Tim Scott isn’t a presidential candidate yet — but in Iowa, he dazzled
Quin Hillyer
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U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) may not officially be running for president (yet), but his speech in Iowa this afternoon featured some of the best rhetoric and substance of any presidential candidate in years.
Scott’s unique biography provided a framework for the whole speech, an approach that in lesser hands could devolve into mere identity-politics grandstanding. Not here, though. Here, Scott used his childhood — black, relatively poor, a failure (for a while) in school — not as a celebration of self but as both odes to America and as a touchstone for individual policy choices within a holistic philosophical vision.
Scott’s point was not that he is special for overcoming hurdles but that this nation is great because it creates such tremendous opportunities for anyone to rise above his roots.
“I am living proof,” Scott said, “that our Founders were geniuses who should be celebrated, not canceled. That we’re a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. This is just my American story. Each of you and your families have your own.”
The rhetoric, meanwhile, featured classic cadences and old-style wordplay: “My family chose faith over anger, responsibility over resentment, and patriotism over pity. My granddaddy taught me I could be bitter or better, but not both. My momma said we could be victims or victors — she chose victorious!”
Again, though, Scott quickly and appropriately moved on from his family’s framework to a litany of policy errors he ascribed to President Joe Biden and the Democrats. He presented all those errors within the useful device of “pretend[ing] you were our nation’s greatest enemy” needing “a blueprint to ruin America.” All the things he correctly identified as coming from Biden’s leftism were part of that misguided blueprint:
“First, you’d take aim at our patriotism” by promoting “attention-seekers who say America is an evil country.” And you would teach kids that “the color of their skin defined them. … Tell white kids they’re oppressors. Tell black and brown kids their destiny is grievance, not greatness.”
To ruin America, you would start Sex Ed in kindergarten, fire high school football coaches for praying, give promotions to teachers who “tell little kids they can pick their gender,” and “let Big Labor bosses trap the poorest kids in the worst schools with no choice and no voice.”
And so on: Ruin America by spending too much, by “replac[ing] law and order with fear and chaos, put[ting] violent criminals right back on the streets and call it fairness… but send SWAT teams after pro-life Christians, and the Department of Justice after parents who show up to school board meetings. And you’d definitely keep our borders unsafe, insecure, and wide open.”
That’s just a sample from this excellent speech. In contrast with those Biden policies, Scott laid out multiple ways to expand choice, freedom, and opportunity while also stressing that with freedom comes the responsibility of good citizenship.
In the end, Scott returned to his own story with tough words challenging the Left, and then with hope — again, not narcissistically, but by explaining why his story can be universal in a nation like this one.
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“I bear testimony,” he said, “that America can do for you what it has done for me. [The Left] can choose grievance, but we choose greatness. They can choose failure, but we choose faith. … Will you join me as a messenger of hope, a missionary for the power of our ideas? I know you conclude a speech with ‘God bless America,’ but we should know God has already blessed us.” We, in turn, he said, should “bless America” by giving back to it.
Please, sir, keep amplifying this message. It is exactly what the nation needs to hear right now and to live by.