Congressman-elect Dan Crenshaw is getting a lot of well-deserved praise for his appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend alongside SNL cast member Pete Davidson.
The previous week, Davidson mocked Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye to an IED blast in Afghanistan, for wearing an eyepatch. Crenshaw’s response this weekend was a genuine display of humor, patriotism, and forgiveness. It’s worth watching the whole four-minute segment here:
When you’re done watching that video, I’d also encourage you to watch this two-minute video of Kathaleen Wall, the GOP candidate who came within 145 votes of killing Crenshaw’s candidacy during the Texas GOP primary:
Crenshaw is such an obviously better candidate, both in terms of biography and style, you might be surprised to learn that Texas senator Ted Cruz and Texas governor Greg Abbott both endorsed Kathaleen Wall over Crenshaw in the primary.
You’ll be less surprised by their endorsements if you know that Wall spent $6 million of her own money on the primary and was widely expected to win.
The endorsements of Cruz and Abbott, of course, didn’t stop Crenshaw from advancing to the GOP runoff. A $100,000 TV ad and the media attention Crenshaw got on Fox News and elsewhere was just enough for him to make it past Wall. Crenshaw won the GOP runoff by 40 points, and the general election by 7 points.
As the Washington Post reported in an excellent profile of Crenshaw on Sunday, Crenshaw ran 12 points ahead of Ted Cruz in Harris County last Tuesday.
But it’s pretty obvious now that earlier this spring Cruz and Abbott were committing a form of political malpractice that isn’t uncommon: valuing campaign cash over candidate quality. Another good example of this: In 2014, some in the GOP establishment preferred Mark Jacobs, a former Goldman Sachs executive, to Joni Ernst, a farm girl turned Iraq war veteran, as an Iowa Senate candidate because Jacobs could’ve funded his own campaign.
Money is a finite resource in politics, but at some point you’d think that political power brokers would learn that charisma and compelling biographies are much harder to come by.
