Wrong Lane, Buddy

Look, I’ve been wondering if Tim Scott was going to run for President for a while now because from what I’ve seen of him, he has a compelling personal narrative and if the Republican Party is going to gather its collective feces enough to pretend to care about building this multi-ethnic working-class coalition that they blather about occasionally, it would help if you ran someone for President who wasn’t either a. White or b. Orange.

I know extremely online people frothed at the mouth about the 2020 Convention being at the White House and fulminated on a million pretend crimes of the Trump Administration (yes, I said ‘pretend crimes’-  just because you indict a fellow doesn’t mean he’s going to be convicted of a damn thing. What country did you think you were living in, anyway?) But in the midst of all that, the one person who stood out and gave a really, really good speech that made him seem like one of the only adults in the room was Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

So, I saw the news he was forming an exploratory committee. Saw Roland Martin on my TikTok deconstructing his announcement video and then ran it down to see it for myself. 

I’m disappointed, but not surprised.

To be fair to him, he is running for the Republican nomination and it’s very illustrative of how broken our primary process is that in order to run for President in a general election, you have to tell your base what they want to hear and what your base wants to hear is so far from where the median voter is in this country it may well be in another galaxy. (Both parties have this problem by the way, but Democrats best pray nightly for the health and well-being of President Biden, because hoo-boy, could they have problems real quick.)

The problem is that there is a gigantic opportunity for somebody, anybody to be The Adult In The Room. That’s a winning lane for either party and it’s so wide, it’s an expressway at this point and his announcement video is a gigantic missed opportunity.

First of all, I get that you’re from South Carolina, but holy shit is Fort Sumter a choice. If you’re going to make a point about a time of heightened division in this country and how to overcome that, might I suggest relocating northward to Appomattox, Virginia?

Second of all, you’re really going to slam the Left for creating a culture of grievance (they are, for sure, culpable, but only in part) in this country when *gestures to every Red State* y’all have this going on? What is this petty defunding of all the public libraries in Missouri? What is going after the only Democratic officeholder in Iowa because you don’t want transparency for your plans? What is expelling two black lawmakers but not the white one in Tennessee if not a monumentally large culture of grievance? You had an opportunity to try and take us away from this spiral of juvenile horseshit where ‘everything you can do, I can do better’ seems to be the order of the day between our two parties now. You failed.

Third of all, the rest was fine. I thought it was strongest when he was talking about his personal narrative and how he climbed the ladder that the Biden Liberals (a hysterically funny label when you think about Biden’s politics and the current state of the Democratic Party) are attacking. That would have been what I centered my campaign on, but sure, you do you.

Finally, there’s time I guess. Trump could get locked up in prison. DeSantis is so wrapped up in the Culture War that I have serious doubts about his viability. Scott seems to be aiming for the lane that Mike Pence is sitting in and in that case, I would say he’s got a shot at wrestling Mike Pence out of that particular chair. I’m not sure he’ll go anywhere much after that, but there’s plenty of time, and stranger things have happened.

This was a missed opportunity for Senator Scott. He’s got plenty of time to make that up, I guess, and maybe he just seemed like The Adult In The Room back in 2020 because of the company he was in at the time. But there was a real chance to do something to get the country’s attention here and he flubbed it big time. People talk a lot about silent majorities and I think there is one in this country and whoever seems like The Adult In The Room come 2024 is going to be the next President of the United States.

I just doubt it’s going to be Tim Scott.