Has Stacey Abrams, who lost the election for governor of Georgia last year by 55,000 votes to Republican Brian Kemp, found an exciting new way to rebound from a setback? Or does she seem to be losing her mind?
The facts as assembled could point either way.
To be clear, she doesn’t claim to have gotten more votes than Kemp, only that the vote wasn’t “right.” And by “right,” she seems to mean there was voter suppression by means of closed polling places and purged voter rolls. Yet, no proof exists that anything close to this happened.
Control of the rolls and polls fell to nonpartisan local authorities — not Kemp, who was the state’s secretary of state.
Since the election is over, and the vote was not close, little attention has been given to her diatribes. But the last time we thought very much about someone not accepting results of elections, the reactions were much less restrained.
“With less than three weeks until the election, the Republican Party is in a state of historic turmoil, encapsulated by Trump’s extraordinary debate declaration that he would leave the nation ‘in suspense’ about whether he would recognize the results from an election he has claimed will be ‘rigged,’” the Washington Post had reported on Oct. 20, 2016. “Top Democrats fanned out to battleground states … to hammer Trump for what they described as an unprecedented attack on the country’s political system.”
President Barack Obama declared, “That is dangerous;” Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine compared it to goings-on in banana republics, and First Lady Michelle Obama said it was “threatening the very idea of America itself.”
All this was true, but Democrats seem willing to indulge it in Abrams, who has a very strong grip upon their base voters but a fairly weak one on herself. As she told “The View” recently, she had to lie to herself to protect her own ego from the disappointments and losses in life. “We are so often, if you come from the outside, taught to be complicit in your own demise,” she said to her audience. “You are taught to accept what happens to you, because that’s the only way you can make progress. But the reality is, the more you accept the diminution of your power, the more powerless you become.”
But if you can’t admit that you lost, ask yourself why, and try next time to do better, your “power” vanishes anyway. Also, you never stop living the lie.
And is identity politics, which she deeply believes in, one of the reasons she lost?
“Identity politics is nothing more complex than saying, ‘I see you,’” Abrams told a group of progressives who met last week in New York. “I lean into identity politics. I believe in identity politics. And I believe identity politics are the politics that win.”
But identity politics does not often win beyond the more localized races. And just what does “I see you” mean? Does it mean that I see that you’re there in the audience? Or does it mean I can see the “real” things about you, which would be your sex and your race?
The real breakthrough leaders in civil rights matters had no interest in things such as this. John F. Kennedy asked voters to look past his religion, and Martin Luther King said he wished to be judged by his character. The biracial Obama, like the two others, used universal and aspirational themes.
Had she listened to them, and not Rev. Al Sharpton (whose panel she spoke on), Abrams might not be roaming about, claiming she really won Georgia last year.
