“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson memorably wrote in 1969.
“Humiliation” also works at that sentence’s start if the topic is Terri Lynn Land’s first – and surely last – try to become a senator.
Her loss to Gary Peters by 55-41 percent is a Republican setback on a good day for the party. It gained seven U.S. Senate seats for a majority there and added 13 to its U.S. House dominance. In Michigan, Republicans expand their state House clout by picking up four seats for a 13-seat majority.
"Republicans have to be kicking themselves that in this year of all years, they nominated a candidate so inept she became a national embarrassment," Jack Lessenberry says Wednesday morning on Michigan Radio.
Terri Lynn Land is called “a wobbly, uneven candidate" by a national newsweekly. (WOOD-TV photo)
Land’s defeat is far from a stunner, and brings down the curtain on a candidacy so amateurish and hopeless that the national GOP early last month canceled more than $850,000 in planned TV buys for Land. Political action committees financed by the Koch brothers kept her on TV, though Detroit News columnist Frank Beckmann wrote: “Her candidacy is dead with less than three weeks to go.”
On Tuesday night, John J. Miller of National Review Online was merciless:
She was a disaster. In 16 years of writing about politics and elections for National Review, she is the worst candidate I’ve covered.
How bad was she? In recent days, she lost the endorsement of The Detroit News, whose editorial page routinely backs Republicans. In other words, she walked into a room of right-leaning editorialists — and performed so badly that they felt compelled to back her opponent. This takes a special kind of lousy.
National AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka tweeted: "Terry Lynn Land’s strategy to duck debates and evade interviews to avoid defending her unpopular positions failed."
Coverage of Land includes phrases such as “a wobbly, uneven candidate, uncomfortable with the Terry Lynn Land’s strategy to duck debates and evade interviews to avoid defending her unpopular positions failed.unscripted interactions required of any statewide contender,” as U.S. News & World Report put it.
“Michigan's race for U.S. Senate is the sick man of the GOP's electoral map,” David Weigel wrote recently at Bloomberg News.
“If the Democrats hold the Senate, Republicans might be tempted to lay part of the blame at the feet of the floundering Terri Lynn Land for failing to win a vulnerable seat that could have secured a Senate majority,” Noah Weiland of ABC News predicted three weeks ago.
A former Michigan Republic Party chairman, Saul Anuzis, tells Weiland: “This is a seat we could have had” with a stronger nominee, such as Rep. Dave Camp or Rep. Mike Rogers.
Rocky ride
Those slaps cap a rough half-year for the 56-year-old former secretary of state (2003-11) from Grand Rapids.
A distress signal surfaced in late May at the annual Mackinac Policy Conference, a chance for candidates to make a splash in front of journalists, business leaders and potential backers. Land belly-flopped instead with an “inauspicious debut,” as columnist Brian Dickerson wrote in the Free Press.
The GOP candidate went toe-to-toe with reporters and came away looking like a shipwreck survivor rescued after a terrifying night at sea.
In one of her first unscripted appearances since declaring her candidacy last June, Land looked as if she were auditioning for a remake of “Bambi Meets Godzilla.” She fumbled an audience question about Internet neutrality, responded to a query about her position on the auto industry rescue with a stream of non sequiturs, and at one point, during a scrum with reporters, threw up her hands in frustration, exclaiming, “I can’t do this!”
In a Michigan Radio commentary back then, Jack Lessenberry called her “absolutely dreadful.”
She came across like a high school student who had memorized a speech. You had the terrible sensation that if interrupted, she would have had to start all over from the beginning. . . .
She was a frightened Sarah Palin in sensible shoes, and everybody knew it.
And so a pattern of evasive bumbling began, reinforcing a blinded Bambi image that Dexter blogger Chris Savage first applied in March. “She came away looking like a deer in headlights,” he wrote at Eclectablog after Land’s debut press conference of the race.
Later behavior solidified the sense of a skittish, sinking nominee:
• Responses to listeners and Michigan Radio host Rick Pluta on Oct. 3 were “a maddening exercise in evasion, obfuscation and incomprehensibility,” Dickerson wrote.
• Two weeks later, Freep editorial page editor Stephen Henderson told Politico that Land’s team "dodged" the paper’s request for an endorsement interview for more than a month. The paper backed Peters on Oct. 19, saying his rival “failed to articulate a coherent case for her election.” (The Detroit News endorsed Peters last Wednesday, saying “Land fell well short” of fitness for the job.)
First ad ‘roundly ridiculed’
On Tuesday, Time posted her earliest commercial from April (below) among “7 Most Memorable Political Ads of 2014.” It’s no compliment.
The ad was meant to be sarcastic and clever, but it was roundly ridiculed, even by members of Land’s own party.
With that Campaign ’14 legacy, it’s tough to picture Terri Lynn Land trying another run for statewide office. Like the song says, she has nothing left to lose.
