Tom Price’s vacating of a Georgia congressional seat set the scene for exactly what is darkly wrong with US politics. In the sprawling kleptomanic entity known as USA Inc., with its distancing between the concept of representation and the money that backs it, a campaign for one congressional seat can cost tens of millions.
The Sixth Congressional District in Georgia was always set for an otherwise unwarranted degree of attention for its June 20 ballot. For one, it was a potential atmospheric “testing” of Trump-era politics, a taster as to how the administration had been going. Mid-term elections are scheduled for 2018, and political pundits and strategists are attempting to take the temperature with usual clumsiness.
As ever, the Democrats, still suffering the withdrawal symptoms of a devastating electoral performance last November, gave another show of denial and misreading. The Republican Karen Handel prevailed over her Democrat opponent Jon Ossoff. Those with an iota of political nous could hardly have been surprised.
The wet-behind-the-ears Ossoff had been primed as the man for the job of reversing the madly erratic Trump machine. On the surface, he seemed absurd, a child-like option to topple adult consistency. But it was entirely appropriate about a party that had misunderstood its mission. The tide, so went the hoodwinked narrative, would begin in Georgia. Money poured into his electoral coffers, showing, yet again, the misguided assumption…