Roy Moore made a lousy cowboy

In my home state of Massachusetts, there have been two very different responses to the Alabama special election results. It has been tempting for some people to draw parallels to Scott Brown’s upset victory in the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in January 2010.

Others have pondered to rather extreme lengths the spectacle of Roy Moore’s campaign and his propensity to dress up as a cowboy. These two things, believe it or not, are related. Both elections were a triumph of style over substance, but it was the style of the underdog in Massachusetts, while in Alabama, it was the style of the expected victor that actually brought on his demise.

{mosads}Let’s take the Scott Brown analogy first. Any other Republican probably could have held the Alabama seat, and Jones is in all likelihood not long for the Senate. But the dynamics of the Alabama race were quite unlike the Massachusetts special election.

Brown won in large part by focusing the race on himself, by presenting himself as a sort of Massachusetts everyman. Brown enthusiastically courted Democratic voters, and he benefited from his opponent Martha Coakley’s relatively weak campaign effort. Coakley came to symbolize all that was lackluster in the state’s Democratic elite, yet, as her subsequent nomination for Governor showed, she did not disgrace herself during the campaign. She was simply out hustled by Brown.

Roy Moore, on the other hand, was the focal point of the Alabama race, but Jones, like Brown, showed that recruiting matters even in races not expected to be competitive. Jones had a good personal story to tell, but the county-by-county voting results show he won in part because he maximized turnout among Democratic groups who had strong reason to dislike Moore, whose history of propositioning teenage girls could not help any campaign.

This brings us to the cowboy analogy. At first glance, Moore was not an obviously Trumpian candidate. He was more of a social conservative than Trump, and Trump has more or less avoided the anti-LGBT rhetoric that Moore traffics in.

But Moore, like Trump, sought to present himself as a throwback to some mythical American past. He outdid Trump in his efforts to clarify what making America great again would look like, perhaps to his disadvantage. The cowboy getup — whether it is a personal style or a consultant-driven affectation — was part of that.

Moore probably didn’t lose because Alabama voters object to cowboys. But the enduring image other Americans will have of his campaign tactics may well symbolize the problem with where Republicans find themselves in the age of Trump. Many of the greatest Westerns portray cowboys as populist figures — as holdovers from a bygone America whose individual values and skills sit uneasily in a cosmopolitan, peaceful society.

As the philosopher Robert Pippin describes matters, in films such as “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance” the cowboy hero is driven by a sort of premodern quest to fulfilling a simple moral contract. Such good vs. evil quests are at odds with deliberative politics, and they often render the cowboy a tragic hero.

The age of the great Western film is certainly past. Modern Westerns have sought to accommodate themselves, often unsuccessfully, to contemporary America by diversifying – by assembling a rainbow coalition of sidekicks. This poses all sorts of problems for the costumed antics of a politician like Moore.

Should we evaluate him in terms of the values that drive him on his mission or should we focus more on his sidekicks? In either case, it seems inevitable that we will come to see such candidates as part of the same mission, and the same team, as our president.

All of which brings us back to the Scott Brown comparison. Coakley did not lose because of her leanings toward Obama. Moore may well have lost because of his resemblance to Trump.

In hindsight, the lesson of the Massachusetts special election for Democrats was, perhaps, to avoid nominating nondescript party politicians, to ensure that they chose candidates with charisma who could present themselves as independent thinkers (they did not necessarily learn this lesson, but that’s a different story).

One lesson Republicans might draw from Alabama, in contrast, is that the public might grow suspicious of the populist motif and begin to crave boring yet competent candidates with a willingness to compromise and do all of the unremarkable but necessary things that legislators do. That poses a problem when your president is hostile to such a project.

But then again, most Western heroes, despite their flaws, tend to stop at tipping their hats to the “little ladies” in the script.

Robert G. Boatright is a professor of political science at Clark University and the director of research at the National Institute for Civil Discourse.