In February, ahead of Sen. Tim Scott’s formal presidential campaign launch, Politico published a memorable report on the South Carolina Republican’s candidacy. Scott was known, the article said, “for his affability and easy smile.”
Politico quoted a confidant close to the senator who insisted that Scott has been “repulsed by the downward spiral of bullying and bomb-throwing that has become the hallmark of politics of late,” and he “feels motivated to do something about it.”
The report added that the South Carolinian was eyeing a 2024 campaign, hoping that “other Americans are similarly disgusted with the tenor of today’s politics, and want a candidate who will restore civility.”
This certainly helped summarize Scott’s political brand. The political world somehow settled on a consensus that he’s the genial contender in the GOP’s presidential field. Others might throw mud or aim for the gutter, but the senator, we’d been told, preferred the high road. He’d bring a sunny disposition and a refreshing above-the-fray optimism to politics at the national level.
I long ago lost count of how many headlines I’ve seen featuring the word “nice” in reports on Scott, but suffice it to say, there have been many.
Whether the conservative senator had earned this reputation is open to debate, but all of this came to mind when Scott responded to Hamas’ attack in Israel over the weekend.
The problem began on Saturday morning, when the Republican pushed this line via social media:
“Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel today is an assault on Western Civilization. The truth is though, Joe Biden funded these attacks on Israel. America’s weakness is blood in the water for bad actors, but this is worse than that. We didn’t just invite this aggression, we paid for it.”
A day later, Scott kept the offensive going.
“Biden’s weakness invited the attack. Biden’s negotiation funded the attack. … At this point, Biden is complicit.”
Roughly 24 hours after publishing that message, the senator was still at it, insisting, “Biden’s weakness attracted the terrorist attacks in Israel.”
As a factual matter, Scott’s rhetorical offensive was, and is, demonstrably wrong. The United States did not “pay for” or “fund” a terrorist attack on Israel, and the details the senator really ought to understand are widely available.
As a political matter, it’s also worth appreciating the impropriety of an American politician scrambling to blame his own country’s leadership, without cause, in the midst of a deadly conflict abroad. But let’s not brush past the fact that Scott has cultivated a political brand that he now seems eager to throw away. His partisan response to the crisis in Israel was factually wrong, but it was also cheap and classless. His ugly tweets seemed like desperate pandering from a candidate who’s polling just below 3% in his national campaign. If the senator had used incorrect grammar, and thrown in misplaced quotation marks, Donald Trump could’ve written effectively the same missives. Maybe Scott made a deliberate decision to abandon his “affability.” Maybe he now sees value in embracing “the downward spiral of bullying.” Maybe he came to see “civility” and “optimism” as electoral losers. Or maybe the hype about Scott being the “nice” Republican candidate was never real in the first place.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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