Lately, Republican primaries in the Deep South have become a race to the bottom. In that region, Trump-style candidates were in vogue long before Trump rode the escalator.
Take Mississippi, for instance, where the race to succeed Phil Bryant seems to be a contest on who can out-Trump the other. The establishment favorite, Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves, is playing up his ties to Trump to the hilt. His Website contains a clip of him speaking at what looks like a Trump rally.
But one of his challengers, freshman state representative Robert Foster, is literally running as Trump with a Southern drawl. His sharp-elbowed style seems to be almost a carbon copy of Trump’s style. Take this tweet on the day before the 2018 election, for instance.
Uh huh. So voting against Cindy Hyde-Smith and her dog-whistling was “ignorant or evil”?
More recently, when Chris Murphy renewed his call for an assault weapons ban, Foster harrumphed that we need AR-15s to protect against, among other things, “socialist liberals.” But believe it or not, that may not be his worst moment. Not by a longshot.
Soon after I put Foster on blast for his unhinged comments about guns on RDTDaily, one of my Twitter followers alerted me to a post Foster made on Facebook that shows his priorities are, to put it mildly, way out of whack.
Foster represents a slice of the Mississippi side of the Memphis suburbs—an area that is about the same shade as a Mississippi State jersey. Last spring, his seven-year-old son wondered why he couldn’t come back north from Jackson to see more of his soccer games. Foster’s response? He was too busy owning the libs.
The original is viewable—at least for now—here. So fighting against those evil libruls was so important that he didn’t have the time to do his most important job—be a dad?
When I saw this, I immediately thought about Jim Bob Duggar. If you’ll remember, during his tenure in the Arkansas state legislature, his then 18-member brood—including 16 kids—were crammed into a house designed for only a third that many. Wouldn’t you think that the time spent in Little Rock could have been better spent finding a bigger house—especially since his family far exceeded that house’s occupancy limits?
Just like Jim Bob, it seems Foster cares more about making a name for himself than being a father.