted that she was the only candidate for governor calling for decertification of the 2020 election.
In addition to the standard denial of the 2020 election, Lake has also adopted the smarmy tactics Trump has normalized in the GOP. When former congressman Matt Salmon, one of her primary opponents, demurred about putting cameras in every Arizona classroom, she accused him of coddling pedophiles and sneered that he was too weak to be governor.
There is no fiction she has not willingly endorsed. She told a group of young women that they shouldn't take precautions about COVID because "the truth is that hydroxychloroquine works and other inexpensive treatments work." Her campaign merch featured a t-shirt with the image of a burning mask. Naturally, she has denounced vaccine mandates.
She told Steve Bannon that her opponent would likely be in jail by election day, and advised another audience that as governor she would criminally prosecute journalists who "dupe the public." During her primary race, she suggested that fraud was already underway. A week before the voting, she announced, "We're already detecting some stealing going on." And despite her victory, she carried a sledgehammer onstage on primary night and pantomimed smashing electronic voting machines. Her loyalty to the orange Jesus is total. After the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, she declared that "Our government is rotten to the core."
That's the GOP nominee for governor of Arizona. What does the Wall Street Journal do with these awkward realities? The board interprets them as problems only insofar as they make it harder for her to win:
GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake hasn't helped herself or her party by insisting that the 2020 election was stolen. Her election fraud claims put off many Republicans and independents and are a loser in the general election. A winning and unifying issue for Republicans this November is school choice.
The important thing is for the election-denying cult member to win, so let's find something that can distract disaffected Republicans and independents.
Despite all of the foregoing, it's just possible that Lake is the most mainstream of the major Republican candidates in Arizona this year. The GOP nominee for Senate is Blake Masters, an election denier who spices up the usual fare with great replacement talk. "The Democrats dream of mass amnesty, because they want to import a new electorate" he says. He attributes America's problems with gun violence to "Black people frankly." (This is what passes for "brave" talk in white nationalist circles.) Masters muses about firing the whole federal workforce. Sounds a bit outlandish, but that's mild compared to his other reveals. When asked for a "subversive" thinker he admires, he responded that "I'll probably get in trouble for saying this. How about, like, Theodore Kaczynski?" Yes, Wall Street Journal editorial board, how about that? The GOP candidate for Senate thinks we should all consider the writings of the Unabomber. Let me guess: The Journal thinks the important thing is that he not say such things because it might impede his electability, right?
But wait, we're not finished with Arizona's contributions to national insanity. The Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona is not just an election-denying extremist enemy of democracy, but a card-carrying member of the Oath Keepers, the fine gentlemen who are currently being tried in federal court for seditious conspiracy. Like his brothers in arms, Mark Finchem was at the Capitol on January 6th, though he has not been charged. Asked whether he would certify the election in 2024 if Biden were to win Arizona and he were secretary of state, Finchem said he couldn't imagine it.
If the law is followed, and legitimate votes have been counted, and Joe Biden ends up being the winner, I'm required under the law—if there's no fraud—to certify the election. But I think you're proposing something that, quite frankly, is a fantasy.
Finchem has appeared on QAnon-linked radio talk shows, and he spoke at a rally in January with Trump, Mike Lindell, and the whole clown car of kooks. He told the rallygoers what they had come to hear: "Ladies and gentlemen, we know it and they know it—Donald Trump won." Finchem posted a "treason watch list" on his Pinterest account that listed Barack Obama, Janet Napolitano, and other Democrats. His website features a banner inviting readers to "Sign the petition to decertify and set aside AZ electors." Soon he may be the secretary of state of Arizona.
Arizona's is the GOP that censured Rusty Bowers for having the integrity to refuse to lie about the 2020 election; the GOP that conducted the cloddish Cyber Ninjas recount of the Maricopa County vote; the GOP that censured Cindy McCain, Jeff Flake, and Bill Gates (chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors).
Some are able to see what is at stake here. When Liz Cheney was asked whether she might campaign for Democrat Katie Hobbs, she said yes.
In this election, you have to vote for the person who actually believes in democracy. And that is just crucial, because if we elect election deniers, if we elect people who said that they're not going to certify results or who are going to try to steal elections, then we really are putting the Republic at risk.
Again, I tend to agree with the Journal's editorial board on many policy matters. Pro school choice? Check. Pro free enterprise? Check. Anti regulation? Much of the time, yes. Pro free trade? Double check. Pro immigration? Check. Anti big government? Check.
But they are pretending, or perhaps deluding themselves, that the Republican party remains, underneath it all, the party of Paul Ryan and Larry Hogan and Chris Sununu, and that the country will be better off if Republicans win elections, full stop.
Yet as Liz Cheney sees and is willing to say, that's not this Republican party. This GOP is the party of Mastriano and Vance and yes, Kari Lake. This is a party that cannot be trusted with power; that openly proclaims its eagerness to overturn elections. Next to that, everything else, including school choice and regulation and taxes, pales to insignificance. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has continuing influence with reasonable center-right voters. They owe them better.
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One of the leading "conservatives" on Newstalkers said yesterday (or was it the day before?) that Kari Lake is being "smeared" when she is described in the media as an election denier.
The evidence that she is an election denier is overwhelming , just as the evidence that Trump tried to steal the election is overwhelming.
America itself is being unmoored from reality by people like this.
I just saw an article that said about 40% of republicans will think elections were stolen if their candidate doesn't win.
The Democrats think the same thing
Or my favorite, they voted against their own best interest. Because the arrogant jackass democrats always know what’s best for you.
Don't tell me, because Al Gore said he won and it went to court...
[deleted]
Why Stacey Abrams
is still saying she won.
FOX NEWS - Democratic New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney says thousands of "recently found" ballots supports his refusal to concede to a Republican challenger who ran a low-budget campaign. Okay
Stacy Abrams is a grain of sand on a beachful of right wing election deniers. There are over 250 GOP candidates on the ballot next month that deny Biden is the legitimate president.
This is unprecedented in American history. Stacy Abrams case pales in comparison.
Boo hoo, people who hadn’t voted in previous elections had been removed, there is no proof they would have voted for Stacey, another pathetic deflection from a loser who lost because she was the inferior candidate, like trump to Biden, and Hillary to Trump.
As we don't need to notify the government if we move and we don't need to vote in elections if we don't want to, just what should be done to make sure the voter rolls are as accurate as possible? The government may not know if you have moved or not. I know of a person from Phoenix who moved to Las Vegas and was on the voter roles in both states.
Just what would you like to have done to try to insure that the voter rolls are accurate and up to date to help prevent voting fraud?
So the solution is to purge everyone right before an election?
To me this is why there should be a national voter registration. Everyone gets a government voting card when they register at 18.
If a person hasn't voted in the past three elections and the desire is to have as clean as possible voter rolls for the upcoming election (and clean also includes current address so that you are on the correct rolls for the voting precinct) one would think that the process would be done in the months leading up to the election. It does no good to clean up the rolls after the election, does it?
So you're in favor of voter id? This is something that could really help this problem. It would require a lot of push from the federal government and buy-in at the state levels as elections are still in the province of each state. But having an national ID would help to provide a way to identify every person as an individual and would help to keep the voting rolls cleaner.
Just because someone didn't vote in a previous election, doesn't mean their vote should be denied.
My point exactly. Except they are handed out to everyone at 18 and are free.
With a national voter roll, it wouldn't matter where one lived to vote or if they moved. The government could check voting records.
It's not just one previous election. Different states run it different ways. According to the article you posted, Georgia purged anybody who had not voted in the past five years which would work out to the past two elections and potentially a third local election. Arizona will purge after missing three elections.
And there was another article about the Georgia voting in that the people who found themselves purged from the voting rolls were able to re-register and cast a provisional ballot so they were not denied.
Who’s vote was denied? Georgia allows provisional voting, the article created a issue where none exists.
There are ways that could stop things like this.
And that's a potential solution but it would require buy-in with the states and territories. Remember that all voting is managed at the state level, there is no power at the federal level to nationalize elections. And it's not 100% clean. Social Security numbers are handed out for free at birth and we still have some numbers being stolen. There's nothing to say a voting ID couldn't be stolen for some purpose either.
So now you are saying voter id won't really work?
The government could have control over voter rolls as their rolls would consist of everyone that registers.
It would not interfere in how states run their elections.
Perhaps, but it seems that we are looking at two different sides of this issue.
Your point seems to be that a person should never be removed from voter rolls. But how would you handle if the person has died? Or if the person has moved (either out of state or just to a different neighborhood in the same city) and is now in a different voter precinct?
My point is that if a person cannot take the effort to vote in a number of previous elections, why should they continue to be carried on a voter roll? They have not shown awareness to their civic responsibilities for the past several elections so there is nothing to assume they would bother to show up now.
No, I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that in order to get a national ID to work would require agreement with all the states and territories as they would need to change their systems. And additional money will be needed to change systems to tie into a national ID registry as well, but Washington wastes so much money that the few billions that would cost is minimal. But if you have one state that refuses to join in to the national ID registry then the system won't work because you cannot guarantee the accuracy.
There could or should be a system in place that notifies of death. Seems like a simple thing to do. The city knows, the state knows, The feds know. Why cannot they know between departments...
I really don't care of someone hasn't voted in a decade. They shouldn't have to jump through hoops because they decided to get off their ass.
Not saying it would be an easy thing to do, just saying Imo it would be the right way to go.
My voting fate should not be up to the individual state to decide.
Simple answer, money. You are correct that when someone dies, the state and feds are notified very quickly. The act of generating the death certificate does that in order to remove the person from state Medicare rolls and from Social Security rolls. But the majority of agencies at state and federal levels have no communication between themselves, it's been that way from the start. And it would require a lot of money to modify existing systems so that they could communicate, very probably trillions of dollars to do so. I don't see much political will to spend that kind of money when there's no real payback in getting re-elected to office so I really don't expect our government to be doing much about it.
Guess that's a difference between you and me. If someone cannot be bothered to get off their ass once every two years to go vote why should I be concerned if once they decide that maybe they should get out and vote they need to start the process again from the beginning. Basically if it's not important enough for them to get off their ass and vote, it's not important enough to me to keep them on a voter roll.
Again for me it comes back to not having a national voter roll. There would not be these problems.
Though to me the states could do something like notify the voter rolls of death and it wouldn't cost that much.
And most states do notify the system of deaths so that those people can be removed from voting rolls. Not all (Illinois) but most. The cost comes from trying to get multiple systems to talk with one another. I worked for a major health insurance company, in the IT department, and the department I was in handled all the Medicaid business for the insurance company. It was just Medicaid, but each state had it's own systems and none of them followed any sort of standard format so every time we brought in a new state we had to completely rewrite the translation for this new state. Getting computer systems to talk to one another is a very expensive process.
But the real problem is not so much deaths, but people moving. We are not required in this country to notify the government if we decide to move, either across town or across the country. So if someone moves, at best they may put in a change of address with the post office, the USPS receives approx 118,000 change of address forms daily. To notify the states of that would require a new system to pull out only the changes for each state or to send all the info to all states and territories, and the states would need to put some sort of system into place to handle that input as it's too much for manual input. Of course we could always change the Constitution and adapt what Russia does and mandate that people need government approval before they move, then there would be an immediate record....
I agree that a national voter roll would help a lot, but the issue as always comes down to money. Who is willing to pay for it, especially when spending the kind of money this would require will not be seen as a benefit towards re-election.
Good conversation, thanks. Personally I would love to see a national voter ID but I suspect I will never see it happen.
I don't think it will ever happen either. To me the people moving thing wouldn't matter as the feds could look up voting records.
Anyway, thanks to you as well.
You forgot the biggest election denier of them all. Hillary Clinton; and every last screaming TDS driven idiot that still thinks Russia stole the 2016 elections.
Just want to verify exactly what you mean by this as it can be understood a couple of different ways. Do you mean for this so that a person could go to any polling station, be verifed that they are a registered voter and would be able to vote anywhere? Is this what you mean?
Basically if need be, the feds could check records on where a person voted and if they voted more than once.
I think that other the exceptions provided in:
The Constitution leaves voting up to the states.
Ok, checking after the fact can provide evidence of voter fraud. But unless the system has real-time updating I don't understand how it would really be helpful in preventing problems at a polling station. Less of a problem if the person just moved across town as they would still be voting on the same local issues at the state/city level but could have issues when dealing with local school boards for example. More so if the person has moved to a different city.
Like I said, I believe in order to get this to work would require buy-in from all states and territories. Possibly a Constitutional Amendment as Article 1 Section 4 does provide that the States have the primary authority over election administration, the “times, places, and manner of holding elections”.
Bold talk, JR, might bold and colorful.
I'm voting for Karrin Taylor Robson myself. Lake is just too far out there for my taste.
Will she be on the ballot as a write-in? I don't see her listed in Ballotpedia...
We'll find out soon as mail-in ballots are supposed to be mailed out on Wednesday.
Dumb me was only half awake when I typed that and forgot she lost the primary to Lake. I don't see her on the write in category.
Yep, working on it.
Democrats spent 50 plus million promoting these candidates and their views.
Bullshit, and a pathetic retort to this article.
Tell us which one of these extreme candidates the Democrats would like to see win the general election?
There are none.
Yet you make it sound like Democrats want to see extremist traitorous nutjobs on the far right get elected. It is very dishonest on your part.
No JR, the Democrats ran ads and promoted extremist Republican candidates in hopes that the extremist candidates would be easier for the Democrat candidates to beat in the general election. That's an admitted fact.
First of all, Republicans voted these people into these nominations. The fact that Democrats may have put up television ads does not translate into these candidates winning primaries until Republicans voted for them.
Secondly, a few television ads does NOT qualify as an endorsement for that person to be elected into office. The fact is the Democrats want every single one of these far right candidates to lose in November.
Of course they want them to lose. That way they get more of their own far left whack job candidates into office. That's just the way politics are in this country
I am sure you feel the same about Facebook and Twitter ads and posts no matter where they come from...................like in 2016
Of course, that's exactly what I said. Sean's initial comment of the money that the Democrats spent on advertising for Republican candidates was to try to get those extremist candidates to win their primary elections in the hopes that they would be easier for the Democrats to beat in the general election. Yet you seem to be arguing against that. Your initial comment to Sean was completely wrong as well. Nowhere in his comment did he imply in any fashion that the Democrats wanted those extremist Republicans to win in the general election.
So I have to wonder why you are arguing this at all. Is this more of a Pavlovian response that a "right winger" posted something so you must rebut? Can you explain so that I can understand why you had to respond to Sean in the first place?
Everyone knows that television ads don’t swing votes! That’s why presidential candidates spend 100’s of millions on them….
Are you excusing Russian interference in the 2016 election? Sure sounds like it. Maybe there is a spot in the 2024 Trump campaign for you.
Every time there is an article about these far right extremist candidates , and Sean sees it, he makes a comment about the Democrats "promoting" these people. Every time. If you listen to Sean you would think that Republican primary voters who selected these people had nothing to do with it.
Are GOP voters so stupid that they become happy hearing "good" things about these extremist candidates and thus become motivated to vote for them? That is essentially what you and Sean are claiming.
Democrats are not responsible for extremist GOP candidates, the Republicans who voted for them in the primaries are. Period.
This is all just more deflection away from these horrible people that are representing the GOP on ballots across the country next month.
250+ election deniers are on the ballot across the country.
No, but they were willing to take that risk in their effort to maximise Dem wins. And they punished some of the few Repubs that wanted to work bipartisan and didn't support Trump. But then alls fair in Politics and war, right.
Funny, that's not how I read Sean's comments on this topic. All I really see is you putting words into Sean's mouth by "adding" to his comment in an attempt to smear Republicans.
The simple truth is that Democrats spend ad money on extremist Republican candidates in the primary elections across the country in hopes that the extremist candidates would win their primaries and would hopefully be easier for the Democrats to beat in the general election. Your continued attempts to smear Republican candidates is quite evident.
This article points to Republican candidates in Arizona. Now I don't believe that you live in Arizona, so why are you expending so much energy on this? Any of them winning their elections next month will not really change your life so I fail to understand the push here. Except for their tie to Trump who seems to consume your every moment.
Unless you have some proof that enough Democrats voted in Republican primaries, and voted for these extremists, you have no case. The people that voted for Kari Lake , etc, to be the Republican nominees are responsible, not people who ran television ads.
Have you lost your mind? The other day Vic said Kari Lake was being "smeared" when people say she is an election denier. There is written proof she is an election denier. So where is the smear? I dont smear anyone, they smear themselves.
You said it..............
"The fact that Democrats may have put up television ads does not translate into these candidates winning primaries until Republicans voted for them.
Secondly, a few television ads does NOT qualify as an endorsement for that person to be elected into office."
Not I