“I hate the city. I hate the bachelorettes. I hate the pedal taverns. I hate country music. I hate all of the things that make Nashville apparently an ‘it’ city to the rest of the country. But I hate it,” Behn said on a 2020 podcast, which resurfaced last week.
Not surprisingly, Behn has sought to distance herself from those condescending and disparaging remarks. But Matt Van Epps, the Republican nominee to succeed Green, shouldn’t assume Behn’s dissing of Nashville (or her since-deleted 2020 Twitter posts calling for defunding the police, which she now implausibly claims not to remember) will automatically torpedo her campaign.
Van Epps could ask Jason Miyares, the Virginia state attorney general, who shockingly lost his reelection bid on Nov 4 to Democrat Jerrauld “Jay” Jones, despite revelations about the latter that in the not-too-distant past surely would have sunk a political candidacy.
Jones won the job of Virginia’s top lawman despite the emergence of 2022 text messages in which he fantasised about firing two bullets into the head of Todd Gilbert (at the time the Republican speaker of the state House of Delegates) and about the killing of Gilbert’s two young children.
Disgracefully, no prominent Virginia Democrat had the decency to call on Jones to drop out of the race. And undeterred, Virginia Democrats voted en masse for him anyway.
Two years earlier, Virginia Democrats came within a couple of percentage points of electing to the state House of Delegates a woman who, with her husband, was exposed as having posted sex videos on a pay-for-play pornographic website.
And who can forget that representative Eric Swalwell suffered no adverse electoral consequences from his fellow California Democrats following the revelation of his ties with a Chinese “honeypot” spy?
Indeed, Democrats’ willingness to vote for candidates, no matter how deeply flawed or compromised, calls to mind a humorous – albeit truthful – exchange between Bob Hope’s and Richard Carlson’s characters in the 1940 horror-comedy film The Ghost Breakers.
Geoff Montgomery (Carlson): “When a person dies and is buried, it seems there are certain voodoo priests who, who have the power to bring him back to life. … [A zombie] has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.”
Larry Lawrence (Hope): “You mean, like Democrats?”
That being the case, even though Green won Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District with nearly 60pc of the vote in November 2024, while Donald Trump was winning the district by an even more impressive 22 percentage points, Van Epps and Tennessee Republicans should campaign as though they were 10 points behind in the polls.
Peter Parisi is a Virginia-based writer and editor
