The Ads Keep Getting Worse

     It's raining Führerprinzip out there.  Indiana's a Republican stronghold, at least at the statewide level, and so the real contest for Governor and Federal office (in the Senate and most House districts) is in the GOP primary.  The Governor's post is up for grabs this year, the generally moderate and careful Eric Holcomb being term-limited, and a jostling crowd of eager contenders is after it.

     They're egging one another on.  While the general election is a time to emphasize a candidate's* broad appeal, party primaries are just the reverse: contenders vie to be more partisan than their peers, or at least they do if they've got the budget.  If an opponent adopts an extreme position or outrageous presentation, why, the thing to do is lean that way, too, but even more so.

     The race for the Governor's office is illustrative.  The pay's not that great, though the job does come with a nice mansion fronting busy Meridian Street and full-time police protection, and they are fighting for it tooth, claw and AR-15.  While current Lieutenant Governor Susanne Crouch has dipped a tentative toe in the advertising waters, stressing her strong law-and-order, Trumpist-Republican credentials, "outsider"† Eric Doden, former President of the state's Economic Development Corporation, has performed a remarkable turn in his ads, from a kindly paterfamilas emphasizing that his grandfather was a preacher and detailing his work fostering a young woman from the Third World to a series of apocalyptic-looking ads that focus on President Biden as a dire problem, the border as a crisis and contrasting his unflinching support of law enforcement with "outsider"† Senator Mike Braun's dabbling in the mildest of qualified immunity reform, demonstrated by highly edited snippets from Braun's interview by former Fox News opionator (and Putin apologist) Tucker Carlson.  Meanwhile, Braun himself uses processed video to share his image of America under Biden as a hellscape of smuggled fentanyl and invading migrants, touting his strong leadership and love for our police forces as a solution (and never mind what the governor of a landlocked state far from any national border could do about those problems).  And "outsider"† Brad Chambers, former Indiana Secretary of Commerce (and another Economic Development Commission politico), also wants you to know he's a true law-and-order man, ready to take on Red China toe-to-toe as only the Governor of a smallish state can.‡  All of them tout their loyalty to the GOP's hetman, either directly or by implication.

     At least two of the last three are warning of an imminent threat from "men in women's sports," using a fourth-place finishing college swimmer -- not a native of or resident in Indiana -- as their prime example.  But that issue looms most literally larger in the campaign ads of Chuck Goodrich, hoping to move up from the Indiana House to the U. S. House, displacing the occasionally-moderate Victoria Spartz in the Fifth District.  I'm still not sure about the source of this obsession with a handful (if that) of high school and college athletes in other states, but Rep. Goodrich's scare ads depict 6' 1" Lia Thomas towering head and shoulders over three other swimmers -- in truth, the average competitive college-age female swimmer is 5" 9", only four inches shorter.§  Why the misleading edit, followed by big-scare material over allegations about High School basketball game in Massachusetts, in an Indiana election?  At a guess, to get people riled up, over a primary in which the only difference between incumbent and challenger is that the current office-holder has a little more sense of how to get things done in Congress.  Lacking any substantive issue, he trots out boogypersons, tweaked for maximum shock value.

     All this culture-war hype is just hype.  Yes, China's selling drug precursors to any narco with the cash to buy them, but you can't fix that from the Governor's office in Indiana.  And our border with Mexico is indeed a mess -- thanks to various screwed-up Latin American governments and an official border policy based on laws that have not been updated in over forty years.  When a compromise was worked out in Congress recently, the Republicans (many of whom had voted for it) shot it down, apparently at the request of Presidential candidate Donald Trump, on the grounds that half a loaf still undercut his desire to run a scare campaign over border issues (and many other ooga-booga items).  Whoops, GOP, you lost the high ground on that one.  The trans stuff is no more than an updated "satanic panic:" take something scary and weird, and blow it up into an issue based on fear rather than facts: in this case, a teeny-tiny minority about whom much is rumored and little known, with no political power and less money, of whom the most visible members are about as scary-looking as Eleanor Roosevelt.  Unaesthetic?  Sure, but so are a lot of people.  It's hardly a threat to the nation, or even the womenfolk thereof.  We've got 'em well outnumbered.  And yet it all gets mashed up like a bad parody of a WW II Axis propaganda piece, with marching soldiers and scary foes, framed in scratchy red and black borders as overwrought voice-overs speak of onrushing doom -- unless we vote for the Man On Horseback....

     The voting booth isn't supposed to be a bullshit shop but increasingly it is on the Republican side, and it's making the regular grabasstic Democrats look like marvels of political competence in contrast.  As a political "outsider"** I count on there being two mostly-sane, reasonably-adequate political parties, one leaning conservative and the other tilting progressive, keeping one another honest and between them managing to steer a path between wild new ideas and stodgy tradition.  I did not sign up for one of them to go luridly nuts and I don't approve of it.
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* Originally typed as "candifate," which is, ouch, a little too close.
 
† Each one of these guys wants you to know they're an "outsider," untainted by the normal give-and-take of politics and the inside-the-Beltway intrigue of Washington, D.C., and each one of them is, in fact, involved in politics right up to their armpits -- or eyebrows, in Senator Braun's case.  Their assertion of being on the outside looking in is howling bullshit that doesn't survive even the mildest scrutiny, which they are counting on most voters to not undertake.
 
‡ While our Governor is better-off that way than, say, the Pope, it's hard to imagine the Indiana Guard's 14,000 soldiers and airpersons being much more than a before-lunch diversion for the two-million-plus active troops of the PLA.  I think we're going to need the help of at least 49 more states and the regular U. S. armed forces to take 'em on.
 
§ The tallest female swimmer competing in recent years was Russian Yekaterina Gamova, at 6' 7" or 6' 8".  She's better known for volleyball and I don't know anything else about her other than what a quick websearch finds.
 
**No, dammit, I really am outside; the closest I ever came to inside politics was when my Mom was appointed Township Assessor and I helped measure building foundations and stuff envelopes.