Several months ago, I delivered what I still believe to be an accurate assessment of Dallas-area Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, the well-educated scion of a middle-class family turned camera-hungry vulgarian: She was a phony with a foreordained future, one I supported for very cynical reasons. Crockett’s relentless quest for notoriety seemed inevitably destined to come into conflict with the best interests of the Democrats as a party. Crockett can rise no higher in Texas politics — Texans are more likely to elect the ghost of Santa Anna as governor than a BLM activist turned progressive gadfly — so her career in Congress is reduced to that of a publicity-seeker, who can only succeed at the expense of greater party discipline and message control.
So far, so good for Jasmine. Spotting a market opening, she decided to make her national brand as a trash-talking gutter queen, the “sassy progressive black woman” analogue to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “obstreperous MAGA populist lady.” (I use scare quotes around these characterizations because I very much believe both of them to be acts.) She has been successful at this. It is in fact fitting that she made her first big public splash by engaging in a classless congressional catfight with Greene, denouncing her “bleach-blonde bad-built butch body” in response to Greene’s equally trashy dig about Crockett’s false eyelashes.
Comments