Remembered by Irrelevance.

 

WyoFile's Kerry Drake wrote an editorial worth reading, entitled:

History will judge Cheney, Hageman by their Trump choices

Wyoming’s U.S. Rep. elect hasn’t been sworn in yet, but it’s already clear that she hitched her wagon to the wrong jackass.

It's a great article, with many good observations, but Drake is reading his audience, the Wyoming voter, incorrectly.

And that's a tragedy.

Drake is correct about this:

Hageman, by contrast, has now irrevocably tied her political identity to backing Trump’s lies about the “rigged” election. Even if she wanted to abandon him, Hageman cannot simply walk away. You don’t just shuck off those handcuffs when you get tired of wearing them.

No, Hageman has made the political calculation to double down on her support, even as many incumbent Republican lawmakers distance themselves from Trump after the GOP’s disastrous midterm election results. Our freshman congresswoman doesn’t have much choice.

And this:

She hitched her wagon to what she thought was the most powerful horse in the field. Now the world is quickly realizing her rotund orange steed was a jackass all along. And Cheney is leading it to the glue factory.

But will "Wyoming's" voters wake up, and will it make a difference to Hageman?

Not a chance.

Nor will it matter to her supporters.

Hageman will go on to be reliably right of the right for the rest of her political career.  In her early 60s, she'll be there for at least 16 years, and have little influence on anything.  

In the meantime, something occurred to me.

I have a friend who is a fanatic Hageman supporter.  I have another who was a real Chuck Gray supporter.

What do they have in common?

Not from here, and not from any of the neighboring states.

They've imported their politics from the Midwest. . . and there's a lot of that going around.  Indeed, we have a Secretary of State that hails from far away and his district has elected a replacement for him, in the legislature, that hails from Chicago.

Wyoming has always been a very odd state in this way.  It has a highly transient population and a core of locals. But the locals themselves are divided between various regions.  And generally, for some reason, people have tended to politically look to outsiders in the state, although our current era is a real exception.  The Governor is actually a Wyomingite, as is Hageman (from the farm belt).  Lummis is as well.

Indeed, Lummis may be the best political barometer of what that local core may be thinking. She dissed Trump when most did, made up to him in spades when things were clearly going the other way, and has dumped him like a hot rock now that he's sinking fast.

Drake is right, Hageman can't do that.

But Drake is wrong to think most Wyoming voters will. The real Hageman supporters, who include an interesting group who brought their political views from somewhere else, would rather ride the Trump jackass into oblivion than admit they've been grifted.

It's sort of self satisfying, really.

But it doesn't help address anything, however.

History will judge Hageman and Cheney by their choices, and Wyoming in general. Hageman and Wyoming are going to look pretty much the same way America Firsters did by 1945.  But there were still a few America Firsters, even those who backed fascists, around in 1945.  History judged them by forgetting them, and they did in fact become pretty irrelevant politically.

As we are about to.