No Moore

Was this week's special U.S. Senate special election in Alabama the first truly post-partisan vote? It was, at minimum, a uniquely ad hominem verdict in one of the reddest of Republican states. The balance seemed to tip decisively against Judge Moore last weekend when Sen. Shelby repudiated him.  History will most likely show that Moore died of a thousand cuts, from lingering suspicion of his Christianist bent to disgust with his alleged preference for very young women. These outweighed appeals to partisan solidarity from the President, who had supported Moore's opponent in the Republican primary, and to tribal solidarity, for want of a better term, from Steve Bannon. There was a rush to judgment against Bannon after Tuesday's result, the feeling being that, as Moore's biggest booster, he had foisted a fatally flawed candidate upon Alabama Republicans. Partisans there have themselves to blame, however, for choosing Moore when the President was urging them to nominate someone else. His ambivalent stance probably minimizes the damage to his own prestige from the Alabama debacle, though Democrats will portray the election as part of a wave repudiating Trump  and Trumpism. Apologists for Bannon -- and we should be careful to distinguish him from  the "alt-right" despite  Democratic and antifa perceptions -- might note that their cause almost prevailed and would have if not for Moore's toxic persona, but the Republican establishment could answer that, compared to typical Alabama elections, Moore's defeat was not a near-miss but a catastrophic abandonment of the party. While Democrats credit black turnout for putting their candidate over the top, a more typical GOP voting pattern would have more than compensated for that, as it has in the recent past. If any lasting lesson is to be learned from Alabama, it'll be the same lesson the nation as a whole has been taught this year. While the sexual-harrassment craze endures, more intensive vetting will be necessary for both major parties, not only for aspirants to office lest they share Moore's fate, but for incumbents lest they share Sen. Frankenstein.   This could go on at least until 2020, when we can now expect Sen. Gillibrand to position herself as the people's scourge of male swinishness in general and a seemingly swinishness President in particular. But while that develops, the cultural wars waged by Moore and Bannon will continue to rage as if nothing really significant happened in Alabama this week, since on that battlefield, nothing really did.