INDIANAPOLIS — Most politicians play checkers, not chess.
They never think more than one move ahead.
The race to be the Republican nominee for Indiana’s U.S. Senate seat on the ballot this year is but one example.
I’d call the three candidates running — former state Rep. Mike Braun, U.S. Rep. Luke Messer and U.S. Rep. Todd Rokita — Indiana’s answer to the Three Stooges, but that wouldn’t be fair to the Stooges. They planned and choreographed their comedy routines, orchestrated their eye pokes, stumbles and face plants.
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Their comedy was deliberate.
Braun, Messer and Rokita keep doing pratfalls because they just can’t help themselves.
Rokita, in particular, can’t seem to take a step without slipping on a banana peel. His latest one-point landing on his own rear end came because of a debate.
A few weeks ago, he issued a loud refusal to participate in an April 30 debate sponsored by the Indiana Debate Commission. He was the first candidate in the debate commission’s history to refuse an invitation.
Rokita said he was going to take his ball and go home because the “mainstream media” were involved and because the moderator was “biased.”
Most Indiana news organizations support the debate commission’s work. And the moderator is Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, a conservative commentator, blogger and radio talk show host who views Republicans as the chosen people and does his best to forgive them all their sins. (Disclosure: Abdul’s column appears in TheStatehouseFile.com.)
It seemed not to have occurred to Rokita at the time that, should he win the nomination, earning as much free media as possible could help and that telling other Republicans not to vote for him wouldn’t be a winning strategy come November.
A little bit of time passed.
Either Rokita or someone around him managed to get more than one brain cell to work at a time. The candidate decided to accept the invitation after all.
But Rokita, being Rokita, couldn’t just say, “Upon reflection, I changed my mind.”
No, he had to fulminate some more about his opponents and take some more shots at Abdul.
In the process, he not only managed to toss more grenades back into his own party’s tent, but also offered compelling evidence that he’s an indecisive fellow who doesn’t know his own mind.
Now, that’s comedy.
Moe, Curly and Larry couldn’t have planned it or played it any better.
But that’s the way it goes in this race.
With only a few weeks left until Hoosiers troop to the polls, the overriding issue dividing Braun, Messer and Rokita concerns which would-be senator will offer the most slavish devotion to President Donald Trump.
The most immediate flaw in this strategy is evident to anyone who has a greater cognitive capacity than an amoeba.
As the revelation that the president and Fox commentator/Trump mouthpiece Sean Hannity shared the same attorney/fixer demonstrates, Donald Trump keeps secrets — hides critical, even essential, information not just from his adversaries, but from his allies, his friends, his family and possibly even himself.
How’s that “I’m desperate to be Donald Trump’s lapdog” strategy going to look if, say, investigators discover that this president owes hundreds of millions of dollars to Russian oligarchs?
The larger flaw in their Trump-focused thinking, though, isn’t the stuff of comedy.
Our three branches of government — legislative, executive, judicial — are supposed to serve as checks on each other. Part of the reason U.S. senators have six-year terms is that this longer time in office is supposed to insulate them from the passions of the moment, allow them to resist immediate political pressures and encourage them to be more deliberative in their approach to their duties.
When they say they’re eager to be rubber stamps for whatever President Trump (or any president) wants, Braun, Messer and Rokita also are saying they really don’t want to be deliberative — don’t want to be senators.
The U.S. Senate, you see, is a place where everyone is supposed to play chess.
And the Indiana GOP has three candidates who only play checkers.
When they’re not performing slapstick, that is.
