HEARING WHAT TIM SCOTT WANTS YOU TO HEAR AND NOT WHAT HE ACTUALLY SAYS

Either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis will win the Republican primaries next year, but Tim Scott might be winning the media primary. In The Wall Street Journal, Lance Morrow praises Scott while denouncing both Donald Trump and Joe Biden in GOP establishmentarian terms:

America is stuck—deadlocked, frozen, like the armies on the Western Front in 1917. One side is headquartered at Mar-a-Lago and has no ideas at all beyond revenge and gaudy vindication. The other side bivouacs at the White House and has far too many notions—not a few of them absurd, in a leftish way. Both armies are angry, full of sullen grievance. Fox and MSNBC lob ritual shells to and fro. Donald Trump and Joe Biden glare at each other across the cratered American landscape.

(Imagine looking at happy warrior Joe Biden and thinking "angry" and "full of sullen grievance" are the appropriate descriptors.)

Morrow thinks Scott could be the way forward, because Scott, Morrow tells us, is just so forgiving.

The key to Tim Scott’s presidential venture ... is in his temperament—his manifest goodwill. His policies are less important at this point than the miracle of his temperament. His conciliatory charm isn’t superficial but rather the product of spirit and character.

The only exits from rage are exhaustion and forgiveness. But sometimes a miraculous change of mood will do. Almost uniquely among American politicians today, Mr. Scott embraces a theology of forgiveness—that great mood-changer. Forgiveness requires humility, a virtue in short supply....

Forgiveness—a profound political transaction, if properly managed—seems to me the idea at the heart of Mr. Scott’s purposes.

Forgiveness breaks the deadlock. It enables escape from the past and opens the gate to the future. Forgiveness may bring with it a blessing of forgetting. The liberation from grievance is a gift of grace all around.

It would be fatuous to think that Tim Scott might turn American public life into the Peaceable Kingdom. It’s putting a lot on the man. On the other hand, he might. One can dream.

I know why Morrow believes this. In his campaign kickoff speech, Scott said:

We need a president who persuades not just our friends and our base. We need a president that persuades. We have to do that with common sense, conservative principles, but we have to have a compassion for people. We have to have a compassion for people who don’t agree with us.

But in the rest of the speech, Scott expressed neither compassion nor forgiveness for his politcal opponents. He thinks we're everything that's wrong with America. He said:

... today the far left has us retreating away from excellence in schools. Extreme liberals are letting big labor bosses trap millions of kids in failing schools. They’re replacing education with indoctrination. They spent COVID locking kids out of the classroom and now they’re locking kids out of their futures.

In Biden’s America, crime is on the rise and law enforcement is in retreat. The far left is ending cash bails. They’re demonizing, demoralizing, and defunding the police....

We cannot have innocent people at risk, police officers getting ambushed and attacked and seniors locked in their homes from the time the sun goes down, until the sun comes up. Joe Biden and the radical left are attacking every single rung of the ladder that helped me climb....

Our nation, our values, and our people are strong, but our president is weak....

America cannot be safe or secure if we sink into a cultural quicksand here at home....

I will be the president who destroys the liberal lie that America is an evil country.... I will be the president who stops the far left’s assault on our religious liberty.

... I’m the candidate the far left fears the most. You see, when I cut your taxes, they called me a prop. When I refunded the police, they called me a token. When I pushed back on President Biden, they even called me the N word. I disrupt their narrative. I threaten their control. The truth of my life disrupts their lies.

Where's the forgiveness? Where's the compassion?

I don't like the word "forgiveness" because it suggests that we're the villains and the right is blameless. I don't like the word "compassion" because it suggests that liberalism is an infirmity. (Poor dears -- they can't help themselves. They're liberals!) But I see nothing benign or conciliatory in this speech, or in any of Scott's utterances. All I see is the pledge that he'll try to talk people who aren't already believers into becoming fellow right-wing ideologues. That's what he's interested in, not compromise, not reaching across the aisle.

The decency bar for Republicans is set so low that even a culture-war speech like this can clear it.