Maryland’s political time warp: Candidates who respect each other!

If your campaign is mainly about proving that you are a strong guy who will stand up to your own party’s domineering presidential candidate, yet you can’t bring yourself to make the hard choice and vote for a president with a pulse, maybe you’re not quite ready to be the senator from independence.

That was Alsobrooks’s basic argument throughout the debate, just as it has been through a blizzard of TV ads portraying Hogan as a Republican who would vote with a Republican majority in the Senate, no matter how much he despises Donald Trump.

This was a pleasant, educational debate. Both candidates were calm, likable, pretty straightforward for politicians. They purported to respect each other and said nice things about each other. (They also called each other liars, but these days, we’ll take what we can get.)

Still, voters can be excused if they come away from this debate a bit confused about political parties and their meaning right now. Hogan is a lifelong Republican who served two terms as Maryland’s governor and did old-school Republican kinds of things, cutting taxes, fighting crime, trimming budgets and blocking a big public transit project. He’s also a realist who knows he could not even come close to competing for a Senate seat in Maryland if he were a Trumper. And he says he’s for abortion rights, even if his party isn’t.

Once upon a time, before the golden escalator thing, Republicans could be like that. Now, most Republicans who are never-Trumpers take constant fire from Trump warriors and generally get sunk or slink away, with extremely rare exceptions like Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) When Alsobrooks argues that a vote for Hogan is a vote for a Republican majority and therefore for the Trump agenda, that’s not just campaign rhetoric.

But there’s something appealing and idealistic about Hogan’s pitch: As he repeatedly put it Thursday, while the Democrat focuses on “red vs. blue, all I really care about is the red, white and blue.” Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a whole bunch of senators who actually voted like that?

We don’t. Best case scenario: Maybe you’ll have three such Republicans in next year’s Senate — Hogan, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and (this might be a reach) Susan Collins of Maine.

If you’re really independent, Alsobrooks said, why didn’t you run as one? Hogan had no answer beyond the standard “I want to change the party from within” dodge. How’s that effort been going, Senator Romney?

The fact that Hogan, extraordinarily popular as governor, is reduced to running a Senate campaign based on the magical notion that he will singlehandedly restore honor to his party, like a latter-day Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” is evidence that our parties have gone off the rails. The spectacle of Democrats, after bingeing on leftist rhetoric, now scampering back toward the center on crime, fracking or the language of identity politics is one of the more dispiriting aspects of this year’s campaigns.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties are diminished, damaged, drifting seemingly inexorably toward their most extreme factions. Remove Trump from today’s Republican equation and what’s left? An incoherent mess, with nary a principle in sight. Hogan clings to the party’s rusted-out husk of Reagan-era conservatism. What can he hope to accomplish other than assuring a Republican majority?

Alsobrooks steered the conversation toward that question, so much so that it seemed like her campaign has but two main purposes: Demonstrate the implausibility of Hogan’s “meet me in the middle” appeal, and protect abortion rights, the issue that got the most airtime.

In the hours leading up to the debate, I watched nine Alsobrooks TV ads about abortion, and just one about her success in fighting crime as a prosecutor and Prince George’s County executive. (All four of the Hogan ads during those hours were attacks on Alsobrooks, saying she was weak on crime and messed up her tax bill, which she admits.)

They went back and forth about abortion for a good chunk of the hour. What they gave only perfunctory attention was the state of the world, which, in case they hadn’t noticed, is poor. There was a question about the war in Gaza, and Hogan pronounced himself staunchly supportive of Israel. Alsobrooks took the Kamala Harris route, sloganeering about how she’s for Israel’s self-defense and for Palestinians’ rights to nationhood and for the logical but increasingly distant fantasy of a two-state solution, without a word about how to get there, or anywhere.

We learned two things in this debate: One, neither candidate is a Ben Cardin, the senator they seek to replace, a most studious and serious legislator with a focus on human rights in Russia, combating antisemitism, curbing government corruption worldwide and holding rogue regimes to account for atrocities.

And two, there are still people who want to be senators and have serious debates about the direction of the country. They need some company.