The Dems depantsed the repulsive Eric Swalwell over the weekend in an attack with something like the Pearl Harbor effect. It swiftly sunk Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign. We followed the depantsing, but without quite the humorous detachment of Wall Street Journal Free Expression editor Matthew Hennessey. There are several interesting angles to the story and he inflicts glancing blows on most of them. He doesn’t expressly mention the apparent knowledge of members of the press about Swalwell’s way with women.
We knew about Fang Fang, okay, but we seem to have gone beyond an old-fashioned scandal into #MeToo territory. Now it’s getting serious. At the end of his column Hennessey raises the question what congressional Dems will do with Swalwell. Will they surprise us? The question is whether he remains useful to congressional Democrats. He could be swapped out for another Bay area progressive. In any event, the powers-that-be in his caucus won’t want to answer many questions about him unless they have to. Ah, the uses of Jeffrey Epstein!
Hennessey writes here this morning in the Journal’s Free Expression newsletter:
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You know what a blanket party is. Popular at sleepover parties, military barracks and prisons, it’s when you throw a blanket over someone’s head so that everyone can take free shots to the guest of honor’s head and ribs.
California Democrats, and some in Washington as well, threw a surprise blanket party for Rep. Eric Swalwell Friday night. I don’t mean to traffic in redundancy. A party like this is by definition a surprise for the guy under the blanket. The real surprise is that it was organized at all.
Mr. Swalwell, 45, is a seven-term congressman from the Bay Area. He ran for president in 2020, staying in the race just long enough to participate in one debate. He went for it that night, telling Joe Biden it was time to “pass the torch.” Mr. Biden literally laughed at him.
When a thing like that happens you have to imagine someone backstage on the Biden team, aka the Democratic Party Machine, writing Mr. Swalwell’s name in a little book under the heading “Dead Men.” The great hope of a long-shot presidential bid is that you raise your profile with the public. The great risk is that you make enemies out of your own party’s power brokers.
Until Sunday night, Mr. Swalwell was running for governor of California. He called himself the “front-runner,” but that wasn’t quite right. He’s the Democratic front-runner in a nonpartisan primary. According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, Republican Steve Hilton leads the field with 14.7%. Mr. Swalwell is in second place with 13.7%. Republican Chad Bianco has 13%, Democratic Rep. Katie Porter has 11.3% and billionaire Tom Steyer has 10.3%.
In other words, it’s a slow-motion car crash. Democrats are at risk of being locked out of the November general election if Messrs. Hilton and Bianco finish first and second in the June 2 primary.
If the election were held today . . . well, nobody knows what would happen if the election were held today in part because elections aren’t held on one day in California anymore. They are held over the course of a month, and sometimes longer. The filing deadline for entering the race passed last month. Counties will begin sending mail ballots to voters on May 4.
That’s why the Swalwell blanket party had to happen fast. Friday night is never the best time to drop a big news story, but the blanket-party organizers—whoever they may be, wink wink—had to move quickly to shake up the race.
Mr. Swalwell is accused of being a scumbag and possibly a rapist. Four women have come forward to allege that he either sexually assaulted or harassed them within the past seven years. One accuser, who hasn’t given her name, was a congressional staffer in his office. She told CNN that Mr. Swalwell raped her more than once while she was heavily intoxicated. Mr. Swalwell denies the allegations.
Blanket parties don’t happen spontaneously. That’s the icky thing. Someone lined it all up for Friday night, which means someone knew about these allegations—possibly for a while—and did nothing about them. When they say “politics ain’t beanbag,” this is what they mean.
Mr. Swalwell walks away from his blanket party bruised and stumbling. He suspended his campaign. It’s hard to see a political future for him, but stranger things have happened in politics. The partisan split in Congress is tighter than a tick. Every warm body counts. Will the Democratic Party Machine toss Mr. Swalwell overboard even if doing so makes life a little easier for congressional Republicans for the next few months?
That would be a real surprise.
