A small parable, if you'll indulge me.
There's an anecdote I read about years ago, from Stan Lee, where he talks about the rivalry between Marvel and the Distinguished Competition; he had friends who worked at DC, and they would tell him that the higher ups were baffled wheneever a Marvel book would outsell theirs. They would go into meetings, and try to figure out why they were being outsold.
“Well, the Marvel covers have a lot of red on them, let's put more red on our covers and they'll sell!”
“Marvel doesn't put speech balloons on the their cover art, maybe if we try that…”
Stan would look at his friend who relayed this exchange to him, blink, and then ask simply, “Did they never think to open the book and read them?”
Whether true or not, this perferctly captures the flaming radioactive train wreck that rolled over onto Grandma Murray's Orphanage-Cookie Factory and Puppyteria that was the Herschel Walker campaign. They grabbed the nearest black guy who wanted to run, bonus points for being especially malleable, and without doing any homework or “opening the damned book and reading it,” assumed that people would vote for Walker based entirely on his skintone. “Just like they did with OBAMA!”
Except Obama wasn't a Macy's Day Parade of cerebral trauma and word-slush. Obama was a teacher and a lawyer who knew what the hell he was doing, and what the hell he was talking about. I imagine that Herschel wandered away from his concession speech having already forgotten that he was even running for political office. Probably trying to figure out if Frankenstein could kill the Mummy or something.
But they can't grasp that. It isn't possible that Obama was elected, or that Warnock was elected, or that any person of colour could ever be elected, based on something other than race. They don't think that way, so they don't realize that other people do. And then they stand around like especially dim chimps, scratching their heads, wondering where the master plan fell to shit. They learn no lessons, they'll do it again the next time they want to push the least qualified person for the job, and it just never fucking ends.
And the worse part is, they could have saved themselves the utter humiliation if Lindsey Graham had just sat down and had a conversation with Herschel Walker. Just one.
“Hi, Herschel, how ya doing? Can I get you some coffee? Beauregard, my valet, makes quite the mint julep, you know. How's the family? Who's the family? Man, what about this weather?”
“You know, some people don't think Inspector Gadget could beat Batman, but I bet he could.”
“…Uh-huh, ain't that something? Well, look at the time, I should really hit the ol’ dusty trail. Thanks for dropping by, it's been fun, we should do this again sometime.”
Just one, and he could have spared his party this whole disaster.