GOP Rep. Pete Sessions lost his Dallas-area seat to Democrat Colin Allred by a sizable 52-46 margin last month, but he’s not ruling out a 2020 comeback. The outgoing 11-term congressman recently told the Dallas News that he wasn’t done with politics, though he declined to answer questions about his specific interest in another bid in two years. However, Sessions very much did not decline to talk about his 2018 campaign for Texas’ 32nd District, and he comes across as shockingly thin-skinned.
Sessions lamented to the paper that his loss only came about thanks to “an incredible amount of money and an overwhelming sense of mischaracterization.” He only got whinier from there. Like many other Republicans who went down to defeat this year, Sessions complained about high turnout, in this case the voters inspired to head to the polls by Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s Senate bid. Why couldn’t Sessions attract new voters himself? Well, that was the fault of the “Democratic Party and their allies who smeared” him as a D.C. insider.
Sessions went on to gripe that he “got tattooed this election,” but how exactly? “People fell victim to thinking, ‘Wow, he’s for dog fighting,’” Sessions carped. “’Wow, he does nothing for seniors. Wow, he voted against cancer drugs.’” Sessions didn’t seem particularly angry at Allred, though, but rather focused his fury on outside groups, including the Humane Society Legislative Fund and the TV spots they ran hitting him for refusing to “crack down on animal fighting or stop cruel puppy mills.”
The outgoing congressman derided the many critical ads that targeted him as “shenanigans” and kvetched, “They did that to harm me.” (Yeah, that’s what negative ads are supposed to do.) He grumbled about his opponents, “You tend to think they are more honorable than that. But they weren’t.”
But Sessions is truly one of the last people on the planet who should be complaining about how mean negative campaigning can get. The Texan ran the NRCC from 2009 to 2012, and Sessions certainly did not play by Marquess of Queensberry rules during those four years. Sessions foreshadowed his strategy early in his tenure with a startling analogy. “Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban,” he offered, favorably describing how Afghanistan’s murderous totalitarian rulers “went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes.”
Sessions quickly added that he was “not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban,” though he didn’t really back off his comparison.
Sessions is notorious for his bizarre commentary, so it's a little difficult to understand what he said next, but he insisted that the Taliban offered “an example of how you go about is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message,” concluding that House Republicans “need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.”
The NRCC’s own commercials during Sessions’ four years at the helm were also far from the “honorable” attacks he felt he was entitled to in his own race. In just one example, a narrator argued that then-North Carolina Rep. Mike McIntyre was joining Speaker Nancy Pelosi in “robbing our Social Security trust fund,” which very much wasn’t true. Sessions was only too happy to authorize this ad and many more like it, but less than a decade later, he’s just shocked! shocked! that Democrats and their allies would have the gall to run negative ads against him.
This very year, Sessions’ allies also sunk to the bottom to try and save him. A digital ad railing against Allred, who is African American, showed an image of a darkened hand over a white woman’s mouth. If Sessions was at all bothered by this, he kept it to himself. His whiny complaints about his own treatment, though, he’s only too happy to share.
