The politics of honesty in an age of lies

It's a cliché that there are no honest politicians.  It's also false.  Three days ago a politician gave us a display of honesty where it counted -- the kind we're going to need more of in the age of Trump.

That day, Stacey Abrams acknowledged that her Republican opponent was going to be certified the winner of the election for Governor of Georgia.  But as she made explicit, she was not delivering a concession speech:

.....to watch an elected official -- who claims to represent the people of this state, baldly pin his hopes for election on the suppression of the people's democratic right to vote -- has been truly appalling.  So, to be clear, this is not a speech of concession.  Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper.  As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede.  But my assessment is that the law currently allows no further viable remedy.

The disenfranchisement and vote suppression which marked this race were gross, blatant, and flagrant even by the standards of what has come to be normal Republican practice.  Abrams's speech (click here to watch the whole speech on video or read the complete text) goes into considerable detail about the multiple schemes and scams the Republicans used to rob Democrats, and especially blacks, of their right to vote.  It's a maddening litany, especially to those of us who know something of how hard black Americans had to fight barely two generations ago to win that right, persevering in the face of ruthless and even murderous opposition.  Republicans' efforts to destroy what took such courage and determination to achieve are a disgrace to the entire country.

And after all that, Abrams ended up "losing" by less than one and a half percentage points.  The close margin makes it undeniable -- without vote suppression, she would have won.  The election was stolen, in the purest and bluntest sense.

All Abrams did was to insist on stating that simple truth.  A lesser politician would have "made nice", would have conceded "gracefully", would have kept silent about the ugly facts and legitimized the betrayal of the voters, would have contributed to the normalization of the outrageously abnormal, would have lied.  Would have acted, to put it bluntly, as a collaborator.  Certainly plenty of Democrats want our politicians to behave like that, to smile and strive for "bipartisanship" while the Republicans shit all over them and all over the electorate.  Abrams was too honest to do so.

Republicans are predictably furious that Abrams didn't follow the script and put her stamp of legitimacy on the fruit of their slimy tactics.  At least one has compared her unfavorably to Arizona Republican Senate candidate Martha McSally who, to her credit, did concede defeat without any of the usual Republican bullshit about hordes of illegal aliens or whatever voting -- but that's because she didn't face the massive campaign of cheating that Abrams and her supporters did.  McSally was rightly conceding that she lost a fair fight.  She gets credit because she refrained from lying.  Abrams, too, refrained from lying.

Abrams has made it clear that she's not going away.  Thank goodness.  We need more like her.