MEET YOUR NEW PRESIDENT OF UNITED EARTH: STACEY ABRAMS.
Congratulations to her on getting as close as she’s going to get to being president of any country.
Say what you will about Stacey Abrams, it’s a real achievement to have built a cultural profile high enough for stuntcasting as the president of Earth in a “Star Trek” series without ever having held federal or statewide office. She’s one of the most famous politicians in America somehow despite never having won an election bigger than a Georgia state assembly seat. She hasn’t held any public office at all in nearly five years.
That could change in November, but Abrams will be swimming against a strong Republican national current. Her only hope is Donald J. Trump splitting the right in Georgia between Brian Kemp and David Perdue, embittering the loser of the primary and causing a meaningful chunk of butthurt Republican voters to stay home in the fall.
He’s helped Democrats to unlikely victories in Georgia before. With Trump working on her behalf, only a fool would count Abrams out.
Although if I were her, given how well Republicans are doing on the generic ballot, I’d be glad to have a fallback career in science fiction.
Yes, it’s stuntcasting, but it’s a smart move by the makers of Star Trek: Discovery. With new episodes of Picard current rolling out, and the upcoming Strange New Worlds series being pitched as a return to the episodic Trek of old, STD risks being lost in the shuffle. They’re counting on the right getting angry at Abrams’ cameo and getting lots of free PR via social media in the process.
It’s somewhat reminiscent of the makers of Brokeback Mountain anticipating plenty of word of mouth via the right’s anger at a pro-gay film. In 2006, when the film didn’t go over the magical 100 million mark in domestic grosses, before Twitter existed and Facebook was just getting started, Mark Steyn noted that “The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed [Brokeback] at the box-office by declining to get mad about it.”