Some excitement might be coming to Rehoboth Beach, the quiet
Delaware
beach town where President Joe Biden spends a lot of time. Rehoboth, where I spent many summers growing up, is a place with boutique shops, pizza parlors, farms, a large gay community, and million-dollar homes. People have opinions about their neighbor, President Biden, both pro and con, but they are easygoing about it.
This is why it’s sad that the Biden document mess has come to the shore. While just three hours from Washington, D.C., it’s one of the places in the country where the old American ethic of tolerance and peace pervades. Part of it may be because the churning presence of the grand and mighty Atlantic Ocean right outside the window tends to soothe the soul and put things into perspective. Ultimately, in the eyes of God, our political battles don’t seem that important.
Doing a story here several months ago, I spoke to state Sen. Ernesto Lopez, a Republican who represents Rehoboth. Lopez told me this part of Delaware is not conservative red or liberal blue, but purple. He noted that people here have a beach-town vibe that lets them “disagree without being disagreeable.” The brawling political battles waged in Washington “are left behind once you cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.” He added that while he is a Republican state senator, Rehoboth’s state representative, Peter C. Schwartzkopf, is a Democrat.
MY BRUSH WITH THE HOLLYWOOD PROPAGANDA MACHINE
That isn’t to say there aren’t political divisions down here, just like in the rest of the country. Rehoboth is part of the Delmarva Peninsula, which includes the vast majority of the state of Delaware, as well as parts of the Eastern Shore regions of Maryland and
Virginia.
In the rural farm areas west of beach towns such as Rehoboth and nearby Bethany, people are much more conservative, as well as in the rowdier and more working-class Ocean City, Maryland, to the south. When you are west of Route 1, the main drag that runs through the town, you see Trump signs, and when you are east of the road, it’s DNC turf. The conservative talk radio station here is popular, but so are the more liberal gay restaurants and businesses.
People in Rehoboth may vote for Biden, but they’re also fans of efficiency, not bureaucracy. If there is trash that doesn’t get picked up, you hear about it, and it gets fixed overnight. “People here are fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” Lopez told me. “They want local services and appreciate that Rehoboth as a tourist spot is an economic driver for the state.”
Lopez noted that a majority in Sussex County, which covers the southern part of Delaware and is home to both rural farmers and beach towns such as Rehoboth and Fenwick Island, voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020, while the “blue coasts” of Rehoboth and Fenwick went for Biden.
Lopez did talk about one inconvenience, however. A Catholic, he has to alter his mass time at St. Edmond’s when the president is in town: “I used to go to mass at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. That’s the mass Joe goes to. Now, when Joe is here, I go Sunday morning.”
Many of the people who work in the shops on the strip along the boardwalk complain about the traffic that happens when the president arrives. Several refer to it as “the Joe Jam,” a motorcade that bottles up cars for miles. They also say they know the president is coming when a notice goes out prohibiting the use of drones, which are popular at the beach. Restricted airspace means that President Biden is coming to town.
On my most recent trip to Rehoboth, I checked in with one of my favorite people on the Eastern Shore, a man named Richard Brueckner. Bruckner, 50, is a DUI lawyer whose passion is surfing. On the wall in his law office in a two-story building on 63rd street in Ocean City, Maryland, just down the road from Rehoboth, is mounted a green surfboard, which he uses every morning before work. He surfs, takes DUI cases, and teaches a class on surfing and life at a local middle school.
Brueckner is an intelligent, warm, and charismatic speaker. He’s not only a surfer but a surfing evangelist. He preaches about surfing as a way of seeing the world that contradicts the cheap, nasty, and shallow place that much of culture war America has become. He’s like the anti-resentment messiah in a country enslaved by Twitter and petty
political
feuds.
“If you’re into surfing, you tend to be reliant or connected to the spiritual world,” he told me. “You are connected to nature. You’re a faith-based person. Most surfers don’t go through life scared. We aren’t gathering information from the news. We’re gathering information from experience.”
He goes on: “When you are out there in the morning, waiting for a wave, and the sun is coming up, and a dolphin goes by, it’s impossible not to know that there are things out there way bigger than you.”
That’s the heart of Rehoboth and the soul of Delmarva. It’s three hours from Washington, but, really, it’s another planet.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of
The Devil
’
s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi
. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
