Judge Roy Moore didn’t ride his horse on stage. He didn’t pull his gun on the crowd either. But while the Alabama Republican seemed a little out of place at the luxurious Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington, D.C., the fundamentalist cowboy must’ve felt right at home speaking at the Values Voter Summit.
Moore was introduced as “a man of God prepared for this moment,” and the frontrunner in Alabama’s Senate race used most of his 20-minute speech to warn against America’s moral failings. More pastoral than political, Moore quoted poetry at length.
The candidate read first from The Calf-Path, a poem by librarian-poet Sam Foss, quoting all seven verses with only the occasional interruption to offer commentary. It’s about how bovines follow the path of a bumbling calf building a road, a village, and eventually a civilization along the way. The rhyme scheme is simple, the illustration charming, and the point obvious: Don’t blindly follow. That folksy fable might work on a sleepy audience after hours of speeches.
But it’s probably not the sort of material Moore should use in his first Senate speech, and it’s definitely not what’s needed in that chamber currently. Blindly following is bad. Blind rebellion is even worse.
For instance, between prayers and regular calls for a revival, many speakers at the summit rightly cursed Obamacare. But that law hasn’t been preserved because of bovine obedience. It’s still around mainly because the junior senator from Kentucky (who was the first to call on election night and congratulate Moore on his defeat of incumbent Sen. Luther Strange) lashed out numerous times. He made the perfect the enemy of the good, and he followed only himself.
Sticking with the agrarian theme, the Alabaman paused to tell a drawn out joke about a confused cow who thinks he’s a rabbit — the idea being that America has lost its moral identity. That failure, Moore argued in simple terms, has led to many sins – most notably and recently the shooting in Las Vegas.
The second poem that Judge Roy Moore quoted at Values Voter Summit was his own. He wrote it. pic.twitter.com/26B7jrRpYu
— Philip Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) October 13, 2017
The candidate then read from America the Beautiful, an ironic and damning reinterpretation of the Samuel Ward hymn by the same name. Written by Moore and full of vivid descriptions, the poem features children “poisoned by cocaine,” a nation reduced to “a moral slum,” and an angry God.
Again, while fear of the divine is the beginning of wisdom, that poetry probably isn’t the basis for a win against Alabama Democrat Doug Jones late in November — let along a successful career in the Senate. Then again, Moore never worried about being out of place anyway.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
