Let us now praise famous retreads. One of the dumbest things ever said by a major American literary talent was that whole business about no second acts in American life. I don’t know how many gin rickeys into the evening old Scott Fitzgerald was when this thought occurred to him—and there’s more than a little evidence that it’s come down to us in garbled form—but its common usage is nowhere belied more than in our politics, which are nothing but second (and third and fourth) acts.
On Tuesday, Sarah Palin lost a congressional seat to Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola for the second time in 90 days, having finished second in a special election and then losing a runoff this week. But that’s nothing compared to our old friend Charlie Crist, the Republican-turned-Democrat who got steamrolled by Ronald DeSantis for the Florida governorship.
Since changing parties in 2012, Crist has lost to Marco Rubio in a Republican Senate primary, then again as an independent in the subsequent general election; then he lost a run for governor against Rick Scott two years later. Crist managed to get elected to Congress as a Democrat in 2016 but left in order to walk into the meat grinder Tuesday night. (Beating Crist seems to have become a rite of passage for ambitious Florida conservatives.)
Democrats seem to have a weird jones for this kind of thing. They ran Russ Feingold against Ron Johnson for Senate twice and lost both times. They ran Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett against Scott Walker twice and lost both times. This behavior contributes to a general feeling that the Democratic candidate pool is stuck with the musty relics of a creepy gerontocracy.
Which leads us by a circuitous path to El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago.
To be fair, he had the most memorable—to say nothing of the most narcissistic—summation of Tuesday’s results, telling News Nation, “I think if they win, I should get all of the credit, and if they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”
Sometimes, you just listen to him and say, ‘Wow. It’s positively a phenomenon of nature, like a horse reading Shakespeare.’
If the Republican Party wants to lose him, it will never have a better chance than it has now. The law is closing in on him from all sides: Letitia James got re-elected as the attorney general of New York, and Merrick Garland has no excuse not to get off the dime now that the elections are over. He’s raging all through Mar-a-Lago, casting anathemas in all directions and—most spectacularly—blaming his wife for foisting Mehmet Oz on the Republicans of Pennsylvania. A substantial portion of the party seems ready to move along up the golden stairs with DeSantis, who, while anti-charismatic, a lousy speaker, and addicted to cruel and stupid stunts rather than actual leadership, is at the very least not the former president* (I have real doubts that DeSantis can sell anywhere north of Pensacola or west of Fort Myers). But if the Republicans sincerely want to send the former president* packing, party leaders better find the guts to start wrangling their donors to cut him off soon, because once he gets a presidential campaign rolling again, there’s still no Republican he can’t squash.
Obsolescence in politics is a very fungible business.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
