Most of those who watched Jeff Sessions testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee saw the nation’s chief law enforcement officer lie, dissemble and squirm on national television.
But the man who now holds Sessions’ old Senate seat, Luther Strange, must have been watching a different hearing. Less than an hour after the marathon session ended, Alabama’s junior Senator took to Twitter to demand that the Democrats leave poor Jeff alone.
Most Alabamians I talk to aren't focused on #Russia or #Comey. They care about getting solutions to our problems. https://t.co/MgzApds1OC
— Luther Strange (@lutherstrange) June 13, 2017
Stand with #Sessions and #Trump and sign my petition telling #Democrats to move on! #ALSEN https://t.co/Rl1QejhkXU pic.twitter.com/23ekDULQWp
— Luther Strange (@lutherstrange) June 13, 2017
It's time to start focusing on the issues the American people actually care about. #ALsen #alpolitics #TrumpAgenda https://t.co/zRpPlxbofJ
— Luther Strange (@lutherstrange) June 13, 2017
It was a theme he’d kept up all day. Just before the hearing, he dropped by Fox Business to complain about how much time was being wasted on the effort to get to the bottom of Russia’s attempt to hack the election. Watch here.
When host Stuart Varney wrung his hands at how “the nation’s business” was taking a back seat to “miniscule matters” like the Russian hacking investigation, Strange said that “most Alabamians, and most Americans that I’ve talked to” are of the same mind.
Wait a minute. A recent Quinnipiac University Poll found that 68 percent of voters are concerned about the ties between Trump and Russia. Seen next to those numbers, Strange’s chest-beating support for Trump seems rather, um, strange.
But notice how Strange said “most Alabamians” aren’t concerned about the prospect that a hostile power hacked our election. That possibility doesn’t seem so outlandish after reading an article from veteran Alabama political journalist Josh Moon, best known as the former longtime columnist at the Montgomery Advertiser. Moon recently helped launch Alabama Political Reporter, a new site dedicated to independent coverage of Alabama’s political scene. In his latest column there, he gives a birds-eye view of what keeps Trump’s most diehard supporters loyal to him.
Moon writes that he was around Trump voters “long before the rest of the country knew them as Trump voters.” From where he’s sitting, one thing drives them–“aversion to change.” That doesn’t seem to compute at first–after all, Trump billed himself as the one person who could drain the swamp and give the country back to the people. But Moon has an idea what makes them tick.
“Whether it’s the lazy blacks getting all the breaks or the gays taking away their rights to discriminate or the liberal courts telling them they can’t hold church services at the courthouse or the schools stopping Christmas parties because some Muslim got upset, the Trump voter is tired, tired, tired of watching white Christians get the shaft in the country where white Christians have never been forced to deal with anything approaching a level playing field.”
But what about their economic interests? Well, according to Moon, that doesn’t matter to the Trump voter. What matters is that he is “a beacon in the night” who will restore them to their rightful place atop the political heap.
It’s the same disconnect that led them to slam Obama as a Kenyan Mooslamb socialist dictator who tore this country to shreds even when they “fail to provide a single fact” to back that claim. It’s the same disconnect that made them ready to lynch Hillary Clinton over her emails, while more or less blinking at the growing evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. All that matters to them, as Moon sees it, is that with Trump, they now “have a voice”–and that voice is “a walking, talking Confederate flag.”
Strange undoubtedly knows this. After all, most Alabama Republican primary voters subscribe to this very mentality. If he has any hope of winning the Republican nomination for the balance of Sessions’ fourth term, he has to win over a good chunk of people who would vote for Trump if he were comatose.
Dismissing the prospect of a hostile foreign power interfering in our election may seem strange to us. But considering the votes Strange needs to stay in Washington, it makes a lot of sense. That says a lot about the state of our politics–and it isn’t good.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
