The Year of America’s Rebirth began late on election night 2022, when it became clear that the worst failed to happen.
Despite what the polls, the pols and the pundits had been telling us to expect: A red wave that would roll across our land and capture control of America democratically. Or destroy America’s democracy in a wave of hate, anger and vengeance.
Neither happened. Because there were millions of real heroes — commonsense patriots who were Republicans and Republican-leaning independents — who’d had enough of Donald Trump’s Big Lie madness. Finally, on this election night (perhaps after taking a hard look at the face in the bathroom mirror), they did what they knew all along they needed to do to really make America great again. They just said “No! No More!” No more of the election denial nincompoopery, in which smart people who of course knew better kept confusing loyalty to Republicanism with pretending to deny the legality and reality of the 2020 election results.
That decision to say “No More!," made by voters in the name of what they once knew as their Grand Old Party, was what a Democrat was really talking about on election night, in his acceptance speech after his landslide victory as Maryland’s next governor.
“True patriotism is alive and well — in Maryland … and in the United States of America,” said Wes Moore, an Army veteran and reservist, who was also a Rhodes scholar and investment banker. “ … Patriotism means knowing that this country is great. But if we work together we’re going to make it even greater, because more people will benefit from that.”
And so, the morning after, Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who was term-limited after serving eight years, met with the Democrat who will be his successor. They thought they should meet right away — just to remind Marylanders of the way things used to be.
They are men of decidedly different political persuasions. Hogan, the son of a famous Republican congressman who served on the House committee that voted to impeach Richard Nixon, had refused to support his party’s gubernatorial candidate, Republican Dan Cox, who was a vehement Donald Trump backer and a vociferous 2020 election denier. Hogan and Moore are both bald; but you are not likely to mistake one for the other. Moore will be Maryland’s first Black governor. And that’s a point Moore touched on, rather poignantly, during his acceptance speech the night before.
“I first felt handcuffs on my wrists when I was 11 years old,” said Moore. “And if someone would have told me when I was 11, with handcuffs on my wrists, that ‘One day you’re going to be the governor of Maryland,’ I wouldn’t have believed it. But I also know no one ever told me that. We’ve got to change the dynamic we have with our young people. We’ve got to change the dynamic we have in our communities. … We have got to deal with the immediate challenges of public safety, but also deal with the root causes of crime.”
As Moore talked about his life and his vision, it became clear that this is just the sort of newcomer that Joe Biden’s Democratic Party will eventually understand they need to showcase. Biden’s national Democrats are a team that seems to have a short bench of prospective leaders who may someday be on someone’s list of presidential prospects. Almost everywhere you looked in this campaign, Democrats found themselves being attacked for not talking about crime — and how to make us safer.
Moore says public safety isn’t a political thing for him — “this is personal.” And as Maryland’s governor-elect, he talked about the urgency of “fixing a broken parole and probation system in which a third of all violent offenders continue to get back on the streets.” Also: “We have to get these illegal guns out of our neighborhoods. But it also means we cannot arrest or militarize our way out of it.”
One thing Joe Biden’s shopworn party needs is a future leader who has, at least, a clue about how to make the Democrats America’s law-and-order party. Or even just how to talk about it. Hmmm, the last time may have been back when cop cars had running boards and cops stood on them as they raced through the streets, chasing bad guys across our movie screens, in black-and-white.
Welcome to the Rebirth of a Notion. We’re on the case.
