Nobody is a bigger thorn in President Obama's side right now than Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). And nothing could be better for Graham's political prospects in 2014.
Graham has been such an outspoken critic of Obama on Libya that the president called him out by name at last week's press conference. "If Sen. (John) McCain and Sen. Graham, and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me," Obama said after Graham and McCain criticized U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.
Graham's response? He very quickly released a full-throated statement saying Obama "failed as Commander in Chief before, during, and after the attack." Graham then upped the ante even more, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday to repeatedly accuse the Obama Administration of burying bad news before an election.
Graham, of course, is a top GOP voice on matters of foreign policy, so to see him jousting with the president isn't terribly surprising.
But it's hard not to look at these things in a political context, and Graham has lots to gain personally by becoming a high-profile critic of Obama.
After two election cycles in which tea party and conservative groups have taken down a number of incumbent senators and establishment candidates who were viewed as insufficiently conservative, Graham now finds himself as the RINO-du-jour for many of these groups in the 2014 primary season.
While Graham is a pretty down-the-line conservative on matters of foreign policy, socially and economically conservative groups have never been happy with him -- particularly coming from a reliably red state -- and Graham has irritated conservatives by voting for Obama's Supreme Court nominees on the Senate Judiciary Committee and working with Democrats on climate change.
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[It becomes tougher to primary out] the guy you're trying to unseat [when he’s] on TV every day saying something hugely critical of the Democratic president (Blake 1-2).
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham is continuing his criticism of the president and the Obama administration, saying he [Obama] is on his way to earn another “lie of the year.”
“Last year he got the lie of the year award for saying, ‘If you like your health care, you can keep it.’ He’s going to have back-to-back titles by saying this,” Graham said Monday on Fox News’s “Cavuto.”
Graham’s latest attack — referencing Politifact declaring President Barack Obama’s health care comment “Lie of the Year in 2013 — follows the president’s pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.
In the interview, Obama dismissed charges that they did not call it [the Benghazi killing] a “terror” attack to benefit his reelection campaign.
“That’s what folks like you are telling them. And what I’m saying is, that is inaccurate,” Obama said. “We revealed to the American people exactly what we understood at the time. The notion that we would hide the ball for political purposes when a week later we all said in fact there was a terrorist attack taking place and the day after I said it was an act of terror, that wouldn’t be a very good cover-up.”
However, Graham said the American people were misled and that Benghazi isn’t a story pushed by Republicans or Fox News.
“This will catch up with him because they’re misleading us and the president is still misleading us. You would have to suspend disbelief, as someone famously said, to believe what the president said to Bill O’Reilly,” the senator said (McCalmont 1).
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina returned Monday [June 1, 2015] to the neighborhood where he was raised to announce that he is running for president, injecting a hawkish foreign policy voice into a crowded field of Republican contenders.
… Mr. Graham, 59, has said his fear that the world is “exploding in terror and violence” inspired him to run for the White House. He will try to convince voters that a platform of pragmatism at home and “security through strength” abroad is the formula to give Republicans the best chance to beat Hillary Rodham Clinton if she becomes the Democratic nominee (Rappeport 1).
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham hit back against the far right wing of his party a day after the CNN Republican debate in Las Vegas, saying Barack Obama “is my President” and calling the anger against him “unhealthy.”
“To those people who think Obama’s a Muslim who was born in Kenya, I lost you a long time ago,” Graham said Wednesday on CNN’s “New Day.” “There’s a dislike of Obama in my party that’s unhealthy, there was a dislike for President (George W.) Bush in the Democratic party that was unhealthy. He is my President.”
Graham said Obama called him Tuesday to talk about working with Iraq’s new prime minister, but the South Carolina senator was also candid about Obama’s handling of ISIS.
“I think he has screwed this up 10 ways to Sunday, but Bush made his fair share of mistakes too,” Graham said.
Graham accepted some credit for his one-liners and strong performance during Tuesday’s undercard debate, saying “I am hilarious.”
Throughout the night he attacked Donald Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country and warned against pushing more Muslims into the arms of ISIS.
Graham has consistently been a standout performer on the undercard stage, but he has yet to earn enough support in the polls to force his way onto the main stage (LoBianco 1).
Since Trump’s Presidential campaign announcement last June, Sen. Graham has repeatedly warned about the dangers Trump poses not only to the Republican Party, but America as a whole:
July
2015: “I
think [Donald Trump is] uninformed about the situation regarding the
illegal immigrant population. I think he has hijacked the debate. I
think he is a wrecking ball for the future of the Republican party
with the Hispanic community and we need to push back.”
August 2015:“Well, Donald Trump’s plan on immigration is stupid. … You’re not going to get 11 million people out of this country. That’s just not practical, that’s going to kill the Republican Party. It’s self-deportation on steroids.”
December 2015: “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell. He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. … He’s the ISIL man of the year.”
December 2015: “I believe Donald Trump is destroying the Republican chances to win an election that we can’t afford to lose. I believe we’re losing the Hispanic vote because they think we don’t like them…
January 2016, on choosing between Trump and Cruz: “It’s like being shot or poisoned. What does it really matter?”
March 2016:“The bottom line is that I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it. … Nobody is going to listen to you about your economic plan or your ability to defend the nation if you’re going to deport their grandmother. … Mr. Trump has taken every problem we have had with Hispanics and poured gasoline on it.
March 2016: “If Trump is the standard bearer, it’s not about 2016, it’s about losing the heart and soul of the conservative movement. … So it’s no longer about winning the election for me, it’s trying to salvage a party that I love and conservatism as I know it.”
April 2016, on running as Trump’s VP: “That’s like buying a ticket on the Titanic.”
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May 2016: “… I think Donald Trump is going to places where very few people have gone and I’m not going with him. Eating a taco is probably not going to fix the problems we have with Hispanics. I think embracing Donald Trump is embracing demographic death” (Ortiz 1-2).
[In Volume One of Obama’s third book,“A Promised Land,” Obama compared Lindsey Graham to] the guy in a heist movie “who double-crosses everyone to save his own skin” (Grady 3).
If they ever write the history of the phrase “too little, too late,” Lindsey Graham ought to get his own chapter.
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This might be a good time to remember what Graham said in a tweet in May 2016, when Trump was still just running for president: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”
Trump did get nominated. Then he got elected. And Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina, supposedly a man of power and integrity, has spent the last four years running as fast as he could from what he knew was true.
He’s one of many Carolinians who helped enable Trump like bartenders serving a drunk. …
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Once, Graham was known as an independent thinker. But under Trump, Graham fulfilled his apparent destiny: He became one of those little birds that eats bugs off the back of a rhino.
For four years, he had a perfect view of what the rhino did to our country. And by the time he hopped off, it was too little, too late (Tomlinson 1).
… perhaps nothing has cemented Mr. Graham’s standing in Mr. Trump’s world as much as his performance at the divisive Supreme Court confirmation hearing for the future Justice Kavanaugh, who faced allegations of sexual assault from Christine Blasey Ford.
His finger-wagging, lip-curling performance — “Boy, you all want power — God, I hope you never get it,” he snarled — was lampooned on “Saturday Night Live.” But Mr. Trump loved it.
“Wow! Remind me not to make you mad,” the president told Mr. Graham on a private call, the senator said (Stolberg 2).
Senator Lindsey Graham, the blunt-speaking South Carolina Republican, vented to reporters on Thursday outside the hearing room where the Senate Judiciary Committee was hearing explosive testimony about sexual assault allegations against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s embattled Supreme Court nominee.
Then he went back inside and really let loose.
“What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020,” Mr. Graham, red-faced and dropping all pretenses of legislative comity, yelled at his Democratic colleagues. “This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.”
With those words, Mr. Graham all but cemented a slow-motion public political transformation over the past two years — from an anti-Trump, maverick Republican senator who often sought legislative compromise to Mr. Trump’s closest ally and most ardent defender.
As one of Mr. Trump’s rivals for the presidency in 2016, Mr. Graham called him “the world’s biggest jackass,” a “race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot” and a “kook” unfit to be president. For his part, Mr. Trump responded by calling Mr. Graham “an idiot” and “not as bright, honestly, as Rick Perry.”
But after Mr. Trump was inaugurated, Mr. Graham gradually changed his tune. He was spotted playing golf with Mr. Trump and chatting on the phone with the president. He has occasionally taken issue with Mr. Trump’s tweets, but has largely supported his agenda.
For longtime observers of politics in Washington, it has been a remarkable change, underscored recently by the death of Senator John McCain of Arizona, who was Mr. Graham’s best friend in Washington and one of the president’s fiercest critics.
There were those in both parties who might have once thought that Mr. Graham would assume Mr. McCain’s mantle as the straight-talking Republican in the Senate, challenging his own party and frequently working with Democratic colleagues to reach bipartisan compromises.
But Mr. Graham’s increasingly cozy relationship with Mr. Trump suggests that such expectations are misplaced.
During the first two years of the administration, Mr. Graham has supported the president’s plans to build up the military, end the Iran nuclear deal, cut taxes, eliminate regulations and reorient the nation’s foreign policy.
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… on Thursday, Mr. Graham became the fiercest defender of the president’s choice to replace Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court in the face of explosive allegations of sexual misconduct.
For almost two hours, Mr. Graham — and the rest of the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee — sat silently during the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, the research psychologist who has accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school.
But when it came time for Mr. Kavanaugh to testify, Mr. Graham, who is a former Air Force lawyer, could no longer sit still.
With Mr. Kavanaugh sitting before him, Mr. Graham assailed the Democrats on the panel. He accused them of merely wanting to accumulate power. And he dared his Republican colleagues to vote against Mr. Kavanaugh’s nomination.
“If you vote no, you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics,” Mr. Graham said, his voice rising in a way that is rarely seen in Senate hearings. Turning again to the Democrats to his left, he fumed: “You want this seat. I hope you never get it.”
That position is a reversal of sorts for Mr. Graham; throughout 2016, he supported Republican political tactics to block former President Barack Obama from filling a similar vacancy on the Supreme Court.
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Mr. Graham is up for re-election in 2020, and there is certainly no political harm for him in binding himself to the president in one of the most Trump-friendly states in the country.
It is not yet known whether the dramatic and emotional performance will help persuade his Republican colleagues to vote for Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination in the face of the allegations by Dr. Blasey and two other women.
But one thing is clear: The unleashed anger is certain to be noticed by the president, who had pledged the evening before that he would watch the testimony of Mr. Kavanaugh and his accuser (Shear 1-2).
Works cited:
Blake, Aaron. “Lindsey Graham: Obama’s Worst Enemy — and Best Friend.” Washington Post, November 19, 2012. Net. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2012/11/19/lindsey-graham-obamas-worst-enemy-and-best-friend/
Grady, Constance. “In His New Memoir, Obama Defends — and Critiques — His Legacy.” Vox, November 19, 2020. Net. https://www.vox.com/culture/21573728/barack-obama-memoir-promised-land-review
LoBianco, Tom. “Lindsey Graham Calls Out ‘Unhealthy’ Dislike of His Party toward Obama.” CNN, December 16, 2015. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/16/politics/lindsey-graham-obama-unhealthy/index.html
Ortiz, Gabe. “12 Times Lindsey Graham Rebuked Donald Trump’s Candidacy.” America’s Voice, May 24, 2016. Net. https://americasvoice.org/blog/12-times-lindsey-graham-rebuked-donald-trumps-candidacy/
Rappeport, Alan. “Lindsey Graham Enters White House Race with Emphasis on National Security.” New York Times, June 1, 2015. Net.
McCalmont, Lucy. “Graham: Obama's 'Back-to-Back' Lies.” Politico, February 3, 2014. Net. https://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/lindsey-graham-barack-obama-103050
Shear, Michael D. “Furious Lindsey Graham Calls Kavanaugh Hearing ‘the Most Unethical Sham’.” New York Times, September 27, 2018. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/us/politics/lindsey-graham-kavanaugh-hearing.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. “What Happened to Lindsey Graham? He’s Become a Conservative ‘Rock Star’.” New York Times, November 2, 2018. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/us/politics/lindsey-graham-trump-midterms.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
Tomlinson, Tommy. “On My Mind: Lindsey Graham Tops the Wall of Shame of Trump Enablers from the Carolinas.” WFAE 90.7 Charlotte, January 11, 2021. Net. https://www.wfae.org/opinion/2021-01-11/on-my-mind-lindsey-graham-tops-the-wall-of-shame-of-trump-enablers-from-the-carolinas
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