I want to clarify something about my reaction to the Mississippi primary campaign, and about my reaction to people’s reactions to it.
I agree with those of you who say that the Cochran campaign acted badly, whether it put that flyer out or not. But I definitely care who put out the flyer, because I like to base my opinions on facts, not suppositions, as much as possible.
I realize I’ll probably never know who put out the flyer. But I emphasized the question in earlier posts because most people I’ve seen who are angry about Cochran and the campaign seem most incensed about that flyer, the one directly trashing the Tea Party.
And more importantly, most people seem to have assumed they knew who put it out and who made the robocalls even though it is possible that they are being manipulated by the left to think even worse of Cochran and company than they already did. If you’re not aware that the left could be purposely widening the rifts on the right in order to help engineer their own victory, then I think you should start looking out for it. Whether it happened in Mississippi or not, it definitely happens.
The primary rules in Mississippi allow crossover votes. Sometimes in a situation like that the opposing party tells its voters to vote in the other party’s primary in order to manipulate the election to override the wishes of that other party. In the case of this particular campaign, something different seems to have happened: Cochran used the open primary rules as a way to appeal directly to the interests of Democratic voters in getting benefits from the federal government, not just what you’d call “pork” but also things such as federal aid to education. Whether this was right or wrong, I submit that it was inevitable that it would happen some day, given the open primary rules. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before (and maybe it has happened before; I certainly haven’t followed every open primary closely enough to say).
The Cochran campaign in Mississippi directly courted the support of the Democratic Party in the state. But the Democrats in Mississippi had their own independent reasons for wanting to give Cochran an assist, even without his asking. In Mississippi, the Republican ordinarily wins. In this race, Cochran was unquestionably the Republican most likely to support continuing services the Democrats wanted continued. Tea Party candidate McDaniel, if elected, would be more likely to try to stop those services. And since one of them, Cochran or McDaniel, was almost certainly going to win in the general, Democrats quite naturally wanted it to be Cochran. So some of these things—the robocalls, the flyers, and the rest—could easily have been put out by Democrats on their own. And even if Cochran had wanted to stop them (and I’m not saying that he did want to stop them), he probably couldn’t have done so, because they had their own agenda.
Cochran should have condemned them, of course. I’m going to assume he didn’t do so, because I haven’t read anything about it. If he had condemned them, though, he would have alienated the very people he needed in order to win. That’s the ugly reality of the situation.
I have never understood the rationale for open primaries. It has long seemed to me that they are simply invitations for various kinds of manipulations and shenanigans of a devious nature (perhaps that’s the reason both parties seem to like them so much). I expect that politicians, being politicians, will take advantage of those opportunities. I would love to see each state close its primaries, although that wouldn’t eliminate all the problems; politicians are creative about finding their way around things, and where there’s a will there’s a way. But although Cochran and McDaniel should have had to duke it out about issues that would appeal to their Republican constituents only, the primary rules in Mississippi are unlikely to be changed in the foreseeable future.
That’s the source of my frustration, and has been for many years. Politicians are never going to be angels or anything like it. Most of them are going to be conniving, power-hungry narcissists, and if they don’t start out that way they will end up that way. So I’m for changing the rules to make it harder for them to screw around with things.
None of this would make me want to run out and vote for Cochran in the general if I lived in Mississippi, to say the least. But I would probably do it rather than allow his Democratic opponent to go to the Senate. The stakes are just too high right now, and the danger of letting the Democrats keep the Senate too great. It is counterproductive to reward Democrats for what Cochran did.
I don’t pretend that it’s an easy decision. Those who would like smaller government (and I count myself among them) are in a bind. We don’t want to be enablers of the likes of Cochran. I say to fight them tooth and nail for the nomination. But fighting them too hard once they are nominated opens the door to something even worse.
