Editor’s Note: John Avlon is a CNN senior political analyst and anchor. He is the creator of “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.” The views expressed on this commentary are his personal. Read more opinion at CNN.
CNN
—
Don’t underestimate Tim Scott.
This week, the South Carolina Republican Senator embarked on the compulsory Iowa listening tour that precedes a doable presidential marketing campaign. He provided up a well-scripted speech in Des Moines after which led the Polk County Lincoln Day dinner, testing out the themes that would outline a candidacy.
If you glanced on the headlines, you may suppose that he was promoting a warmed over type of Trump’s “combative vision,” served with a facet order of DeSantis’ bitter tradition warfare assaults.
That can be a mistake. Because should you truly listened to Scott’s speeches, you’d hear a really completely different pitch to voters. “For America to be at our best, we have to work together,” Scott said. “We must come together on a common ground, built on common sense.”
Yes, Tim Scott is an unapologetic conservative. He is an individual whose non secular religion genuinely defines his private journey and his politics. That might or will not be your coverage desire. But his imaginative and prescient is basically optimistic, a rebuke to grievance politics on the left and (implicitly) the correct.
He just isn’t fanning the flames of worry about “American carnage.” He just isn’t wielding the American flag as a weapon to bludgeon individuals who look completely different than him. Amid a wave of strategically induced CRT panic, he’s additionally not making an attempt to whitewash American historical past to faux it’s an unadulterated story of perfection.
At the Lincoln Day dinner, he instructed the story of how his beloved grandfather, born in 1921, was taught to step apart on the sidewalk to let a white man cross and by no means make eye contact. This was deep within the Jim Crow South. “So when I talk about our history, I’m not whitewashing it,” Scott said. But he added that his grandfather instructed him “you can be bitter – or you can be better. I chose better.”
As the one Black Republican Senator, Scott sees his exceptional rise as proof of American exceptionalism and our success in forming a extra excellent union. And as inherently distinctive as it’s, Scott’s story just isn’t one that may merely be dismissed out of hand. But he’s prepared to have his patriotism attacked.
“For those of you on the left, you can call me a prop, you can call me a token, you can call me the N-word, you can question my Blackness, you can even call me ‘Uncle Tim.’ Just understand: Your words are no match for my evidence. The truth of my life disproves your lies.”
That’s a superb line. It’s additionally a tough reality rooted in his private expertise. And he’s unsparing in his perception that activists strive to use our nation’s historic errors as a wedge to “bring more power and more resources to their progressive agenda.”
You can contest this all day lengthy with stats and information about systemic racism and its expression in all the things from police abuse to housing. Scott may even agree when it comes to sure insurance policies. But his place on the stage as a Black Republican US Senator preaching the necessity for nationwide unity to obtain nationwide greatness goes a great distance towards repudiating the white identification politics that fueled a lot of Trump’s rise.
To ensure, he’s nonetheless making an attempt to enchantment to a celebration that fell underneath Trump’s spell – and Scott does go too far with the play-to-the-base purple meat for my style at instances.
For instance, his discuss of how left-wing Democrats are intentionally making an attempt to “destroy America” basically undercuts his general rhetoric in regards to the want to unite America. And he’s half of the conservative crew that’s dancing across the outright denunciation of Donald Trump’s try to overturn an election on the idea of a lie – a stance that can look as cowardly sooner or later as it might look pragmatic now, from the attitude of somebody operating for president as a Republican.
But making an attempt to slap a cynical Trump-derivative bumper sticker on Tim Scott does him a disservice. Because Scott’s optimistic pitch for doable presidential marketing campaign is proof that there’s a lane exterior of Trump, Trump Lite and Never Trump. It’s proof of evolution past an obsession with identification politics and the grievance industrial complicated. And that’s good for the long run of Republican Party and good for the republic.