September 11, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Dan Bishop’s Win in the NC 9^th District is a Major Victory for the Tar Heel State and the Make America Great Again Agenda

Friends,

For the past several months the pundits and highly-paid Mainstream Media commentators on CNN and MSNBC were telling us that Dan McCready, the Democratic candidate to fill the empty congressional seat in North Carolina’s Ninth District (which includes part of Charlotte), was going to be the new congressman from that district. His opponent, State Senator Dan Bishop was an underdog; as late as two week ago some polls supposedly had him down by double digits. Fox News had him down by around 5% as late as this past weekend.

Talking heads at CNN, MSNBC, and NBC were positively giddy at the prospect: another defeat for Donald Trump in a district he had carried handsomely back in 2016. Money and aid poured in to the coffers of McCready’s campaign, and an air of almost insouciant confidence pervaded many of the Democratic candidate’s supporters. A McCready win would be a momentous signal, a major indicator that Trump was headed for defeat in 2020 and that once-very conservative North Carolina (and the once Republican Ninth District) was turning blue. The hoopla and expectation were nearly deafening.

A cousin who lives in the Charlotte area described to me that down the street some of his neighbors, staunch McCready supporters, were already celebrating.

McCready seemed to have all the advantages. 

In the hotly-contested congressional election back in 2018 against Republican Mark Harris, he had come very close, losing by only 900 votes. He had been running, thus, non-stop for twenty-seven months.  Not only that, the inane malfeasance of Republican operatives during the 2018 election had caused the State Board of Elections to throw out the result of that election and to nullify it. Thus, from the beginning of this special election, Dan Bishop had to overcome major, nearly insuperable disadvantages. And the media and national and local Democratic representatives did everything they could to drive these points home to Ninth District voters.

And not only that, but McCready enjoyed major financial advantages. Like other Democratic candidates running in more conservative districts, he presented himself as a “moderate,” a man who would “work across the aisles” with Republicans in Congress, and that he eschewed “right wing extremism.” In almost every ad he touted his military service in Afghanistan and that he was a “small business owner.” In other words, voters could “trust him.”

It was all geared, as the old saw goes, “to deceive the elect,” to convince more conservative voters that (1) it was “safe” to cast a vote for him, and (2) that Dan Bishop was a “right wing extremist.” 

Yet, Bishop refused to accept that narrative, pointing out that McCready supported sanctuary cities (Charlotte now no longer works with ICE to hold criminal illegals), that he was very weak on illegal immigration (which hurts the job market in the district), and that, despite his soothing rhetoric, he would be in effect a Nancy Pelosi clone. More, Dan Bishop fully embraced the Trump agenda, appearing with the president at a major rally in Fayetteville this past Monday night before the election.

On the face of CNN's Erin Burnett early Tuesday evening there was heightened expectation: this would be the moment when one more significant blow would be inflicted on the hated Donald Trump. And as the early votes came in—mostly early voting totals—McCready was, it seemed, safely ahead. But then, horribile dictu, Bishop began to pile up election day votes, and his totals were considerably better than Harris’s from 2018. And in the end he won the race by 4,000 votes, by two percentage points, 50.7 to 48.7.

Oh, the weeping and gnashing of teeth! The neatly prepared scripts all had to be thrown out! I almost lost my supper when for a few moments I caught that nauseous bug-eyed Jennifer Rubin on MSNBC trying to explain the whole thing away as a “bad dream,” after all, she mumbled, Trump had carried the ninth in 2016 by a larger margin, so, you see, it was still a good night for the Dems and anti-Trumpers. Rubin, of course, is a Neoconservative, a Never Trumper who used to write for the (thankfully) defunct Weekly Standard who wears her Zionist Likudnik sympathies and her support for “enlightened morality” (like same sex marriage) as badges of honor…and a prime example of just how rotten Establishment Inside-the-Beltway “conservatism” has become in 2019.

Dan Bishop’s victory, plus the victory of Dr. Greg Murphy in the Third Congressional District, 62% to 37%, over this Democratic opponent, Allen Thomas, should send a message… a message that should unsettle the condescending pundits and cocooned media personalities, as well as the Democratic strategists. Those fake polls, that ceaseless babbling that passes for “informed commentary,” those predictions made as if from Mount Olympus, all that palaver still must pass the test of the voting booth. And despite the best and most strenuous efforts to import new voters and “woke” Millennials to North Carolina—a campaign that goes on without ceasing—there are still enough of us Tar Heels ready to say “No” to the progressivist Left, whether full-fledged or in deceptive drag, as in the case of Dan McCready.

Dan Bishop deserves our congratulations, and our earnest prayers that he support the Make America Great Again agenda.