Slate: A Guide to the Crazy Pants Ohio Republican Senate Primary and Its Most Recent Crazy Pants Debate
November 16, 2021
Columbus, OH — National media outlets are noticing just how wild the GOP Senate primary in Ohio really is. Slate takes a look at the most recent “crazy pants debate” and assigns each of the candidates a final grade based on their performances.
“All of the GOP Senate candidates are locked in a race to the bottom, sinking to new lows every day. With six months to go and millions to spend, this crowded primary is sure to get nastier and even more insane as the candidates get desperate to reach the finish line,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.
Slate: A Guide to the Crazy Pants Ohio Republican Senate Primary and Its Most Recent Crazy Pants Debate
Ben Mathis-Lilley
November 16, 2021
- The Ohio Republican Senate primary is not being held until May, but has already made a number of national headlines as its competitors have raced to the bottom of the MAGA barrel and then tried to dig through it to find an even lower level of barrel. Well-connected venture capitalist J.D. Vance is pretending he hates “the elite” and thinks QAnon makes a lot of sense, while perennial candidate Josh Mandel is calling for violent resistance against the vaccine “Gestapo” and adopting a southern accent on Fox News despite being from suburban Cleveland. It’s been fun times from the get-go.
- Last Thursday night in Columbus, five of the candidates gathered for a forum, which was basically a debate but with less overt hostility and formal back-and-forth. In viral tweets, Politico’s Natalie Allison flagged some of the event’s worst/best moments, chief among them IT entrepreneur and candidate hopeful Mark Pukita’s monologue about why people should know that Mandel is Jewish. What better use of 90 minutes could there be than reviewing the entire tape?
- Before we dig in, here’s a primer on the candidates:
- Vance, who skipped the event, is the author and investor who denounced white rural America for its purported culture of poverty in Hillbilly Elegy, ran a Middle America-focused tech startup fund backed by Jeff Bezos, and has called Donald Trump, among other things, an idiot. He is running as a fanatical Trump supporter who will protect white American culture against the influence of wealthy tech figures like Jeff Bezos. (This is really true!)
- Longtime state party figure Jane Timken, who was also absent, wants to be a regular conservative senator and is saying Trump stuff because it seems like the best way to go at the moment.
- Among those who were present:
- Mandel is a former state treasurer who was the party’s nominee in a losing 2012 race against Sherrod Brown. He supported Marco Rubio in 2016 but has always come from the racial cheap shot school of conservative politics and transitioned easily into pitching himself as a MAGA enforcer for alt-right and anti-vax types.
- Cleveland investment banker Mike Gibbons and Pukita are respectively on the more genial and more unhinged edges of the politically incorrect Baby Boomer businessman lane.
- Cleveland-area car dealer turned cryptocurrency enthusiast Bernie Moreno is a Colombian immigrant running on the idea that the U.S. is descending into failed-state Latin American socialism. (He is also younger and more handsome than the name “Bernie” and the phrase “Cleveland-area car dealer” would suggest.)
- State senator Matt Dolan is running as someone who supports Trump on some things, but not others, and will therefore lose.
- Here we go! Time stamps are by the minute.
- 16:30: Pukita, who wears the clear rectangular glasses frames of a mild-mannered architect but seems to vibrate with the throwback rage of a man who gets mimeographed newsletters from other Barry Goldwater donors, opens his remarks by denouncing (among other things) “facades” and “caricatures,” which, it will soon become clear, is a shot at Mandel (and Vance). “I make people uncomfortable,” he says matter-of-factly, then calls conservative Republican Mike DeWine “an awful governor” who “should never hold office again” to huge applause. (DeWine is disliked by some right-wingers for having instituted relatively modest anti-COVID restrictions.)
- 33:00: Gibbons is cut off by the moderator during what seems to be a complaint about how work shortages have affected McDonald’s.
- 44:15: Moreno says that he was, at one point, canceled for criticizing DeWine.
- 45:30: Pukita brags that he is not vaccinated and confronts Mandel, who had previously refused to say whether or not he’d gotten his shots, about dodging the issue. Mandel takes the microphone only for Pukita to cut him off when it becomes clear he is not going provide an answer this time either.
- 1:08:00: Moreno says the FBI should have its funding reduced until it stops advancing liberal causes and that Jan. 6 was an “unfortunate riot” rather than an insurrection.
- 1:15:20: An increasingly defeated-looking Dolan tries to convince the crowd that you shouldn’t pass abortion bills that will immediately be ruled unconstitutional. Moreno dunks on him shortly thereafter, basically calling him a coward, to huge applause.
- 1:23:25: OK, here’s the Pukita rant bit. He says: “So, in terms of anti-Semitism, all I did, in an ad, was pointed out, that Josh is going around saying he’s got the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other. Right? But he’s Jewish! That’s fine—everybody should know that, though, right, because to me, it’s a facade, it’s a character. If I went into a mosque, right, with the Constitution and a Koran and said that’s how I was gonna make decisions in Washington? I’d get laughed out of the place. If I did the same in a temple with the Torah and the Constitution, I’d get laughed out of the place. If I went into a Hindu temple with the Gita and the Constitution, they probably wouldn’t laugh, because they’re very, very polite people. But I probably wouldn’t get invited back.”
- Closing comments and grades:
- Gibbons is not going to win this race but is having a good time and had a nice suit. 8/10
- Dolan already looks like a hollow-eyed salesman who is going to have to tell his kids that there’s no Christmas this year. He needs to drop out before he reaches medically dangerous levels of beleaguerment. 1/10, gets credit for at least showing up
- For all the attention given to Vance and Mandel’s outrageous positions by national outlets like Slate, Pukita is much more of the genuine article if what you’re looking for is someone who would strangle a Communist in public. 10/10 (but to be clear it would be extremely bad news if he really got elected)
- Mandel has natural authoritarian impulses, which allows him to understand what a certain portion of his audience is looking for, but is hamstrung by being—and I’m sorry, this isn’t nice, but it’s true and relevant to the question of who will win the race—kind of a lurching goon. You can just see the effort coming off of him. Total goon. 0/1,000