When reproached by Suellen O’Hara that her treatment of Mr. Kennedy and his infestation of “crawlin’ clothes” was humiliating, Mammy clapped back, “You’d be a sight more humiliated if Mr. Kennedy’s lice gets on ya.” Of course, that’s from Gone with the Wind, and the subject is worth expounding upon all these years later. I mean humiliation, but not necessarily lice.
Humiliation is related to shame and embarrassment, and I suspect these first cousins of diminishment vary mostly by degree and duration. Realizing one has been walking around with a piece of toilet paper attached to one’s shoe is an embarrassment. Shame seems to result from something deeper and therefore lasts longer, perhaps an entire lifetime, and the cause of shame can be camouflaged and kept secret. But the causes of humiliation are public and inescapable.
Some of those who do not support the current administration frequently express their feelings about what is going on as shameful or embarrassing or even humiliating. There are good reasons why they are feeling as they do, particularly as we Americans have long been prideful of our role on the world stage. But we’ve been humiliated before, haven’t we?
In living memory, there’s the Bay of Pigs, the Warren Report, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the Iran-Contra affair, Monica Lewinsky, Abu Ghraib and other somewhat lesser embarrassments too numerous to catalog. The United States has spent much of its time at the center of the world stage not reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy with the perfection of Olivier but rather performing like a bumper car on the midway of the county fair. Of course, we’re not alone in this. Take practically any country you like, and you’ll find much of the same. Incompetence, arrogance, corruption, sexual inappropriateness, and cruelty. To steal a construction from Mitt Romney, countries are people, my friend.
Lower-level humiliation was served up in the Texas runoff this week. John Cornyn got an old-fashioned ass whuppin’ from Ken Paxton, who won the nomination in a bona fide landslide. I honestly thought Cornyn would do better than 36% of that Republican vote. Both candidates engaged in a good deal of Trump boot licking, but Paxton got the endorsement. Bless his heart, Cornyn couldn’t get that boot wet enough to go all the way in. How humiliating.
In short order, the pundits and prognosticators saw this as a win for Democrats and their nominee, James Talarico. The nomination of Paxton certainly widens the path to a win in November for Talarico, but this is still Texas and Paxton’s path is still wider. In the months ahead, they both have political fence-mending to do with those who supported their primary opponents, and it may be that Paxton has a longer stretch of fence to mend. Just how butt-hurt over a third of Republicans are right now is a big question and an even bigger challenge for both campaigns.
I got a giggle when the Cook Political Report downgraded this race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican” the very night Paxton won the nomination. It might be just a little bit humiliating to know that winning the runoff is viewed as diminishing your party’s likelihood of keeping that seat in the general election.
Now that gets us down to cases, since the media is going to talk endlessly for the next several months about who will have control of the Senate when the dust settles in November. Building on that same Cook analysis, the power balance boils down to eight states that don’t fit into the “likely” or “solid” categories for either party. Democrats need to win seven of them, while Republicans need to win only two. That Texas is now one of those eight means both parties are going to aim for that cherry.
But the other state in the “lean Republican” category is Alaska. Yes, that Alaska, the one that humiliated Texas years ago by becoming the biggest state in the union and forcing the change in the lyrics of the state song to accommodate that diminishment. “Largest” became “boldest,” which is not the same thing at all.
In 2022, the Alaska senate seat was won with 136,330 votes. When it comes to campaign spending, Alaska is the Dollar Store and Texas is Neiman Marcus. The other six states are somewhere in between. Something to keep in mind.
Along with dry holes, which is a sometimes humiliating feature of Texas.
