Once again, white women have voted against their own interests. In the state of Texas, 59% of white women voted for Ted Cruz, when they could have been represented by Beto O’Rourke: a 6”4 heartthrob who’s like a Kennedy without the curse.
Ever since Barack Obama left office, C-SPAN programming has been lacking in the aesthetics department. Not once when surfing the channels has someone confused political reporting for a primetime political drama, like was the case when President Obama shared the primetime airwaves with Scandal’s President Fitzgerald Grant. Given the opportunity to provide eye candy to the legislative body that determines who has health care, whose life experiences are believed, and who gets attacked in the Middle East, the people of Texas have disappointed millions of people who wanted their fates sealed by a hot guy for once.
Beto’s loss not only denies Democrats a vote towards their priorities and against the Trump agenda, but it also denies us six years worth of live-streams of Beto eating Whataburgers he Postmated to the Capitol as he sits and reads the Republican budget proposal. We could have had years of Jake Tapper interviewing someone even hotter than Jake Tapper. A generation of schoolchildren could have had someone to look up to, knowing that if they work hard and are also irresistibly handsome, they too could flip a Senate seat in a state where there are almost as many guns as people.
Growing up as a woman in society, I was led to believe that looks were the most important factor in determining one’s worth. Hotness played an outsize role in countless Prom King elections, and as much as I like to believe that the people of France rejected Marion Le Pen for her new brand of fascism, Emmanuel Macron’s stellar bone structure certainly helped him become the president of France. The people of Canada gifted the world by boosting the profile of Justin Trudeau, who along with Macron, gives the internet G8-summit's-worth of fantasies to write about. Even in America, historians suggest that it was John F. Kennedy’s square chin opposite Richard Nixon’s made-for-political-cartoon nose that helped him ascend to the presidency in 1960. Hotness is appealing on all sides of the aisle: the right is so horny for Trump, they draw him as swole in their cartoons and make sure he looks smoldering in their memes.
Texas could have delivered us a hunk to conduct Senate Agriculture Committee hearings on farm subsidies, but no, they had to go with the guy whose face looks like an armpit. Texas was as forgiving of Ted Cruz as Ted Cruz was of Donald Trump.
The lack of a Senator O’Rourke means that Cory Booker (D-NJ) will have to do all the heavy lifting for the annual Sexy Men of the Senate calendar (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Lindsey Graham as Mr. July. And ladies—he’s single). As much as Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) fancies himself to be a looker, he’s only a Republican 7, which means he’s a Democratic 4. The newly elected Josh Hawley might be considered by some to be the Beto of the Right, but he’d deny himself health insurance for that pre-existing condition.
The loss of the hot guy is not just a sorry event for news junkies hoping for a chaser after being forced to look at Mitch McConnell’s reptilian jowls. It reveals that the only thing more powerful in this world than horniness is partisanship. Only American racism can triumph over the libido.
Seriously, people. If the Sexiest Man Alive couldn’t convince you that everybody deserves health insurance and kids shouldn't be put in internment camps, who can?