‘Progressive Fighters’ don’t have much fight in them
Two weeks after the Rhode Island Political Co-Op announced part of its slate of candidates for Governor, LG, the General Assembly and more, bad PR has continued apace.
First, after taking heat for its selection of General Assembly targets, RIPC acolytes had to twist themselves into knots to defend their decisions. Of particular interest were challenges to liberals like Sen. Dawn Euer and Rep. Karen Alzate, by Jennifer Jackson and Tarshire Battle, respectively. Less than a week after the RIPC mounted this defense of their candidates, some oppo researcher did the basic due diligence that the RIPC failed to do themselves, and dug through these candidates’s social media history.
For Jackson, the posts unearthed read more like your right-wing boomer uncle on Facbook than a leftist — Jackson questioned vaccine mandates for health care workers and even lamented the removal of God and religion from the classroom(!). Again, it is absolutely critical to re-emphasize that the RIPC was, days before this was unearthed, justifying their support of Jackson as a challenger to Sen. Euer on grounds that Euer was insufficiently pure as a progressive. The Co-op has dropped Jackson as a candidate.
Battle’s posts were a degree less nutty than Jackson’s. She appeared to support religious exemptions from vaccine mandates and shared a post with religious overtones from Hobby Lobby, the left’s least favorite arts & crafts supply store. The RIPC stood by her as a candidate, and I did not see many making a big deal of that decision. But as of this morning, Battle announced that she was ending her campaign.
This week, the oppo dump turned to the #2 name on the RIPC ticket, state senator and LG candidate Cynthia Mendes. Mendes previously shared pro-life posts on Facebook and it was discovered that she had been registered as a Republican as recently as 2016, and was unaffiliated after that until 2019.
The statements from Battle and Mendes, as well as commentary from RIPC acolytes in the wake of these discoveries, demonstrate to me that the organization has failed to prepare itself or its candidates for the public scrutiny that comes with running for office.
Battle claims that “attacks” on her and other candidates have been “relentless,” and seems to indicate that this has something to do with her race and sex. Leaving aside that Battle was herself challenging the Chair of the Legislative Black and Latino Caucus, pulling these cards is lazy but entirely predictable. I’d also suggest t that if you take a news story on your own social media posts to be an attack, that you just might not be cut out for a campaign for public office.
The next claim is simply nonsensical. Again was a healthy dose of hyperbole, Battle claims that these so-called attacks constitute a “weaponizing” of her life by “the political establishment.” I’m not sure what weaponizing of one’s life really looks like, but it sounds like a deflection from scrutiny into past views that were embarrassing or contradictory with political aims. In the same breath as she claims that she refuses to allow the establishment to get away with this, she says that she won’t be running for office.
The Mendes situation is somewhat more complicated. I believe that public officials should, to a certain extent, be given the benefit of the doubt on changes in their beliefs, especially beliefs from before they entered public life. But this case warrants a simple question — do RIPC progressives grant the same forgiveness to their political opponents?
One of the RIPC’s biggest aims is to flip the Senate, an easier feat in a sheer numbers sense given the inroads they made there in 2020. Their two biggest targets will be Senate President Dominick Ruggerio and Majority Leader Mike McCaffrey. Any political observers from last year could see that, having lost many of their deputies to progressive challengers, Ruggerio and McCaffrey were old centrists that were trying to speak the progressive language, sometimes awkwardly so. Nevertheless they moved the chamber to the left of where it was for years under their leadership.
It’s worth asking what the RIPC would say if, knowing their time is potentially running out, Ruggerio and McCaffrey said that they were simply wrong before, that they had seen the light on abortion, guns, labor issues, etc. Would the RIPC “celebrate” them for “learning and growing” as they have asked others to do for their candidates? Call this a highly unlikely hypothetical, but there should be no doubt that the RIPC would continue to hit them on these past stances because they think it is politically beneficial for them to do so.
And the politics of this is what makes the progressive groveling so ironic. The RIPC has branded themselves as fighters who won’t back down from challenge of upending the political establishment. They even like to throw around F-bombs to show how very serious they are about this fight. Yet, still 11 months away from the primary election, they are crying foul about the most basic form of oppo research being done against them. Their stance seems to be that they and only they should be afforded the right to drag their opponents name through the mud, with claims of corruption, impurity and immorality, and that the tables being turned against them represents some affront on the grounds of sexism, racism or prejudice against working class people. It’s classic case of being able to dish it out but unable to take it.
If all it takes for the so-called political establishment to work the progressives into a defensive crouch, or for them to fold completely, is the easy investigative work that the Co-Op candidates could have done for themselves , then maybe this won’t be as tough a fight as the establishment feared.
