I follow former state Representative Charles Booker (D-43rd District, Louisville) on Twitter not because I like him, but because he is a candidate, and now the Democratic nominee, to challenge Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in the general election. Mr Booker, who ran for the Democratic nomination to challenge Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in 2020, but lost a tightly contested primary to Amy McGrath Henderson, was running to Mrs McGrath’s left, as the ‘progressive’ candidate. He hasn’t changed that a bit.
Knowing that he’s running, at the most charitably, an uphill campaign, or, perhaps most realistically, a sacrificial lamb one, Mr Booker is taking wild, long-range three-point shots in the hope of somehow catching up to Dr Paul.[1]I almost typed ‘Hail Mary’ shots, but I would never use a Catholic comparison, in any way, with regard to a candidate who supports abortion. It should be noted, that, as a Kentuckian, I … Continue reading The latest is shown in this tweet.
Mr Booker’s new campaign ad is all about lynchings in the past, and he claims that three of his uncles were lynched. But while lynchings have occurred, they are very much in the past. Even the Lexington Herald-Leader, which endorsed Mr Booker against Mrs Henderson in 2020, and which will endorse him again for the general election, because the editors are both stunningly liberal and out of tune with their readership, noted just how “striking” and “unconventional” the ad is:
‘Confronting the trauma of our history.’ Booker campaign video invokes lynching with noose
by David Catanese | Wednesday, June 1, 2022 | 3:14 PM EDT | Updated: 4:54 PM EDT
A striking new digital video by Democratic Senate candidate Charles Booker uses a noose around his own neck to highlight Sen. Rand Paul’s temporary blockage of an anti-lynching law.
“I have become the first Black Kentuckian to receive the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate,” Booker says in the video rolled out Wednesday. “My opponent, the very person who compared expanded health care to slavery. The person who said he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The person who single-handedly blocked an anti-lynching act from being federal law.”
Of course, Dr Paul did not block the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act from becoming law. Instead, as the Herald-Leader article notes further down, he worked out a compromise to get it amended:
Paul’s initial objection to the bill in 2020 was rooted in language he believed would have led to more minor crimes being characterized as lynching, a heinous act of violence that originated in the Jim Crow South.
But earlier this year, the Kentucky Republican signed on as a co-sponsor of a revised version of the legislation, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in March. To date, there have been over 160 recorded lynchings in Kentucky, according to the Booker campaign.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who isn’t related to Kentucky’s Booker, hailed Paul at the time for his work on amending the bill to create “the bipartisan backing that we have to finally meet this moment and help our nation move forward from some of its darkest chapters.”
“Dr. Paul worked diligently with Senators Booker and Scott to strengthen the language of this legislation and is a cosponsor of the bill that now ensures that federal law will define lynching as the absolutely heinous crime that it is. Any attempt to state otherwise is a desperate misrepresentation of the facts,” said Paul’s deputy campaign manager Jake Cox.
In other words, Mr Booker lied, lied through his scummy teeth, to the extent that even what my, sadly late, best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal acknowledged it.
It wasn’t just the Lexington newspaper; CBS News also acknowledged it:
In 2020, Paul held up a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime, saying he wanted to see more discussion to “make the language the best that we can get it.” He said in a an op-ed in The Louisville Courier Journal that he was concerned that the language in the bill might “unintentionally mete out 10-year sentences for minor altercations.”
Earlier this year, Paul cosponsored a new version of the legislation, which passed the Senate by unanimous consent.
“It wasn’t a popular stand to slow this bill down, but I wanted to do it because, you know, I thought it was the right thing to do,” Paul told The Louisville Courier Journal in an interview in February. “And in the end, I think the compromise language will hopefully keep us from incarcerating somebody for some kind of crime that’s not lynching.”
Let’s tell the truth here: the anti-lynching bill was wholly unnecessary! Murder, and every other crime involved in a lynching, was already illegal in every state in the union. Murder, to which Mr Booker alluded with his noose in the ad, carries a sentence of life imprisonment, at the very least, in every state, life without parole in many, and in more than half of the states, including Kentucky under KRS §507.020 and KRS §532.030, can carry a death sentence. Other than, perhaps, securing a death sentence in a state which does not have capital punishment, I cannot see what more the federal statute could do to someone convicted of murder via lynching. While Mr Booker’s campaign website doesn’t seem to have much of an issues section, I was able to find a tweet of his, from December 11, 2020, which stated, “We need to end capital punishment,” so it would seem that even that federal enhancement which allows a capital sentence would not be something of which Mr Booker would approve.[2]Full disclosure: I am also opposed to capital punishment.
For a Southern state, Kentucky does not have a very large black population; the Census Bureau guesstimates that only 8.5% of Kentuckians are black. Just how much of an emotional appeal to race, which is what this advertisement is, will have in a state that is 87.5% white is hard to see. In our two liberal cities, Louisville and Lexington, which also have far higher black percentages of the population (23.60% in Louisville, out of 615,067 residents, and 14.61% in Lexington, out of 335,330 residents), the appeal might work, but in the rest of the state, perhaps not so much. Absent Louisville and Lexington, only 4.58% of the Bluegrass State’s population are black.
Unlike 2020, in which the Democrats poured a boatload of money into Mrs Henderson’s fruitless campaign to unseat Senator McConnell — Mrs Henderson did not even crack 40% of the vote, as Mr McConnell trounced her 1,233,315 (57.8%) to 816,257 (38.2%) — they don’t seem to be wasting their dollars on Mr Booker, as Mr Catanese concluded:
Booker’s campaign has struggled to fundraise and gain traction against Paul, who isn’t seen as vulnerable to defeat in what’s shaping up to be a difficult year for Democrats.
It will be interesting to see if Mr Booker can crack that 40% mark in November.
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