If it had been a prize fight, they’d have stopped it in the early rounds.
The final Michigan Senate debate between Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers was hardly the mano-a-mano blood sport the press would have you believe, but plenty of mud — or a mud-like substance — was slung, all from one side of the aisle. It’s well worth watching.
Rogers tried mightily to get people with weak minds to see El-Sayed as a terrorist monster bent on jihad from the Senate floor. Which, sad to say, is a lie that lands easily in certain Michigan circles. There are still, for instance, a shocking number of misguided Jews who insist on feeling threatened by him, and for no rational reason.
Let’s now stipulate that the Muslim Brotherhood is not exactly top-of-mind for most Michiganders, but it’s all Rogers had to work with. His was not an easy hand to play, especially with the Trump stink wafting off him, but he played it badly nonetheless. He was flustered, ill-informed, blatantly lying, and unable to address a single question with honesty.
El-Sayed, on the other hand, had a repertoire of repeatable jabs at the ready, including a brilliant device he called “MAGA Bingo,” where he invited the audience to keep track of the overcooked buzzwords Republicans use to distract, deflect, and flat-out lie. He used the bingo-card theme throughout, and sure enough, Rogers obliged by attacking him with all the hits:
“He wants to take away private health insurance.”
“… largest tax increase in the nation's history.”
“…rapists and murderers and gangbangers”
“…open the border.”
“…defund the police.”
“… Democratic Socialist agenda”
Rogers was at his best sidestepping awkward subjects, especially things like tariffs, soaring prices, a collapsing healthcare system, an unwinnable war, and a senile psychopath with nuclear codes. El-Sayed was at his best happily filling in those blanks.
El-Sayed was eerily controlled throughout. He absorbed Rogers’ attacks with a practiced inscrutability. The camera found him rolling his eyes in a few strategic places, but for the most part, he listened to Rogers’ admittedly pathetic assaults, and waited for the inevitable mistake.
He came prepared, not just with complete command of the issues and his own talking points, but also with a deep knowledge of Rogers’ own record. He was living in Rogers’ head.
El-Sayed is remarkably fluid — the Robin Williams of politicians. He speaks rapidly but clearly. He can improvise on the spot. There are no pauses — no uhs or hmms — and he can rattle off his talking points at top speed, without confusing his audience. He’s as quick on his feet as any public figure I’ve ever seen, and he can explain the current reality in ways even dumbshits can relate to, if they can ever get past the Muslim thing.
Even the format of the debate worked in El-Sayed’s favor. Unlike most political debates, this one was notable both for the real-world relevance of its questions, and for its effectiveness at injecting actual substance into what has become a vapid and meaningless exercise.
The panel — three local Michigan newscasters — would pose the same question to both candidates, giving each just one minute to answer, followed by half a minute to rebut what the other guy said. Not a lot of time. This had the effect of speeding things up, which was fine with El-Sayed. It also limited the bombast and deflection so endemic to the genre, and allowed for a fresh question every five minutes or so.
Which meant there were a lot of questions, and they were all good ones, all begging for substantive responses. Unfortunately, Republicans don’t do substantive, and the contrast between Rogers’ bingo-card responses and El-Sayed’s detailed articulation of both problems and solutions could not have been starker.
When asked about tariffs and the trade war with Canada, an issue especially important in Michigan, Rogers tossed out the understatement of the year:
“I have stepped back and said maybe these Canadian tariffs were not well thought through.”
The Trump tariffs have been killing Rogers politically, and he’s been walking a tightrope for months. He has to oppose them publicly, but in such a way that he doesn’t question the brilliance of the Dear Leader’s trade policies. The best he could come up with was “not well thought through.” What he meant was “total freaking disaster.”
At one point, the panel asked how the candidates might go about funding the rapidly depleting Social Security system. Rogers’ knee-jerk bingo answer was to go after fraud. All those hundreds of billions in fraud in the system that Republicans have been bloviating about for decades.
And this is where El-Sayed could have pointed, once again, to Rogers’ own record. How Rogers voted for trillions in tax cuts that might have gone to Social Security. How we heard not a peep from him when Musk’s high schoolers hacked the SSA computers. How he was unmoved when 10 percent of SSA staff was fired. El-Sayed could have reached for any number of facts that would show Rogers for the corporate tool he’s always been, but that would’ve been redundant.
So instead, he chose that moment to give us all an unexpected lesson in Republican tactics:
… I want you to pay attention to a word he just said, which is "cut" and "fraud." You know they're coming for the program when they start talking about fraud. 'Cause what happens is they run their audits, and then they say there's so much fraud in it, and then they privatize it — which Mike is on record as saying he wanted to do.
He also said he wanted to raise the retirement age to 67. I'm so sorry, but you don't work this hard to be told that you got to work two more years. You don't work this hard to give your money to Wall Street like he wants to do. So be careful when they start talking about fraud, because it means that they're going to cut the program right out from underneath you.
As a person who admires these kinds of rhetorical skills, I think he’s in a class by himself. And his track record in the public sector speaks volumes about his competence.
Does any of that mean he’ll win? Who knows? That’s in the hands of the voters, and Michigan has a lot of stupid people who don’t understand their own interests.
The frustrating thing about these so-called debates is that the people who most desperately need to hear what El-Sayed has to say are the very people least likely to be watching. Which means that the future of the Senate, the nation, indeed this very planet, is in the hands of people who are either not paying attention, or are listening to charlatans. When all you hear are bingo-card answers, you forget what the questions are.
We all have trouble expressing our anxiety, not to mention our anger, at what is being done to our country. I like knowing there are people like El-Sayed who have no trouble expressing it at all, as he did in his opening statement:
I'm running because it just shouldn't be this hard. Shouldn't be this hard to afford a second bag of groceries. Shouldn't be this hard to pay your rent or your mortgage. Shouldn't be this hard to fill up your tank. Shouldn't be this hard to see a doctor. Shouldn't be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money is going to be spent for you and your kids rather than dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids.
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