MAYBE I'M CRAZY, BUT I HAVE A FEELING THAT THE GOP REALLY ISN'T THE PARTY OF THE WORKING CLASS

I once thought that Dr. Oz was going to coast to victory in the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania, but polls show that the front-runner is David McCormick, who doesn't exactly seem compatible with the GOP's recent "party of the working class" branding.

From a New York magazine story about his wife, Dina Powell:

Take Goldman Sachs partner Dina Powell, the irresistibly charming, gossip-slinging, Washington–Wall Street power-brokering insider who served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser.... She isn’t running for office herself, but she’s been working hard to help her zillionaire hedge-funder husband, David McCormick, win the Republican primary to replace retiring senator Pat Toomey in his home state of Pennsylvania. (Despite years in D.C. and Connecticut, he still owns his family’s Christmas tree farm in the state.) Team McCormick got Trumpy quick. Stephen Miller works for the campaign, along with Hope Hicks.... McCormick has also got Breitbart apparatchiks and ran “Let’s Go Brandon” Super Bowl ads.

This is a party that sells itself as opposed to "elitists" and "globalists," and yet here's more about the wife of the party's likely Senate nominee:

There she was with Kobe Bryant and Bob Iger at a Hollywood dinner hosted by Brian Grazer and Ari Emanuel for Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. In 2019, she married McCormick. (They both had been previously married.) Afterwards, a glittering cross section of the ruling class hauled itself to Egypt for a days-long riverboat cruise down the Nile, from Aswan to Luxor: There was Paul Ryan, Axios founder Jim VandeHei, journalist turned Facebook exec Campbell Brown and her husband, Dan Senor. Oh, and fashion designer Tory Burch. (Hardly “populist potential,” as Breitbart pigeon Matt Boyle absurdly cooed about McCormick in a headline.)

When Vandehei’s star reporter, Jonathan Swan, married another reporter, Betsy Woodruff, Powell was at their Virginia wedding. When the Times opinion section had a pre-coronavirus Valentine’s Day party in the office, Powell was there at the invitation of Nicholas Kristof. She brought Washington Post columnist David Ignatius to a box to watch the Army-Navy football game in Philly with Trump.

This is why I laugh when writers like Greg Sargent of The Washington Post and Jason Zengerle of The New York Times tell us that there's a pro-working-class movement on the right that genuinely threatens to change the ideology of the Republican Party. The GOP will never head in that direction. It doesn't have to -- it's voters don't care whether their Republican politicians help them economically as long as those politicians stroke their rage centers. McCormick ran a "Let's go, Brandon" TV ad and is working with Donald Trump's most racist aide -- that's all GOP voters want. Do that and you can be as globalist and elitist as you want.

In other countries, right populists throw a few economic bones to the Volk in order to win their support. In America, why bother? All the Volk care about is grievance. Say you hate the people they hate and they'll love you.