Making Sense of Will Hurd
Hurd's message about "Normal" makes some sense. But what is "Normal" anyway?
What is Normal for Republicans? That seems to be a pertinent question based on The Atlantic’s piece on former Congressman Will Hurd, who sounds like a guy who is running for President.
The piece starts with an anecdote regarding Hurd’s father and how it relates to the modern GOP:
“William, I can’t give any advice on what you should do, because I don’t understand any of these things,” Bob Hurd told his youngest son. “But I know what you shouldn’t do. Don’t be desperate. Because when you’re desperate, you make bad decisions.”…
….“Some of my friends, some of my former colleagues, they are desperate,” Hurd tells me. “They are so desperate to hold on to their positions, to hold on to their power, that they make really bad decisions.”
Those bad decisions are evident when it comes to big, history-forming events, such as the party’s enabling of Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy. But the bad decisions are also made subtly, in response to smaller episodes every single day, often to accommodate the party’s ugliest impulses.
That’s a good start and it is logical. So many Republicans, particularly in Washington, have abandoned their entire sense of being to follow Donald Trump into the abyss.
Hurd also shows disdain for Washington Democrats and Washington Republicans alike. I firmly subscribe with a lot of what Hurd is saying here:
Republicans have become comfortable “saying or doing anything to win an election,” Hurd writes. The party of family values champions cruel policies and hateful politicians while lecturing the left on morality. The party of fiscal discipline and personal responsibility blows holes in the budget, then blames Democrats for their recklessness. The party of empowerment and opportunity systematically attempts to disenfranchise voters who are poor and nonwhite. The party of freedom and liberty keeps flirting with authoritarianism.
But not all observers thought that Hurd came out looking like a good guy.
Unlikeable is a strong word. Hurd is an interesting guy, a CIA guy, so I assume that CIA guys would seem aloof and detached at times.
But regardless, this is where Hurd starts to lose me. When he starts talking about some of the social issues that are being discussed at all levels of politics, Hurd does sound quite a bit out of touch:
His subtext is plain enough. To confront these challenges, Hurd’s colleagues in the Republican Party might need to rethink their fixation on transgender athletes and critical race theory.
“Everyone treats everything these days like it’s some damn emergency. And it’s got to stop,” Hurd says. “We’re going to be dealing with issues that are so complicated, and so life-altering, that they make the stuff we’re dealing with right now look like tickle fights.”
I’m not sure Hurd is reading the situation properly here.
I agree with where Hurd insofar as the fact that our country has very real and very serious challenges in the years and decades to come, some of which we don’t even know are problems yet.
But the dismissal of certain social issues, particularly the “fixation on transgender athletes” is problematic because Hurd doesn’t understand the issue. The issue with transgender athletes is transgender athletes; it’s the damage being done to women's sports and the diminution of opportunities for female athletes being boxed out by biological men. But it is also an extension of societal concerns with the acceptance of transgenderism that flies in the face of science and reason. When quidditch wants to change the name of its sport partially because the sports creator believes in science, the transgender issue has reached critical mass in society.
What Hurd fails to recognize here is the fact that Republicans are on the right side of science and history on that issue. It also makes me concerned about where Hurd may be willing to compromise on other similar issues, particularly those regarding the sanctity of life.
That’s not to say that Hurd doesn’t have legitimate criticisms of the GOP, particularly with Congressional Republicans. Let me highlight this part:
Take the issue of immigration. The nadir of Hurd’s time in Congress came in early 2019, when the federal government shut down for a record-setting 35 days because of a stalemate over which policies to fund—and how much money should be spent—at the southern border. For 35 days, Hurd watched the leaders of both parties scheming, wrangling their rank-and-file members, figuring out how to emerge victorious from the standoff. Never once in those 35 days did anyone, in either party’s leadership, solicit an opinion from Hurd—a national-security expert, the member who represented more of the U.S.-Mexico border than anyone else in Congress, a guy who’s studied the issue inside and out.
Why wouldn’t they want Hurd’s input? Simple. Because they knew he wasn’t going to tell them what they wanted to hear. They knew Hurd would offer a set of solutions—the mass streamlining of legal immigration for both high-skilled workers and low-skilled laborers; the construction of a cutting-edge “virtual wall” utilizing cameras and fiber-optic cables to monitor illegal crossings; the granting of citizenship to millions of “Dreamers”; the surge of funding to local agencies dealing with a mass influx of asylum seekers—that would antagonize the loudest voices in both party bases.
“So, nothing gets done,” Hurd says. “Because politicians would rather use it as a bludgeon against each other, as opposed to solving a problem that most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, agree on the solutions to.”
Obviously, Hurd put himself over in a big way by highlighting how “e wasn’t going to tell them what they wanted to hear” But I emphasized the most important part of this, which is the last paragraph. Politicians, particularly in Congress, get nothing done because it’s easier that way. I wrote about this over a year ago:
…too many members of Congress are comfortable just kicking the cans down the road on accomplishing things in order to keep their political noses clean, take no risks, and keep the paychecks and bennies rolling in so they can get their pension vested. Until members of Congress decide once again that governing is an important function of their job, the flood of executive actions rearranging policy from this and future administrations will continue.
So in that respect, I completely agree.
I’ve read the piece three times now and I’m still not sure what to make of it nor am I sure what to make of Hurd. Is he a serious candidate for President? No more or less than anybody else. Is he a bookish nerd with serious ideas to fix the country or a jaded ex-Congressman angry he wasn’t invited to the adults table? I can’t tell, and probably not a lot of others can either.
But the question I’m stuck with: what is a “normal” Republican?" Here’s what Hill says:
“Look, there’s some people I’m not going to appeal to—the right-wingers. That’s okay. But there’s more of the other people. The normal people. And I’m going to find them,” he says. “It will be hard. The cost per acquisition of those voters is higher than it is for the traditional Republican primary voter—you know, the people who have voted in the last four primaries. That’s why most people don’t bother trying to find them or turn them out.”
But Hurd is missing the point. He refers to a normal Republican (normal people, perhaps) as those who are not “the traditional Republican primary voter” i.e. 4x4 voters. But if they aren’t voting in every primary, aren’t they abnormal Republicans? Aren’t they the people who occasionally show up for a primary, usually vote for a Republican, but don’t always?
Ironically, the voters that Hurd is talking about reaching is…..Trump voters. I’m serious about this. The hardest of hardcore Trump Republicans are relatively new to the party, don’t vote in non-Presidential primaries, have been a Democrat or leaned Democrat before, and probably only voted in the 2020 Republican presidential primary.1
It’s the people who have voted in the last four primaries who are the Republicans who have been steadfast Republicans. Normal, one might say.
So what makes a normal Republican? Hurd doesn’t define it. But does he think that the Normal Republicans are moderates? Are they conservatives? Or are they left-leaning and support Trump’s statism? Hurd doesn’t define it.
Hurd is taking the steps to run:
Hurd is putting the pieces in place. His friends say he wants to run for president in 2024. He may not have universal name recognition or a behemoth political operation, but he does have a vision. He has a loyal and growing donor base. He has the biography and the charisma and the God-given political chops to put the Republican Party—and the rest of the country—on notice.
But what is that vision? What would Hurd want to do as President? What policies would he want to champion? Throughout this entire piece, I struggle to see a shred of what those policies are. It’s not good enough to be “normal” or to be against Trumpism; you have to have some ideas of what you want you want the party and the country to look like and what policies to embrace to achieve that. I’m not sure Hurd has found that yet.
Hurd asks some good questions. I just wonder what answers he’s looking for.
A lot of those voters didn’t switch to Republican until after Trump won.