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The Democratic Party has lowered the bar to schlep two election losers to a status reserved for winners. They continue to refer to failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams and failed U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke as ‘rising stars’—a moniker typically used to describe someone who comes out of nowhere to win a significant election and whose resume has significant achievements. O’Rourke and Abrams have neither. However, they are routinely awarded participation trophies. Abrams' additional reward was to deliver the Democratic response to President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union speech after losing her race.
Remember when Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was talked about by liberal reporters and commentators? He was always prefaced as a rising star in national Democratic Party circles. He became the darling of the Hollywood elites. However, his shelf life as a star fizzled out quickly after he lost his bid for the U.S. Senate to Senator Ted Cruz in Texas by over 200,000 votes. During his run, he was mentioned as a top tier candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. His problem is that he doesn’t check any of the required boxes on the liberal identity politics form. He’s a white, Irish-American male. Nothing wrong with that but it makes him persona non grata by their rabid socialist base. His nickname Beto is supposed to fool the uninformed into thinking that he is of Hispanic descent. Once people started to peel back the layers and poke around, he was finished. You would expect that of someone who hasn’t accomplished much politically and whose bio is pretty thin. His single-digit polling numbers among the other Democratic presidential candidates have signaled the death of this rising star. However, he still gets the rising star participation trophy treatment.
Beto has reached his supernova, the explosion that signals the death of a star. His meteoric rise onto the national political scene and his explosion has led to the creation of the latest Democratic Party “rising star”—Stacey Abrams.
Before I dissect Stacey Abrams let me give her some props. She is a Yale law school graduate. Great. She was in the Georgia state legislature. Nice. Other than that, she is another politician with few accomplishments. Haven’t we seen this act before? We tried that experiment when a state legislator from Illinois became a freshman U.S. senator who was elected president in a social engineering experiment. The results were disastrous. His claim to fame was voting “present” so as not to create a record that would allow him to identify as a moderate Democrat in his run for president. Slick.
Abrams continues to traverse the country in a state of delusion, telling audiences that she won her race for Georgia governor but that it was stolen from her through racist Republican gerrymandering. She lost by 55,000 votes, not even enough to trigger an automatic recount. Georgia has 156 counties. Abrams won—are you ready for this—20 counties. The only reason the race was as close as it was is because she won Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia and where 54% of blacks live. The reality is that she lost because her base of support didn’t go outside of Atlanta. It wasn’t diverse enough, ironically. She tried to get elected to the highest office in the state of Georgia by basically winning in one county. Maybe she should have considered building her bio by running for mayor of Atlanta first and governing from there. Her ambition wouldn’t allow that. She was trying to be the first—as in first black and female governor of Georgia. She could not fulfill being the first black mayor of Atlanta. Maynard Jackson beat her to it having become Atlanta’s first black mayor in 1974. Democrats are still trying to become the first in some office whether regarding skin color, gender, or sexual preference.
Now Democrats want to force Stacey Abrams down the throats of the rest of America after the voters of Georgia rejected her. They mention her as a potential presidential or VP candidate. She has a thin resume just like a replay of Obama circa 2008. I hope that conservatives push back this time with the gumption they did not have in 2008 when they decided to flaunt their racial sensitivity because of the fear of being called racists.
Let me get the drumbeat in rejecting Stacey Abrams for national office started. Too many in the GOP will be afraid to do so. She is a flawed candidate with no real political experience outside of activism. She is a career race-baiter having started a voter registration campaign called the New Georgia Project, which was investigated for voter fraud, and that was unable and unwilling to say what the organization did with the $3.6 million they raised to register voters. It failed.
Abrams has not had the class to concede to her opponent. Instead, she has called anyone who did not vote for her a racist. She has parroted a Democratic rally cry lie about voter suppression causing her defeat. She provides no evidence. What better figure to sloganeer for Democrat race politics. A black female. Perfect. She checks two boxes in their insidious game of identity politics. This is what she’s good at.
O’Rourke and Abrams from an experience standpoint started their campaigns with a quarter tank of gas and thought they’d travel across the country. The Left is still pushing their broken-down vehicles with participation trophies and labels such as risings stars, hoping they will catch fire and make the journey. Elevating election losers to statuses reserved for winners appears to be the new normal for the Left.