Guilty as Charged

At Tuesday's Republican runoff debate in South Carolina, Senator Darline Graham was asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea are national security concerns for the United States. Her answer, in full candor: "I'm just going to be honest here. I'm not that informed on national security." In the days since, defending the answer, she has sharpened it rather than walked it back: national security, she says, is not her thing. She is, at this writing, a sitting United States senator, and on Tuesday she may become an elected one.

Honesty first, because she was honest, and that is rarer than it should be. A hundred politicians in that chair would have mumbled something about strategic ambiguity and peace through strength and escaped unbruised; she declined to bluff, and there is something almost admirable in it. Her circumstances deserve honesty too: she was appointed six weeks ago, three days after her brother Lindsey died suddenly in July, and she is the first woman South Carolina has ever sent to the Senate. Forty days into a job she did not seek in the ordinary way, she gave a civilian's answer. From a civilian, it would even be fine. Most Americans are not that informed on the South China Sea, a point her defenders have made with gusto: Sean Hannity doubted most people could find Taiwan on a map.

The trouble is that she is not applying to be most people. The Senate is, by constitutional design, precisely the room where national security is somebody's thing: it ratifies the treaties, holds the war power, confirms the generals and the ambassadors and the spy chiefs. South Carolina alone is home to Fort Jackson, Parris Island, and Joint Base Charleston, and the seat she occupies was, for a quarter century, held by a man who built his entire public identity on knowing this material cold. Nobody is asking her to find Taiwan on a map. They are asking whether she should be one of the hundred people who vote on what happens if China finds it first.

Watch what her defenders did with the flub, because the maneuver is the story. "I don't speak politician. I was just honest. Of course, Taiwan is our friend." The admission of ignorance is presented as authenticity, and authenticity is presented as the qualification, and the substitution happens so smoothly you could miss that knowing things has been quietly dropped from the job description. Honesty about not knowing is a virtue. It is not a substitute for knowing. A surgeon who tells you, candidly, that surgery is not her thing has been refreshingly authentic, and you should still leave the building.

To be clear about who is unwilling to make that trade: her own party's old guard. Heritage's Kevin Roberts called the answer embarrassing and inexcusable even accounting for her being new. Nikki Haley observed, with South Carolinian economy, that Lindsey Graham was well informed on the nation's security and Darline Graham admits she is not. Her runoff opponent notes that South Carolinians cannot afford a grace period for on-the-job training while China buys farmland next to military bases. These are not liberals. They are the wing of the party that still believes the answers are supposed to live in the senator.

Then came Friday night in Myrtle Beach, and the President supplied the correction. Her answer was "very honest," he said; she is "very smart"; national security "hasn't been her thing but she's surrounded by very good people"; and, in the compliment he reached for first, "she's into the price of groceries, the price of food, the price of beef." Read that endorsement slowly, because it is not a defense of her, it is a re-scoping of the office. Surrounded by very good people means the opinions will be provided. The price of beef means her portfolio is to feel what voters feel and vote as instructed, which, given what this administration has done to the price of beef, at least keeps the irony in-house.

And here is the uncomfortable engine underneath it all: her answer was not a gaffe within this system. It was a perfect fit. It is not okay to be uninformed in that job, but it is entirely rational in this party, because information is a liability. Information produces opinions; opinions occasionally produce no votes; no votes produce primary challengers. Her brother knew everything about national security, and it availed the country nothing, because in the end he did what he was told anyway; his knowledge spent two decades as decoration. The new model simply deletes the decoration. You do not need to know what is going on in the world to do what you are told, and doing what you are told is the entire remaining function. She stood beside the President on Friday and said the critics claim she is not a politician: "Guilty as charged." For once, the charge undersells the crime.

The runoff is Tuesday. This paper rates absurdity in clowns, one to five, and we sought an independent panel to score a senator being praised by a president for not knowing things as a form of intelligence. The panel confessed it is not that informed on clowns. We are told this makes them experts now, so: five.