As reality finally begins to intrude upon the political and chattering classes, the inevitability of realizing Republican state Treas. John Fleming is a serious candidate to win the senatorial seat up for grabs this fall finally has prompted what in retrospect may turn out to be a too-little-too-late series of go-for-broke attacks on his candidacy, validating his growing strength.
To date, the campaigns of his GOP nomination opponents incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy and Rep. Julia Letlow, but more instructively political action committees pledged to support either, almost exclusively had trained their fire on each other. This is done in good cop/bad cop fashion, where the campaigns extoll the virtues of their candidates and the PACs lambaste the opponents. Candidates and their allies follow this strategy because the PACs keep the candidate they prefer from looking demeaning through attacking that tries to detach voters from the opponent while the campaign presents a pristine candidate and positive reasons to vote for the candidate.
However, they now have put Fleming in the crosshairs, although in a spectacularly clumsy and manufactured way with a couple of negative television advertisements recently aired. One claimed Fleming supported carbon capture and sequestration, despite Fleming being the candidate most assertively and visibly arguing against the use of tax dollars to subsidize the activity, by its saying he voted for budget bills that allow the subsidization. It attempts guilt by association by trying to tie Fleming to leftists who also oppose CCS (but for reasons with which Fleming disagrees), a connection that becomes even more ludicrous when considering that meant, according to voting on last year’s budget reconciliation bill, just about every Republican in the House of Representatives and Senate also were in league with leftist bogeymen – including both Cassidy and Letlow.
The other tactic spliced recordings of Fleming together to create the false impression that he wanted more, not fewer, illegal aliens in the country – contrary not only to Fleming’s consistent statements and actions historically but also patently misleading and untrue. However, legally campaign communications can spread falsehoods as long as they don’t defame or maliciously spread factual errors.
In a way, such obvious distortions and mendacity convey an air of desperation pointing to great panic among supporters of Fleming’s opponents that confirm he is in strong position to make the inevitable runoff. At the same time, because this is the Republican semi-closed primary, such attacks won’t bear as much fruit as those supporters might hope, which explains the over-the-top approach.
As this is a primary where most voters will be Republicans, the central problem facing the attackers is the candidate seen as the most conservative consistently will be the candidate most difficult to have mud slung against stick. These voters place a premium on a rock-ribbed conservative and are the most attentive to all forms of campaign communication, and to date Fleming has done nothing to dispel the notion that he fits that bill much better than either of the other two, whose records of voting and statements open themselves up to charges that they go whichever way the wind blows to get ahead, implying that they cannot be trusted to adhere to conservative principles in office – not the indictment they need around their necks in this era where conservatives rail about Washington, D.C. as the unprincipled “swamp.”
Worse for the two federal officeholders, their surrogates are doing this to them. Every negative ad run against each other only reinforces this image and makes Fleming less and less touchable in the absence of similar treatment to him. The problem is, his supporters – of which at present there seem to be enough of to make the runoff – are the least likely to waver in the face of those appeals, knowing the records as they do.
The only way to put this in position to make this work is to have the Cassidy and Letlow campaigns keep pumping out positive stuff about their bosses– while hoping the consumer doesn’t hear about Cassidy’s vote to impeach GOP Pres. Donald Trump and dalliances with Democrats or Letlow’s changing her tune on hot button issues after she entered Congress (and rather unconvincingly) – while their surrogates keep pounding both the other and Fleming. But they need Fleming’s cooperation to make it actually work, by his campaign not refuting the distortions.
That takes money, and a lazy assumption that a number of observers have made about Fleming – maybe because he comes from north Louisiana, maybe because he hasn’t spent much fundraising efforts in favor of his day job and shoe leather campaigning, maybe because he’s generally considered an outsider as demonstrated by the relatively microscopic PAC money he has had donated – is that he won’t have the resources to finish the job. So far, he has, and in a week’s time will come another marker to evaluate the veracity of that view with the release of the next round of finance reports. If it shows he has pumped a few more of his many millions of dollars in personal wealth into the race, that indicates he can and will respond, if his campaign already hasn’t, and that he can be there for the long haul.
The underestimating of Fleming’s candidacy had to collapse eventually because the real world is unforgiving. Now the question is whether the dynamics set in place are so solid as to obviate the present necessarily extreme efforts needed to prevent him from making the runoff election.
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