One of my hobbies is genealogy. I love to comb through the annals of history and consider the exact paths taken that brought me here today. If I could take a time machine and meet an ancestor at their place in time, is there a debt I could repay? Could I help them patch a roof? Milk a cow? Repel invaders?
The problem with using “Common Sense” as an electable quality is that common sense is rarely common and often nonsense. The subjective nature of common sense says that it can mean whatever you need it to mean. There is no declaration of shared ideals. It is merely a “trust me, bro” variety of statement. “If you put me in office, you can be assured that I will make the correct vote according to my inherent rightness.”
Having lost the keys to the kingdom in 2022, a select cadre of the good old boys joined their wallets and efforts in an attempt to wrestle control of the party back from the people in 2024. I wrote about it then. Unable to find enough Republicans to field a slate of conservatives, they’ve recruited and dipped into the Democratic Party to round out their rosters. Thus, the birth of the white elephant.