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Tag: jane timken
Republican Candidates Vilifying Fauci To Excite Their Base Voters

Republican Candidates Vilifying Fauci To Excite Their Base Voters

In a Republican Party dependent on ginning up its base's rage, the villain of choice has become President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser on the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who now often supplants GOP archenemy and Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

As the New York Times reports, "Fire Fauci" became the inaugural ad for Jane Timken last fall as she launched her bid to win Ohio's open Senate seat. Wackadoodle celebrity doc Mehmet Oz, who's running for Pennsylvania's open Senate seat, doesn't want to debate his opponents—he wants to debate Fauci. And Wisconsin Democrat-turned-Republican Kevin Nicholson, who's running for governor, said Fauci "should be fired and referred to prosecutors.”

In Fauci, many Republicans see an amalgam of favorite conservative resentments.

“Populism is essentially anti: anti-establishment, anti-expertise, anti-intellectual and anti-media,” GOP strategist Whit Ayres told the Times. Fauci, he added, “is an establishment expert intellectual who is in the media.”

But while demonizing Fauci could whip up the GOP base, the strategy could just as easily haunt Republicans in the general election, as Ayres noted.

However, another GOP strategist, John Feehery, argued that anger at Fauci over lockdowns was an issue that could cross party lines with voters desperate to move on from the pandemic.

But it wouldn't be the first time Republicans fixated on a base strategy that saddles them in the general election. One big question is whether the pandemic will still have the resonance it does today.

The strong and steady U.S. recovery is starting to suggest that the nation's economy has moved beyond the reaches of the highly unpredictable pandemic. Some Democratic officials are also ending pandemic restrictions that had been in place for months on end. Democratic governors in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware have all laid out timelines for ending statewide mask mandates in schools and elsewhere.

So while Republicans fixate on Fauci and the pandemic, Democrats are working to move the nation beyond its clutches.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

GOP Senate Hopeful Touts ‘Working Class’ Agenda — While She Campaigns At Country Clubs

GOP Senate Hopeful Touts ‘Working Class’ Agenda — While She Campaigns At Country Clubs

Ohio Republican Senate candidate Jane Timken is running as a self-proclaimed champion of a "working class" agenda. But so far, her campaign has spent more than $23,000 for meals and drinks at private country clubs.

Timken, a millionaire attorney and former Ohio Republican Party chair, promised in May 2021 that if elected she would fight for ordinary working people. "The America First agenda is for the working class - for jobs and freedoms and the Constitution!" she tweeted.

In an interview with Crain's Cleveland Business in September, she asserted, "The Republican Party is now the party of the working class."

But according to her campaign's Federal Election Commission filings, she spent $23,691.24 on food and beverages for receptions at the Brookside Country Club, Chagrin Valley Hunt Club (a "historic private country club"), Hyde Park Country Club, Lake Forest Country Club, Moraine Country Club, Western Hills Country Club, and Youngstown Country Club in 2021.

The Youngstown Country Club calls itself the "premier destination for first-class, private club experience" and offers membership "by referral only."

A spokesperson for Timken's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But while she has been spending tens of thousands of dollars at country clubs, Timken has been opposing President Joe Biden's agenda to actually help working-class Americans, calling it "the absolute wrong policy" and dismissing his human and physical infrastructure bills as "a reckless path of tax-and-spend policies."

Her campaign issues page notes that she would "fight to return to the historic Trump-era tax cuts" that reduced tax rates for corporations and the wealthy while increasing the tax bills of 10 million American families.

Timken is one of more than a dozen announced candidates seeking the GOP nomination to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman in the 2022 midterm election, according to Politics1.com. Democrats are targeting the open seat as a potential pickup.

Her country club spending comes less than a year after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) proclaimed in a speech to the right-wing CPAC conference, "The Republican Party is not the party of the country clubs, it's the party of hardworking, blue-collar men and women."

Reprinted with permission from American Independent