In the middle of the Senate race his own supporters call existential, Ken Paxton got on a plane to Europe with his girlfriend. He is legally married. And the timing was also interesting — he spent his own nation’s 250th birthday headed to the nation from which we rebelled. Nobody has explained who paid for the trip, which is a relevant question when Paxton travels.
The only thing for which Paxton has ever shown prodigious energy is philandery and possibly corruption. He is a lazy candidate in a heated race, and laziness is not a flaw you can fundraise your way around. In the primary, I argued that Paxton could beat John Cornyn and that dragging the man across the finish line in November could cost Republicans the Senate. We have arrived at that moment.
Paxton’s supporters now insist everyone else must carry him. They want the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the outside groups, the donor class, and President Trump to spend whatever it takes, even if the money spent in Texas costs Republicans Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and Ohio, and even if it forecloses winnable pickups in Michigan and New Hampshire. Saving Paxton, they say, matters more than saving the country from a Democrat controlled Senate. That is nonsense. I said it in the primary, and I stand by it now.
Senator John Kennedy went on Fox and put the number at $100 million to get Paxton across the line.
That is not a rounding error. Every dollar of it is a dollar not spent defending Alaska and Maine, not spent in Ohio against Sherrod Brown, and not spent contesting a Michigan seat where Democrats nominated Abdul El-Sayed. Republican money is finite. The President is sitting on the sidelines of the Texas race for now, which ought to tell Texas Republicans something about how people who count votes for a living see this.
Cornyn was not a great candidate. He was too moderate for much of the Republican base in Texas, and the frustration with him was real. It was always nonsense, though, that the better option was a serial philanderer whose own staff reported him to federal law enforcement for corruption and whose own party impeached him. Republicans did not choose between a squish and a fighter. They chose between a safe seat and a coin flip, and they took the coin flip on purpose.
The tantrum now underway in Texas consists of blaming everyone else for refusing to rescue Paxton. It is a tantrum precisely because the people throwing it lack the intellectual honesty to say out loud that this is their mess and theirs to clean up. In every prior race, Ken Paxton was carried across the finish line by somebody else, by a strong top of the ticket, by a good year, or by straight ticket voters who never learned his name. This is the first time he sits at the top of the ticket himself. Paxton has a string of mistresses, but he has no coat tails.
None of this is hindsight. It is what a great many of us predicted out loud when it could still have been avoided, and we were shouted down, insulted, and rebuffed for it. We are being shouted down, insulted, and rebuffed now by the same people who insisted Paxton was the stronger candidate and who have decided the rest of the country owes them a bailout. We told the Paxton cult of personality this would happen, and, as it plays out, they insist we hate him and want him to lose as opposed to recognizing their myopic hatred of John Cornyn could saddle Texas with James Talarico as the rest of us predicted.
Texas Republicans still have the largest activist base and one of the deepest donor pools in the country. The activists who nominated Paxton and the donors who funded him can pony up, knock on the doors, and run the turnout operation his campaign has not bothered to build. If they save that seat themselves, they earned it. God bless them. Paxton can, after all, still win. But the rest of us have a Senate to save, which is more important than saving Texas at the expense of the republic.
As you wake up this morning, Apple has a new CEO — John Ternus. He replaces Tim Cook, who replaced Steve Jobs. Jobs, occasionally, would reply to customer emails. Cook continued that tradition and was probably more responsive than Jobs.
I once had a nice exchange with him, sharing pictures taken from my iPhone of the Northern Lights here in Georgia. Once, a friend’s business had mysteriously been converted on Apple Maps to Japanese letters. Have hitting dead end after dead end getting it fixed, I emailed Tim Cook. The next day, the matter was resolved.
Tim Cook, in less than twenty years, turned Apple into one of the most profitable companies on planet earth. Under his watch, Apple launched its watch, its AirPods, its Airtags, and more — not to mention the transition of Apple from Intel chips to its own chips. And as Apple updated and refined its computers, it also has continually upgraded that small device I keep in my pocket that connects me to the world and lets me make memories with my family, like that night we stayed out late on a school night to marvel at the Northern Lights in Middle Georgia.
Thanks Tim.
