Michael Whatley's pseudo-populist campaign

 Michael Whatley’s Senate campaign has gotten off to a clumsy start. The former RNC Chair, a veteran of 25 years of Republican attack politics, has struggled to find a line of attack against his Democratic opponent. For a Trumper, Whatley’s aggression has been rather limp. He’s presenting himself as a fearless populist warrior against a man who grew up picking tobacco. 

At a recent fundraiser in Wilson, Whatley slurped down cooked oysters and railed against Cooper. He argued, with a straight face, that Cooper “represents New York, Chicago, San Francisco values.” I had to stifle my guffaw. Can you imagine Roy Cooper sipping Chablis with fancy New York City liberals, exchanging snide jokes about the hicks in North Carolina? The thought is ludicrous. But Whately seems to be adopting the pseudo-populist stance that his party has used in its decades of processing white working-class votes into white upper-class tax cuts. 

In fact, of Cooper and Whatley, Whatley has the more elitist resume. His LinkedIn page still lists his location of employment as the “Washington, District of Columbia area.” Even Thom Tillis managed to lie about where he lived. Tillis, an IBM executive earning $500,000 a year, resides in Cornelius. Cornelius has a median income of over $100,000 and is 91% white. Thus, our senior senator found it necessary to claim he lived in Huntersville. Whatley, the real North Carolinian, has failed to update his tony professional hometown. 

The contrast between Whatley’s and Tillis’s career trajectories reveals the sheer disingenuousness of Whatley’s populism. Tillis, no friend of the working class, got his start in politics by advocating for bike trails in his local neighborhood. Whatley has spent his entire career in Washington, on K Street, or inside the Raleigh Beltline. Whatley is an elite political operative with few ties to the daily rhythms of life in our state. That means that even Thom Tillis is a more authentic product of local North Carolina communities than Michael Whatley. 

The remarkable thing is that, in other forums, Whatley has touted his insider status. One of the ways Whately’s supporters have tried to “sell” him to the GOP grassroots is by emphasizing his fundraising prowess. In other words, they’re saying that Whatley has deep connections to the wealthiest Republicans in the country. He’s trying to defuse populist discomfort by reassuring them that he can raise hundreds of millions of dollars. This money will not come from dirt farmers. 

Thus, Whatley’s populist affectations are unrooted in his biography or his career. He would like voters to believe that he’s the downhome boy, the humble North Carolinian out to stick it to elite Washington. He would like Roy Cooper to be his foil. MAGA Republicans can be unbelievably gullible, so it would not surprise me if Whatley’s schlocky rhetoric convinced some of them. But, after years of watching cynical politicians misrepresent themselves and break promises, most voters have keen antennae for a political ruse. It seems unlikely to me that Whatley will be able to convince most voters he represents “North Carolina values” and that Roy Cooper is a San Francisco snob. 

The clumsiness of Whatley’s early attacks suggest that his political instincts are far less impressive than I’d thought they were. I thought Whatley was a keen political thinker with a good sense of the state. But he has chosen a campaign message that is likely to flop like a Red Drum on the deck of an Outer Banks fishing boat. What Whatley really is is a savvy insider operative who lacks the charisma or judgment to sell his own campaign to the voters. He’s a 

pseudo-populist, like George W. Bush attacking John Kerry for windsurfing. The Trumper is a Bushie after all.