Mike Lee Endorses Mike Lee For Senate

Well, who could resist such a principled and dynamic politician, right?

 Mike Lee is a family man, a strong man, a Christian man, a Mormon man. Mike Lee loves Jesus and babies and puppies. Mike Lee is strong enough to wrestle a bear, yet so gentle that songbirds alight on his shoulders as he takes his morning walk around Provo to greet his neighbors and God's glorious sun. Although he went on to clerk for Justice Sam Alito, Mike Lee is a man of the people who never forgot his working class roots as the son of the dean of BYU Law who became Ronald Reagan's Solicitor General. Mike Lee's shirts are always neatly pressed, and he smells like cookies and clean mountain air. 

 All these facts are true, just ask Mike Lee, he'll tell you himself. 

The senior senator from Utah took a lot of flack yesterday for an opinion piece in the Salt Lake Tribune praising his own virtues in the third person.

"Since taking office, Senator Lee has earned a reputation as a principled conservative," he writes. "He believes elected officials are responsible for keeping the federal government within its constitutionally limited role."

Later he went on to paint himself as a centrist who can work across the aisle, touting his work "protecting privacy with the USA FREEDOM Act, families with legislation expanding the Child Tax Credit, and criminal justice reform with the First Step Act." He left out the part about running point for Trump trying to gin up support for the coup plot involving fake electors. And while we're talking objective reality, Lee voted against expanding the child tax credit in 2021 when the country was still recovering from COVID, taking the principled position that alleviating child poverty was a disincentive to marriage .

The piece, which is lifted more or less verbatim from his campaign website , is bylined "Campaign for Mike Lee," and sparked a thousand jokes about Lee finally finding a senator from Utah to endorse him — something his colleague Mitt Romney has pointedly refused to do. (And if you're old as dirt, it triggered memories of Bob Dole.)

Lee is facing a surprisingly robust challenge from Evan McMullin, a fellow conservative and former CIA officer who served as a policy wonk for the House Republican Conference before jumping ship when the GOP found Trump and lost its mind. McMullin is running as an independent with the endorsement of the state's Democrats and hopes to peel off enough Republicans to unseat the two-term incumbent.

The Tribune also gave him space to make his case, which he used to address Utah voters in the first person:

I’m Evan McMullin, and I’m running for U.S. Senate not as a member of any political party or as a representative of some special interest, but as a true independent dedicated to serving Utah and our nation.

Right now, Utahns face a choice for the future of our politics and our country. Do we continue down a path of division, partisanship and cynical self-interest that not only threatens our democracy and puts special interests ahead of Utahns, but stifles progress on issues like addressing inflation, stabilizing the economy, lowering health care costs, and protecting our air and water?

Looks like someone understood the assignment.

And kept on understanding it at last night's debate. 

“McMullin: For you to talk about the importance of the electoral college is rich. You know exactly how important it is and I think you knew how important it was when you sought to urge the WH that lost an election to find fake electors to overturn the will of the people”

— Acyn (@Acyn) 1666052454 

 Still understanding ... 

“McMullin: You are the only member of Utah's congressional delegation not to be blacklisted by Putin. There is a reason why. In 2017 he was one of only two senators to vote against sanctioning Putin's regime. In 2019, He went to Russia alone and discussed lifting sanctions.”

— Acyn (@Acyn) 1666053901 

Woof.

Well, Utah is a ruby red state that already sent Lee to the Senate twice. On the other hand, McMullin took 21 percent of the vote in Utah as a protest presidential candidate in 2016, when Mike Lee himself voted for him so ... who the hell even knows.

[ Salt Lake Tribune / Salt Lake Tribune ]

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