In Search of the Elusive "Moderate" Republican, Ch. 82,537

By Jenny Herk
Florida Correspondent

Having heard of recent reports of a sighting of the rare and possibly mythical moderate Republican, we donned our white rubber go-go boots and headed off into the trackless swamplands of central Florida where the beast is supposed to be.  Sure enough, one may have been spotted:

Who is this great champion of higher education, this Ben Sasse?  He's a graduate of Harvard College.  He got his doctorate at Yale.  And for decades we've been told he's the voice of thoughtful Third Way conservatism and a Solon of great integrity. Here's that perennial font of conventional wisdom, CNN:

Sasse presented himself as a sober conservative, critical of both parties and the three branches of government for failing to live up to their responsibilities. A frequent critic of Trump before, during and after his presidency, Sasse has given voice to a conservative critique of the lack of civic virtue.

“Many years of corroding our constitutional order have contributed to the polarization and the viciousness that are poisoning our politics more broadly,” Sasse said in his opening remarks Monday. “We all know that our civic health and our civic life is not healthy.”  

Let's not even ask what the f***  that even means.  Instead let's turn to the mother lode of both-sides pontification, Chris Cillizza: 

Instead Sasse is trying to forge a third way – Bill Clinton smiles wryly – between those two extremes: A candidate who believes in traditional conservative values and thinks T**** has strayed at times from them but not someone wholly motivated by their hate for this President. 

Whilst chomping on his favorite Chevy Chase sopprassata sub, David Brooks back in 2017 said:

For Republican senators, it’s harder. Their consciences pull them one way — to tell the truth — while their political interests pull them another way — to keep their heads down. Some senators are passing the test of conscience — Ben Sasse, ... 

Those interested can read Mr. Brooks's full list of Republican conscience-test passers in the light of their behavior over the past five years.

Here's an adoring 2021 tribute from the Associated Press:

When Ben Sasse heard that GOP activists in Nebraska were primed to censure him for insufficiently supporting Donald Trump, the Republican senator didn’t try to talk them out it. Instead, he punched first....Sasse ripped fellow Republicans for following a “cult of personality” and “acting like politics is religion.”

It’s the no-apologies approach Nebraskans have come to expect — and even appreciate — from their junior senator, who perhaps more than any other rising Republican leader is cultivating anti-Trumpism as his brand.  

Have we found it, the elusive moderate Republican, thought to have become extinct with the retirement of Ed Brooke? Are Gator fans (and we never hear from you!) rejoicing?

Um, not so much.

According to The Gainesville Sun,

A presidential search committee on Thursday announced it had selected Ben Sasse, a Republican United States Senator from Nebraska, as the sole finalist to lead the University of Florida, a provocative move after more than a year of controversy at the public university over academic freedom and accusations the Board of Trustees has politicized the cherished state institution.

Is this the elusive moderate Ben Sasse?

Above all, secrecy was key to Sasse's elevation.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law earlier this year making applications for college presidential openings confidential, effectively cloaking the process in secrecy until the very end stages. From the outset, it was clear that the law was intended to give crucial cover as Florida's benighted college boards considered overtly political candidates for the lucrative, powerful positions heading the state's universities. 

Or as we used to say on Beacon Hill after a state rep's nephew was appointed to a no-show job, “After a worldwide search...”

The Gainesville Sun continued:

The UF search committee, headed by Rahul Patel, a member of the Board of Trustees, claimed its search was "exhaustive," but it did not explain in any detail how such a process could have landed on Sasse, who possesses limited experience in higher education and accumulated a divisive, hard-right voting record in the U.S. Senate. Nor did the board bother explaining how secrecy best served the process. In the past, the minor inconvenience that an applicant would need to disclose their interest was considered secondary to the public's right to have a full view of an important hiring decision. No more: Sasse was permitted to walk away from his Nebraska constituents under cover of darkness, alerting them only after the goose had been cooked.

Maybe we need to look a little harder at this supposed Third Wayer.

To ensure the health of our civic, Sasse joined every single Senate Republican in denying so much as a hearing to President Obama's highly-qualified Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland on transparently hypocritical grounds (as we shall see) and then voted to let the corrupt grifter fill the seat with hard right mediocrity Neal Gorsuch.  He then soberly and thoughtfully voted to ram through the nomination of Brett “Here it is, wanna touch it?” Kavanaugh despite serious unanswered questions involving the nominee's perjury and sex crimes.

Then, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg finally succumbed two months before the 2020 election, Sasse had no problem disregarding his previous stance against election-year nominees by voting for Spooky Handmaid Amy Coney Barrett.

Again let's consult The Gainesville Sun:

One change Sasse will immediately bring to UF's executive office is a right-wing political philosophy deeply hostile toward gay rights, women's reproductive health, equality and academic freedom. In the Senate, Sasse enthusiastically backed Donald Trump's three Supreme Court appointments, all of whom are laboring to engineer a puritanical society that would be unrecognizable to incoming and current students.

More recently he voted against superbly qualified appellate judge Ketanji Brown Jackson because, frankly, who give a s*** why? 

Sasse continues the tradition
of great Florida educators

At least with that Harvard AB and Yale Ph.D. he must be a bright boy, right?  Guess again:

Supporters of Sasse's bid pointed to his intellect as his ace in the hole, a claim difficult to evaluate since the search process was secret. Rob Bradley, a former state senator from Clay County and staunch DeSantis ally, called Sasse "brilliant," and other advocates pointed to an essay on higher education Sasse wrote for The Atlantic in May as evidence of his intellectual heft.

Sasse's essay is a broad argument against student debt forgiveness — an inflammatory message to send to aspiring and current Florida college students. The piece also broadcasts Sasse's dark view of higher education as a system that is "failing our students on a massive scale," an odd argument from the likely next president of UF, an incredibly high-performing institution.

Sasse's turgid, buzzy prose does not reveal the mind of an education reformer but that of a wishy-washy dilettante. Sometimes he says very little ("we need dynamism — not status quo-ism — in higher education"). At other points he merely repackages bland ideas into Ponzi-like sales pitches: "As important, we will need a broader base of wise, gritty learners. We cannot build what we need if we assume that the developmental experience of every 20-year-old will be the same." (Sasse might be shocked to find no one at UF assumes the developmental experience of every 20-year-old is the same).

To sum up, he's an intellectual lightweight who realized he was going nowhere in national politics as long as the Former Loser Grifter had the Republican Party chained up and ball-gagged.  Given the crookedness of the authoritarian DeSantis regime in Florida, it's a safe bet that his new job was a grift [Surely, gift? – Ed.] delivered to him by minions of ol' Go-Go Boots Ron in exchange for providing a sheen of intellectual respectability to DeSantis's Amsterdam-like ambition to impose his form of dictatorship on the United States.

If moderates like Ben Sasse can attach themselves to an anti-democratic bigot like Ron DeSantis, can our wonderful Never FLG Republican allies be far behind?

Let's see what David “Axis of Evil” Frum thinks:

Others disagree, but in my opinion, a DeSantis GOP nomination in 2024 represented a much better outcome for the whole country than a Trump return. Maybe you don't like DeSantis's manner or record, but he's a recognizably normal US politician. If defeated, he'd go peacefully. 9/x

— David Frum (@davidfrum) August 15, 2022

So the bad news is that once again our search for the elusive moderate Republican has crapped out.

The good news is that it's clear that supposedly principled conservatives like newly-minted Gator Ben Sasse and former Iraq War flack David Frum have shown their true colors. And those colors are as pure white supremacy [Surely, white? – Ed.] as the boots worn by their new crush, wannabe dictator and Nancy Sinatra cosplayer Ron DeSantis.