Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana has such a significant name that it feels almost obligatory to add “no relation” when mentioning him in conversation. You really wouldn’t want to confuse him with the other John Kennedy. He’s really nothing like THE John Kennedy.
John Kennedy (no relation) is one of those high-profile yet junior Republican Senators who love the fawning gaze of a TV camera. He has the look of Grandpa from The Munsters with a big soft-focus face that looks as fleshy as a Louisiana swamp and twice as deceptive. He’s the kind of “good ol’ boy” who falls easily into aphorisms, comparing tough jobs to the difficulty of flicking a tick from a gator’s nostril or teaching arithmetic to a squirrel. He’s been described as the “folksiest man in the US Senate” but that probably understates it. He might well be the folksiest man in America.
He also exemplifies the Democrat’s problem as they begin this week to turn their gears on the real business of impeaching President Donald Trump. They can’t simply make their case against the President. Nor is it their job to convince men like Kennedy who will only ever pluck the strings of their red-state banjo. Their task is to provide a narrative that’s impartial, reasonable, and ultimately more compelling than any offered by Kennedy, who continues to pollute the national airwaves with his nonsensical drivel wrapped up in parochial wisdom.
Narrative remains important to Democrats given a political reality where intuition means so much. Kennedy’s most high-profile (and ridiculous) moment came in 2018, at the Brett Kavanaugh hearing. Having largely ignored the powerful testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford, Kennedy asked the accused nominee to the Supreme Court “do you believe in God?”. He then proceeded to conduct a cross-examination entirely premised on Kavanaugh’s ability to look Kennedy in the eye and swear to his Almighty that none of the allegations were true. That seemed to be enough for John Kennedy (no relation) who fixed the soon-to-be Supreme Justice Kavanaugh with a long stare and then nodded his head as if he’d discerned the deeper truth. He is that kind of politician.
And by “that kind of politician”, I mean, of course, deeply cynical. Kennedy is as fake as flippers on a hound dog, as he’d probably say. He began his political career as a Democrat but in 2007 he became a Republican and finally won his seat in the Senate in 2017. Before that, he had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and then a lawyer with serious books and articles to his name. In other words, he’s not an idiot. He just enjoys playing one on TV.
If that sounds too strong, consider his appearance this weekend when he told the audience of Meet the Press that “President Poroshenko actively worked for Secretary Clinton”. He’s been peddling (and back-peddling) this stuff for weeks but this was a new low.
A YouGov poll released this week suggested that 53% of Republicans believe that Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln. It’s the same kind of meaningless statistic that would have you believe that (looks desperately at the charts) Maroon 5 are greater than The Rolling Stones or Lewis Capaldi superior to John Lennon. That’s not to say the 53% don’t really believe that but it does remind us how belief shaped by ignorance can be co-opted by a powerful media that preaches partisanship. And when 53% of Republicans are willing to believe Dodgy Donald is a better president than Honest Abe, there is very little surprise that they listen to men like Kennedy claiming that Ukraine meddled in the US election.
To a lawyer like Kennedy, the word “meddled” is so loose as to mean literally anything they want it to mean. It can mean the kind of operation launched by Russia that the US intelligence community consider to be the real “meddling”, but it can also mean “expressed an opinion about” as in the many Ukrainian officials who expressed an opinion about the candidates running in 2016. This is the point that Dr Fiona Hill acknowledged in her recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Many foreign politicians had unwisely written articles condemning candidate Trump but, by that definition of meddling, the UK meddled, France meddled, Canada meddled, everybody meddled…
The job of Democrats, then, isn’t to defeat these counterfactuals but reasonably set them in context with as little suggestion of partisanship as possible. The emphasis will be less on what the President did as how far it collides with the Constitution; something akin to a Constitutional Law for Dummies in televised form. The speed with which Democrats are now choosing to run this towards the Senate suggests they recognise the unlikely chance of victory there. Yet perhaps it’s enough if Republicans like Kennedy continue to argue the President’s defence. If you believe that the course of history is towards enlightenment, you will believe that the glaring contradictions of the Republican position will eventually harm them. If you believe that we’re descending into a period of deeper partisan rancour, motivated by conspiracies and imaginary conflicts, then men like Kennedy will succeed.
In the here and now, however, John Kennedy (no relation) already looks desperate and rather foolish. The process, he said, has been “as rigged as a carnival ring toss” only hours before the White House rejected a chance for the President to have representation at Wednesday’s hearing. He will no doubt be sitting at the President’s trial in the Senate, possibly as early as January, where, as they no doubt say in Louisiana, he will continue to paint lipstick on the proverbial pig. He and his Republican colleagues might even succeed but it will be a victory many will have to justify in November and every year they remain in the Senate, though that might be not much time at all. Long thought impossible for Democrats, a path to the Senate might be opening up, with the Republican response to the impeachment certain to factor into that.
What then is the Republican game plan? Do they stick by a President so damaged as to be an electoral liability? If they do, then as Kennedy once said, “[i]t must suck to be that dumb”.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.