Steve Bannons self-immolation Roy Moores upset defeat shows us that Steve Bannon isnt the

Machiavellian genius he sells himself as

SIMON MALOY at Media Matters

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/12/13/Steve-Bannons-self-immolation/218844

"SNIP......

Bannon poured everything he had into trying to keep Moore viable and gave little worry to the obvious signs that his candidacy was falling apart. Moore’s campaign shifted its focus to attacking the media while the candidate himself vanished from the trail, emerging only to spin elaborate, conspiratorial attacks on the many left-wing phantoms he claimed were aligning to damage his candidacy. Moore’s surrogates gave a series of shambolic and absurd interviews to cable news channels as they ineptly sought to defend their candidate’s extreme record. Bannon spoke at Moore’s final rally on Monday night -- a rally that also featured Moore’s wife address charges of anti-semitism by proudly declaring that “one of our attorneys is a Jew.”

Bannon coasts on a reputation as a master political strategist and presents himself to the world as a sort of frumpy modern-day Machiavelli. But throughout the entire Moore campaign, he’s demonstrated little in the way of political intelligence. Aligning with Moore was liable to backfire from the get-go -- he was a weak and vulnerable candidate even before reports surfaced that he was a serial sexual abuser. The only messages Moore had to offer voters were relentless grievance, vacant flag-waving nationalism, and whacked-out conspiracy theories.

The same was true for Bannon, whose campaign speeches for Moore digressed into lengthy harangues aimed at Mitt Romney and the “opposition party” media. His best effort at knocking down the sexual misconduct reports against Moore involved asserting the existence of an anti-Moore plot and just assuming partisanship and anti-media sentiment would overcome his lack of evidence. “The whole thing was a setup. This whole thing was weaponized right?” he said at a December 5 rally. “You know that. Folks down here in Alabama know that.”

Well, it turns out they didn’t know that. And now Bannon, after all that feeble and unsteady “street fighting,” is left having to explain how a political strategist of such self-proclaimed insight and deviousness managed to help lose a Senate seat that the GOP should have had little difficulty holding onto. The easiest explanation is that Bannon’s reputation as a “street fighter” and master of the political dark arts is oversold nonsense, and the proof of that resides with senator-elect Doug Jones.

.....SNIP"