Yes on Kemp, No on Greene

National Review Online

Friday, May 20, 2022

 

Georgia voters going to the primary polls on Tuesday have some serious choices to make. They should renominate Brian Kemp for a second term as governor. But they should reject freshman congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and nominate Jennifer Strahan in the 14th congressional district. Kemp represents sober, principled conservative governance and public service; Greene represents its opposite.

 

Few governors have faced storms from all sides like Kemp. During and after his 2018 election victory over Stacey Abrams, the national media tarred Kemp as a vote-suppressor, while Abrams won press plaudits for insisting, baselessly, that Kemp had stolen the election. In April 2020, when Kemp became the first governor to reopen his state, the Atlantic ran an article headlined, “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” In November 2020, after Donald Trump narrowly lost Georgia, the president embarked first on an intense pressure campaign to get Kemp to convene a special legislative session to extricate Trump from his own defeat. Trump also blamed Kemp for law-abiding decisions by his successor as Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who also deserves to win his primary. By depressing Republican turnout with charges of rigged elections, Trump then cost the Senate seats of David Perdue and Kemp-appointed Kelly Loeffler.

 

In 2021, Kemp signed a reasonable election-security bill and drew the fire of the White House again, with Joe Biden pronouncing it “Jim Crow 2.0” and strong-arming Major League Baseball into pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. Under that supposedly vote-suppressing law, the primary has already shattered records for early-voter turnout.

 

Perdue, rather than blame Trump or himself for his defeat, has launched a shameful Trump-backed primary challenge to Kemp built entirely around spite over the 2020 elections — this despite Kemp’s strong support for both men in those elections. Trump even claimed that Abrams “might be better” than Kemp. Perdue has never articulated any case for his candidacy besides playing to Trump’s rage, and he has barely even been visible on the campaign trail in the closing week of his flailing challenge. Through it all, Kemp has kept his cool and compiled a solid conservative record. He has earned another term. Republican primary voters should choose him over Perdue without hesitation.

 

Greene has been a disgrace to her office and a disservice to her constituents in Georgia’s 14th district. She made headlines during her 2020 campaign over her prior musings on QAnon, the “so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon” on 9/11, and the Parkland shooting as a false-flag operation. In an incoherent and now-infamous Facebook post, she imagined an elaborate conspiracy connecting wildfires in California to Rothschild Inc. and then to space solar generators she likened to a “laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth.”

 

She has not mended her ways in office, claiming that January 6 was an “inside job” and a “Fed-surrection.” She told Lou Dobbs that joining the U.S. military was “like throwing your life away.” She spoke at the America First Political Action Conference, a white-nationalist gathering organized by a Holocaust denier. Of course, she promoted theories that the 2020 election was stolen.

 

These would be disqualifying ugly baggage even for a member of Congress who was otherwise busy and effective. For Greene, who serves on no committees, does no apparent legislative work, and rarely appears in a district she moved into in order to run for office, they are her accomplishments. A fixture in the national headlines, she has drawn fire locally for her lack of constituent service. Greene’s district is too red for her to face a real Democratic challenger. Fortunately, Greene has a conservative primary opponent — Jennifer Strahan, a health-care-industry entrepreneur who pledges to focus on serving the district rather than courting controversy for its own sake. The district’s voters should choose Strahan.