Ohio's Republican secretary of state was shamed by a veteran political columnist for associating himself with Donald Trump's election lies.
Frank LaRose, who oversees the state's elections, likes to boast that Ohio's rules make it easy to vote and hard to cheat, but WVXU-FM's Howard Wilkinson said the secretary of state had sullied his reputation by bowing to the former president's "delusional rants" about fraud costing him the 2020 vote.
"If LaRose, who wants to be Ohio's next U.S. Senator, has a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel on the other, bad angel won the struggle for LaRose's heart and soul last weekend when he went to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), now a magnet for right-wing conspiracy theorists of all stripes," Wilkinson wrote.
The GOP secretary of state spoke on a CPAC panel that was originally called "Easy to Vote, Hard to Cheat," but his press secretary said the panel was renamed at the last minute to "They Stole It From Us Legally" that was "packed with Trumpish election deniers," according to Wilkinson.
"OK. Maybe Good Frank was somehow hoodwinked into sharing the stage with a bunch of Trump sycophants and election deniers. Maybe," Wilkinson wrote.
"But he had to know what was going on when he bought a table at CPAC's Ronald Reagan Dinner, a big fundraising event last Friday night that featured defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who — like Trump — doesn’t seem capable of getting it through her skull that she lost the election," he added. "Lake's delusions rival those of the My Pillow Guy for sheer loopiness."
LaRose finds himself in the same predicament as other GOP candidates seeking statewide office since Trump took over the party, Wilkinson wrote.
"They believe they have to show proper deference — even devotion — to Trump to appease his Ohio supporters for the purpose of winning the GOP primary," Wilkinson wrote. "Then, once they win the primary, they have to scurry back to the center in order to be palatable to independent voters who aren't particularly inspired by the 45th president."
"Looks like that good angel and bad angel will be duking it out for quite some time, at least for the next year," he added, "with LaRose's head in-between to take all the blows."
