At the Bulwark, Amanda Carpenter has authored a sloppy, dishonest hit piece on Georgia governor Brian Kemp — one that was clearly the product of a desire to write a hit piece on Georgia governor Brian Kemp, rather than any well-founded frustration with his political sins.
Carpenter’s mendacity is observable as early as her headline, “Brian Kemp’s Running Mate Is a Fake Elector.” As the Dispatch‘s Andrew Egger pointed out on Twitter, running mate is a “weird choice” for a descriptor since the position of lieutenant governor has its own race, detached from the gubernatorial contest in Georgia, and Kemp did not endorse the eventual GOP nominee, Burt Jones, in the primary.
Her choice to describe Jones as Kemp’s “running mate” — an obvious attempt to make readers think Jones was selected by, and is attached electorally to, Kemp — becomes less strange as the smears keep rolling.
Carpenter asserts that the Kemp campaign has “one principle: to make nice with MAGA,” and writes that Kemp “has ignored Trump’s tirades against him, turned the other cheek, and told voters he was the better candidate to deliver on Trump policies than his Trump-endorsed primary opponent, David Perdue.” I can imagine that for Amanda Carpenter, there might be no worse indictment of a politician than their being able to ignore Donald Trump, but for many of us, it stands out as a novel and refreshing trait.
And besides, her evidence that Kemp has transformed into an acolyte of the former president hangs on a thread. Carpenter says that Kemp supported “a bill to restrict voting access in order to appease aggrieved Trump voters,” but she’s not confident enough in that claim to describe, link to, or even name said bill. It’s an understandable self-confidence issue, given that S.B. 202 extended early voting and implemented a broadly uncontroversial voter-ID requirement for absentee ballots.
Moreover, she lambasts Kemp for saying the following during a debate with Perdue:
I was as frustrated as anyone else with the 2020 election results, and I actually did something about it, working with the Georgia General Assembly to address those issues in Senate Bill 202, the Elections Integrity Act. We’ve outlawed Zuckerberg money, we’ve tied photo ID to absentee ballots by mail, we’ve secured drop boxes to make sure we don’t have those problems in the future.
“So which is it? Were Georgia’s election in 2020 free and fair? Or was something problematic about them, which required Kemp to change the law?” asks Carpenter.
If professing to be frustrated with the outcome of an election, or believing that it could have been better conducted, constitutes denial that it was free and fair, there may not be an American alive today who meets Carpenter’s standards. But the false choice she presents aside, she’s ignoring Kemp’s own words on the matter. During another debate with Perdue, Kemp responded to criticism of his handling of the 2020 election by telling him that “weak leaders blame everybody else for their own loss instead of themselves.”
Carpenter goes on to shame Kemp, implying that he is somehow complicit in Trump’s lies.
No matter that Kemp’s own election officials, such as Gabriel Sterling, disputed many of the theories Perdue put forward and begged Trump and other Republican leaders to stop promoting false claims, warning that “someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed” over them.
Think about that: Sterling warned that the president was creating an atmosphere in which someone might get killed.
This might be compelling, if Kemp was not one of the officials Sterling was implying might be at risk. But Kemp became a primary target of Trump’s ire — and of those who believed him — after Kemp refused to help him overturn the 2020 election. In fact, Trump was so incensed by Kemp that he joined Carpenter in boosting Stacey Abrams last year, declaring at a rally that “having [Abrams] I think might be better than having your existing governor, if you want to know the truth.”
“Stacey, would you like to take his place?” he asked. “It’s okay with me.”
Carpenter wants Republicans to lose elections, and she should feel free to work toward that end. But if she had any respect for her readership, she would return to her old vocation as a political staffer and spare them her demonstrated disregard.