Are liberals allowed to admire James Lankford?

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2024

We'll go with a solid yes: We've never voted for a Republican. That pretty much leaves Senator James Lankford (R-OK) off our future "might vote for him" candidate list.

Aside from that, we've always semi-admired Sen. Lankford. Our reasons would have gone something like this:

This week, Lankford is suddenly very high profile due to his role as one of the three senators who crafted the Ukraine / Southern border bill. In the past, he was much lower profile on the national stage, but he always struck us as very smart—and he isn't nasty, stupid, ridiculous, crazy or some kind of ugly name-caller., as many others are.

Are we liberals allowed to admire those who differ from our views? In yesterday's New York Times, Kayla Guo offered an intriguing profile of the suddenly controversial Sen. Lankford, parts of which we post below. 

Lankford's views are not our views. We're prepared to let them be his:

As His Border Deal Dies, a G.O.P. Senator Laments the Forces Against It

[...]

The plight of Mr. Lankford, 55, a slim, understated Baptist minister with neatly combed red hair, reflects the extraordinary rise and fall of the border and Ukraine deal that Republicans blocked in a test vote on Wednesday—and the political forces within the Republican Party that brought it down.

For months, Mr. Lankford, a staunch conservative, labored over the package alongside Senators Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, and Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent, demanding strict immigration policies his party insisted must be a part of any bill to send a fresh infusion of aid to Ukraine. But when Mr. Lankford managed to extract them, he found his fellow Republicans unwilling to embrace the plan, in a vivid illustration of how the political ground for any compromise on immigration has vanished for a party that has decided the issue is too valuable as a political weapon to resolve.

Lankford is "a staunch conservative." Here at this site, we aren't.

Also, he's a Baptist minister. We hold no religious or theological views. As a general matter, our cosmology could be summed up like this:

We humans have no idea where we are, or how we got here, or what we're doing there. 

In our view, it's all beyond our pay grade as humans. By way of contrast, the leading authority on the subject reports that Lankford's early life and formal education proceeded in the manner shown:

Lankford was born March 4, 1968, in Dallas, Texas, the son of Linda Joyce (née House) and James Wesley Lankford. His mother was an elementary school librarian. His maternal grandparents owned a small dry-cleaning business, his father and paternal grandparents a dairy farm. His stepfather was a career employee of AC Delco, the parts division of General Motors.

Lankford's parents divorced when he was four; he lived with his mother and older brother for a time in his grandparents' garage apartment. He became a Christian at eight. His mother remarried when he was twelve, and the family moved to Garland, Texas, with his stepfather.

Lankford attended Lakeview Centennial High School in Garland. While there, he participated in the Close Up Washington civic education program. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Secondary Education (specializing in speech and history) at University of Texas at Austin in 1990, and a master's degree in Divinity at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1994. Lankford is an ordained Southern Baptist minister.

That isn't our story at all. Lankford was born in Dallas, we were born in Boston and came of age in the San Francisco suburbs. We were talked out of religion in the ninth grade by the friend whose father created this amazing legacy as a musician, composer and painter. 

To see some of the paintings, click here.

Way back then, we would walk past Greg Gutfeld's Serra High as we ambulated down the Alameda de las Pulgas to visit that friend's (very challenging) home. Because he'd been stricken with polio, our friend's father was painting with a paint brush held in his mouth by that point in time.

Lankford graduated from Texas Austin, then went to Southwestern Baptist Theological. We graduated from Harvard in 1969, then began to teach in the Baltimore City Schools, looking for a possible way to possibly save the world.

Lankford became a Christian at age 8. Except in the most tangential ways, that description of an early life lies outside our frame of reference. 

That said, his upbringing produced a very bright man who isn't nasty or ridiculous or crazy—a person who doesn't go around calling everyone names.

The Beatles lived in a yellow submarine. By way of contrast, the rest of us live in a large continental nation. An array of different culture zones define and establish the complex fabric of that giant nation.

As we've often noted, Bill Clinton said he greatly admired the Arkansas Pentecostals, even though they rarely voted for him, because of the way he saw them live their faith. A nation like ours cannot exist unless people are able to admire neighbors and friends with different outlooks and worldviews.

(We also think that that passage from Clinton's book is the greatest primer of this era in the way to win elections and / or to advance the values and goals of your political party or your cultural tribe.)

Lankford is now on the firing line. "He could have seen it coming," Guo says. After that, she explains:

He could have seen it coming. Weeks ago, Mr. Lankford revealed on Wednesday, a “popular” right-wing media personality vowed to do “whatever I can to destroy you” if he tried to “move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year,” he said.

“By the way,” Mr. Lankford added, “they have been faithful to their promise, and have done everything they can to destroy me.”

The soft-spoken second-term Republican, who generally refrains from seeking the political limelight, did not volunteer to helm the border negotiations when they began in the fall. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, deputized him as the top Republican on the Senate’s border security subcommittee. Or as Mr. Lankford put it, he drew the “short straw when it came time to be able to negotiate all this.”

His Republican colleagues warned him to be careful.

“I told him he was going to be like a goalie on a dart team,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who was supportive of the talks but came out this week in opposition to the bill. “He knew this was a treacherous path, but I have nothing but praise for Senator Lankford. I think he’s done the best job you could possibly do under the circumstances. It’s just a very, very, very difficult, complex situation.”

Just a guess—confirming the claim about that "right-wing media personality," and identifying who that person is, will now be the focus of a large journalistic hunt.

Lankford is soft-spoken, and also plainly quite smart. In a political world of endless invective, "soft-spoken" strikes us as good. 

Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) is full of praise for his Republican colleague. We think Murphy is one of the smartest, sanest Democratic senators. 

A nation like ours can't possibly function if we all insist on loathing The Others. Murphy's praise for his colleague Lankford is good enough for us.