I’ve done a few national radio and podcast interviews since Saturday night, when Bill Cassidy’s career in electoral politics came to an abrupt end. A lot of the national folks are absolutely shocked at Cassidy’s dismal performance. I’m having to tell them that nobody in Louisiana — other than perhaps Cassidy and his wife — is at all surprised.
Cassidy didn’t just lose Saturday night. He got clobbered. He finished third with only 25 percent of the vote behind Congresswoman Julia Letlow (45 percent) and State Treasurer John Fleming (28 percent). Three-quarters of Louisiana’s Republican voters gave him the finger.
And it was well deserved.
Cassidy came to represent virtually everything people hate about the legacy Republican Party, the animal which existed prior to Donald Trump’s arrival, elephant gun in hand, and descent down that escalator in Manhattan. Cassidy, by trade a gastroenterologist whose clientele was almost solely made up of Medicaid patients, got into politics as a state legislator and made his way to Congress and then on to the Senate, beating the fossilized Mary Landrieu in a not-close election in 2014. Cassidy said at that time he was only interested in two terms in the Senate, but he reneged on that pledge. (RELATED: ‘Bill Cassidy Sucks’)
That was only one of the betrayals that Louisiana’s conservatives, and those around the country, perceived from Cassidy.
Everyone remembers the thing that was the death knell of Cassidy’s political career, and they ought to. He was one of the meatheaded moron Republican Senators — there were seven of them — who voted in favor of a post-presidential impeachment of Donald Trump, supposedly owing to Trump’s role in turning the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol protest into a riot. (RELATED: Cassidy v. Trump Isn’t Much of a Fight)
It took more than five years before Louisiana’s GOP voters had an opportunity to punish Cassidy for that vote, but it turns out that on Saturday, the memory was as fresh and turgid as if it had just happened.
There’s a reason for that, of course, which is that Cassidy, incompetent boob of a politician that he is, did absolutely nothing to assuage the ire of his constituents over that vote. And in defeat, he actually validated that ire.
First he says if you get beat, you don’t whine about it. Then he whines about losing by virtue-signaling about Trump’s endorsement of Letlow and complaining about “leadership” with a veiled shot at the Iran campaign.
Louisiana voters have been absolutely sick of this kind of duplicity for a very long time. Many were sick of it before the impeachment vote.
Especially since Cassidy ran for re-election in 2020 as the Trumpiest Trump who ever Trumped, and not two months after the election, there he was stabbing the president in the back.
On the basis of what?
Cassidy is castigating Trump as having whined and made excuses about losing the 2020 election, while Todd Blanche, the attorney general of these united states, is warning the public that substantial evidence exists that the 2020 election was, shall we say, improperly held.
He’s never been quick on the uptake.
In Cassidy’s first term, he made a fool of himself in the national media by — while he was attempting to write an Obamacare alternative bill — stating that whatever replaced Obamacare had to pass the “Jimmy Kimmel test.” This, after the left-wing hack and Chuck Schumer crony disguised as a late-night talk show host had given an impassioned announcement that his son was very sick and had grieved for the fate of kids from less-well-off backgrounds.
Fooling him was always too easy, and he never seemed to learn.
The formulation of the “Jimmy Kimmel test” was awkward at best — Kimmel didn’t need the federal government to provide health care to his family. But it got Cassidy a guest spot on Kimmel’s show, which was awkward in the extreme.
And then, two weeks later, Kimmel was on his little stage at ABC trashing Cassidy as a liar and echoing Schumer’s talking points about Cassidy’s efforts to redesign American health care. That was an episode everybody saw coming but Bill Cassidy.
Fooling him was always too easy, and he never seemed to learn.
The post-presidential impeachment was the ultimate painting of certain Republican politicians as marks, and Cassidy not only fell for it, but was too politically stupid to cure the mistake when he had five years to do it.
It was apparent early on that something unusual had happened on Jan. 6 — when Nancy Pelosi turned Capitol Hill into an armed camp ringed with razor wire and troops summoned from around the country, in response to an unruly mob of grandparents in Uncle Sam costumes, none of whom bothered to arm themselves for the “insurrection” they were carrying out, it looked more like a coup d’etat than almost anything else this country has seen.
And yet Cassidy marched right along with the lemmings, going on every dinosaur-media show he could to trumpet his Never Trumperism and to declare Trump politically finished.
Then Clay Higgins, a member of Louisiana’s House delegation, began doing yeoman work on the House Oversight Committee, uncovering a trove of disturbing evidence about how many federal agents and assets were on the Capitol property on Jan. 6 and raising very serious questions about whether the migration of that crowd from outside of the Capitol building to within its walls wasn’t some sort of information operation — a Reichstag fire, if you will, which masked the very real deficiencies of the 2020 election.
I bring that up because Cassidy had to know what Higgins was uncovering, and he certainly should have recognized the opportunity to save himself that his fellow Louisianan was giving him.
All he had to say was that he was taking note of Higgins’ investigative work and that “I didn’t have the information when I made that vote that I do now, and I’m troubled at the thought I might have been lied to on a subject so grave as this.”
Cassidy didn’t have to apologize for the impeachment vote. He didn’t have to repudiate it. All he had to say was that his information after the fact didn’t match what he was given at the time, and that he didn’t like that fact.
It would have been enough.
It would have been enough to keep Trump out of the Louisiana Senate race. Trump, after all, now has Cassidy to deal with until early January in a Senate with a very weak GOP majority of 53 votes, a handful of which can’t be counted on even for no-brainer legislation like the SAVE America Act. The easy thing for Trump to do would have been to either publicly make his peace with Cassidy or just stay out of the race. But Cassidy never gave Trump the opportunity to do that. He never moved off the impeachment vote. (RELATED: The Abysmal Quality of the GOP Senate Caucus Is the Real Issue, and the SAVE Act Mess Has Made That Clear)
Instead, his campaign ran ads on the radio and TV airwaves boasting about how when Trump needs a vote, he has one in Bill Cassidy.
It was utterly bizarre. It looked like Cassidy’s political consultants hadn’t even paid attention to why he was in trouble in the first place.
Or that they were treating their client like a mark while they were spending tens of millions of dollars in a vain attempt to prop him up long enough to get him into the runoff — so they could spend a few million more of the mark’s money before losing to Letlow.
Bill Cassidy has spent his political career as a mark. That’s his legacy — a legacy which begins now.
Because that career is over.
And it will not be mourned.
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