by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
US Senator Ol' Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, is retiring at the end of his current term next January, and this past Tuesday the major parties selected their nominees to run for his important senate seat in November. The Republicans have nominated Missouri's attorney general, Eric Schmitt, to take Blunt's place in the US Senate, and the Democrats have selected St. Louis socialite Trudy Busch Valentine as their nominee.
While Schmitt has been jockeying for the senate nod for more than a year, Busch Valentine was a relative late entry into the race. Late this spring when more conservative elements of the state's Democratic Party began to realize that an outsider, and a progressive, by the name of Lucas Kunce was on track to take the nomination from a lackluster field of candidates, they got Kunce's leading opponent to drop out of the race and hurriedly replaced him with Trudy Busch Valentine, a person who had never run for office but was an heiress to the vast Busch Beer fortune and a well known philanthropist in the St. Louis area.
The Democrats had never been favored to win the senate seat in red Missouri, and, in fact, the national Democratic Party did not direct any significant resources to the race - and the national press generally ignored the contest. The only apparent path for a victory in November would have been for the GOP to nominate its most reprehensible candidate, former Governor Eric Greitens, and for the Democrats to challenge him with a candidate as knowledgeable and formidable as Kunce.
None of that happened.
The Republicans brought in outside big guns - like Texas Senator Ted Cruz - to campaign for Schmitt, and pumped a boatload of out-of-state dark money into the campaign both to further denigrate Greitens as well as to promote Schmitt. It turned out to be a sound investment of time and money.
The conservative elements of the Democratic Party were able to portray Busch Valentine as the calm and sensible alternative to a more radical and in-your-face Lucas Kunce. She was not as well spoken as Kunce and clearly not as well versed in the political arts. At one point Ms. Busch Valentine was forced to admit that she did not know what "Citizens United" was. Her hometown newspaper, "The St. Louis Post-Dispatch," wound up endorsing Lucas Kunce just prior to the primary election and referring to Trudy Busch Valentine as "unprepared and unconvincing."
"Unprepared" and "unconvincing" aren't going to win the senate contest in Missouri this fall. If Trudy Busch Valentine wants to beat Eric Schmitt she is going to have to switch from cocktail party mode to barnburner mode and begin laying waste to the opposition. There is one very narrow path that might get her to the victor's circle, and that is to begin spitting fire over the issue of abortion. Eric Schmitt has been a big, loud advocate for the anti-abortion movement, and Trudy needs to make sure that the people of Missouri know exactly where he stands on the issue - and exactly where she stands.
This election will not be won on the High Road. Eric Schmitt doesn't even know there is a High Road. This election will be won in the mud of the trenches, and if Trudy Busch Valentine has a sincere desire to win it she will need to wade through all of the anti-abortion crap that Schmitt and his tribe have been generating - and begin force-feeding it back to him.
The abortion issue can backfire all over Republicans - even in Missouri - but it is going to take dynamic Democratic leaders to make that happen!
Lead us there, Trudy - or get out of the way!
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