As I’ve mentioned, I hope profoundly that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is allowed to find her own way as a freshman congresscritter and doesn’t spend too much of her time as A Symbol. However, her ascent is making so many of the right people completely crazy that I’m starting to become a genuine fan. It’s certainly clear that the elite political press in quite transported with the vapors, and one lovely piece of evidence is this very weird New York Times story about the race for governor of Georgia.

(By the way, the meeting held between the NYT’s publisher and its editorial-page editor and El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago was both admirably broad-minded and incredibly stupid.)

In Georgia, a Democrat named Stacey Abrams is running against this Brian Kemp guy, who is a public loon. This is my interpretation of the election. This is the one in the NYT:

More starkly than in most midterm campaigns, the contest between Mr. Kemp, the two-term Republican secretary of state, and Ms. Abrams, a former Democratic leader in the State Legislature, has come to mirror the disorienting polarization of the Trump era and expose the consequences of a primary system that increasingly rewards those who appeal to the fringes.

Fringes, you say?



Each side frames the election of the other in doomsday terms. Mr. Kemp, the Democrats fear, will take Georgia the way of North Carolina and Indiana, which were tarnished by recent legislative battles over issues like gay rights and the use of public restrooms by transgender people. Republicans warn that Ms. Abrams, who hopes to expand Medicaid health coverage for the poor and disabled, will raise taxes they have cut, reverse the state’s job growth, deplete its rainy-day surplus and threaten its superior bond ratings.

Georgians have consistently supported Medicaid expansion, and by large margins, too, right from jump. By what possible standard is this a “fringe” position? I hate it when all the editors show up drunk.

Meanwhile, brother Kemp is the guy who ran this campaign commercial.

Poor Georgia "centrists." Forced to choose between a (black) woman advocating for an enormously popular program that provides health-care for poor people, and some gun-humping maniac who has a big old truck in case he has to drive criminal illegals back to Honduras. Whatever could The Third Way be?

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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