Mister Republican
And who would that be? Abraham Lincoln, the Republicans' first President, and universally regarded along with George Washington as one of our two greatest Presidents? Hardly; within a couple decades of his murder by a Southern racist (i.e. what would today be called a member of the Republicans' base,) Lincoln had come to be mister everything-a-Republican-isn't.
How about Senator Robert Taft who, in the fifties and sixties, was actually called "Mister Republican," by virtue of the fact that he was a total corporate tool in the mold of later Republican luminaries like Bob Dole or Mitch McConnell, and therefore above reproach? No, I don't think he would earn the title these days. Merely selling out to the rich without pandering to the hatred and greed of the Republican base hardly earns that title any more.
And what about the obvious choice, the lying, criminal, traitorous bully that they managed to put into the White House a few years ago? Well, he comes closer than these other guys, but I think there is a figure that is even more deserving of the title of "Mister Republican." And that would be a person who few of you have probably ever heard of, one Byron Low Tax Looper.
Yes, here we have a Republican politician who was so craven that he actually legally changed his name to the only thing that Republicans ever really cared about- i.e. "cut my taxes," or give me all the government services I want without having to pay a cent (charging those black people or someone instead.) He knew that Byron "national defense" Looper, or Byron "Keep those furriners out" Looper just didn't really stir the hearts of Republican voters, so he went right to the essence of it all: open, unconstrained greed.
But this is only the beginning of Byron Looper's story.
Looper was born in 1964, in Tennessee, and originally was a Democrat. He ran for office as a Democrat, losing in 1988, and actually campaigned for Clinton and Gore in 1992
He soon realized, however, that if he were to build his career on appealing to the most craven impulses in American voters, he was lost in the Democratic party, and in 1992, changed his party affiliation to where he belonged, the Republicans, but unfortunately lost an election to the Tennessee House of Representatives anyway, in 1994.
Realizing what it took to succeed as a Republican, Looper then changed his name as detailed above, and ran for the job of Putnam County, Tennessee tax assessor. In masterful Republican strategy, his campaign consisted of essentially nothing but a string of negative ads, which indeed had the desired effect, when he ousted the 14-year veteran who occupied that post.
So, there Byron was at last- an elected politician. And how did he use this position? I think I will just turn to Wikipedia to summarize his career in that office:
"In October 1998... the Putnam County attorney and ten citizens filed petitions to oust him from the office of tax assessor. In the ouster petitions it was alleged that:
Looper had arbitrarily increased the tax assessment on the property of a person who would not contribute to his political campaign fund;
Looper had failed to enter assessments on certain parcels of property;
Looper had removed a parcel from the tax roll with the intent of preventing the property owner from serving as a county public official or running for public office;
Looper had failed to deliver property tax rolls to the county trustee as required by law;
Looper erroneously classified certain property as falling under the state's Agricultural, Forest, and Open Space Land Act in order to obtain a benefit under that law; and
Looper used county employee time, county money, and other county resources for his own personal and political purposes.
The ouster suit led to Looper's removal from office in January 1999"
Or to be blunt, he found every way he could think of to milk his position illegally of both money and power. For this alone, I think he should be in the running for the title of Mr. Republican, foreshadowing as he did what would become the canonical Republican attitude toward government a mere two decades later. But we are not done yet.
So there was Looper, unemployed again. That would not do, so Looper managed, in 1998, to secure the Republican nomination for a seat in the Tennessee State Senate. He was probably able to do this, because the seat was occupied by Tommy Burks, a 28 year veteran of the Tennessee legislature, who is described as an "old style Conservative Southern Democrat," i.e. a crooked, racist pig who could count on the backing of virtually every voter in Tennessee, so nobody wanted to make a fool out of themselves by running against him.
Except for Byron Low Tax Looper, of course, who, it must be said, had an almost guaranteed strategy to remove Burks from office.
Now, in order to understand Looper's cunning electoral strategy, you must know this: Under Tennessee law at the time, if a candidate died in the thirty days before the election, their name would be removed from the ballot, with no substitute allowed.
Well, I guess you can see what is coming. In an act of brazen stupidity equal to anything Donald Trump ever did, Looper simply waited until the election was in that thirty day period, and drove by Burks' house and shot him dead in his front yard. That left Looper as the only candidate for that State Senate seat, and a guaranteed winner.
Of course, except for that minor issue of murder. At first, the local police could find no suspect or motive, but pretty quickly, a couple of witnesses to the killing showed up, who were able to identify Looper's car, and Looper inside, driving by and shooting Burks. That was too much, even given the incompetence level of police in Tennessee, so off to jail he went.
We've all heard Richard Nixon's famous remark, "It isn't illegal if the President does it." What he really meant, of course, was that it isn't illegal if a Republican does it, and I guess there has never in all of our history been someone who believed that maxim as thoroughly as Byron Low Tax Looper.
Unfortunately for Looper, it was still a couple of decades away from the time when a Republican could confidently say that he could gun someone down in the street and get away with it. Looper heroically adopted the classic Republican playbook when he was tried for murder, going through six sets of attorneys to stretch out the pre-trial period, during which he conducted a smear campaign against a childhood friend to whom he had confessed the details of the murder, and filing all sorts of other spurious motions, in classic Republican fashion. No luck, as he did not have, say, a President willing to pardon him, so off to prison he went.
In the meantime, the Democrats managed to mount a write-in campaign in the name of Burks's wife, who won the election, 30,252 votes to 1,531, and subsequently served several terms in that office. A pretty resounding victory there, but let us not forget that five percent of Tennessee's voters still preferred a murderer to a Democrat. The number these days, of course, would be a clear majority, but still, it was Looper who paved the way.
Looper remained in prison until 2013, filing the usual endless round of spurious lawsuits against his conviction, when apparently he tried to rape a female prison employee, and then dropped dead of a heart attack two hours later. A fitting end to his whole Republican career.
Anyway, here he is- Byron Low Tax Looper, my nomination for the most Republican politician that ever lived.
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