Today’s lesson is that “character trumps ideology.” It’s something we should have known all along. It is the reason 2016 was so very depressing, since Hillary Clinton mistook character for her own self-interest, her great flaw all along.
In the 2008 election, as in most other contests, both sides had their flaws, but at least they were not mired in utter hypocrisy. In 2016, both sides were steeped to the gills in their own greed and lies, and by predation and lechery, if we count Clinton and her husband as the two-for-one package they had once promised.
In sharpest contrast stands President Trump’s current Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. “By comparison [with Trump] Barrett is well-liked,” the blog Hot Air said recently. “CNN/SSRS’ poll earlier this month had her with a +10 point net positivity rating among registered voters. That’s basically on par with the +12 and +13 point ratings Elena Kagan, a Barack Obama nominee, and Neil Gorsuch, a Trump nominee, got in 2010 and 2018 … what makes Barrett’s polling so strong is that her net popularity is running 28 points ahead of Trump’s.”
This is because Barrett’s character, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s, appears to be sterling, and, like Ginsburg’s story, hers is great.
Because of her age — she is 30 years younger than Ginsburg — Barrett is not quite the trailblazer that Ginsburg was, although, on the other hand, she has five more children, which must count for something. To the rage of the Left, she is living proof that children need not impair a woman’s ambitions. The Left will not easily forgive her that lesson.
But this is just the beginning of the things that the Democrats cannot seem to bear in the unfolding of recent events — the fact that the end, when it came, seemed so very sudden; that it came at the worst moment possible; that Trump and Mitch McConnell had the nerve to name her successor immediately, as the Constitution indubitably allows.
They can’t forgive Ginsburg for having died when she did, with just time enough for the Republicans to name her successor, just weeks before the presidential and Senate elections could put the appointment power back into her party’s hands.
Ginsburg’s forte was always her character, which led her to fight on through repeat bouts with cancer. It was character, too, that led her presumptive successor to parent seven children, including her Down syndrome son and two adopted orphans from Haiti, who were in dire straits when she found them but are now doing fine.
No better face can be found for conservative women, and no better brand can be found for the party of Abraham Lincoln in view of the void that exists in the White House at present.
The Barretts are a first family we can look up to, the one we have sought all the time. They can be our RFKs without the hyperactivity, our JFKs without the adultery, the bright shiny apple without the worms in it that too often impinge on our dreams.
Since Trump appeared in the picture in 2015, descending the escalator in his glass and gold tower, there has been a hole in the soul at the heart of his party. The Barretts are filling it at last.
