OPINION:
There is so much to look forward to in the new year, particularly as several prominent figures who suffered big setbacks in 2023 likely will enjoy much less time in the limelight in the days to come. That’s a good thing.
Claudine Gay, for example, announced on Tuesday she was stepping down as Harvard University’s president. Ms. Gay drew widespread criticism for the evasive answers she offered about whether students calling for the genocide of Jews in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel deserved punishment. She withstood the initial storm only to fall after researchers recognized a pattern of plagiarism in her scholarly work.
Elizabeth Magill likewise resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania last month. She had little choice but to hand in her notice after a Penn alumnus threatened to withdraw a donation worth about $100 million to the university.
Don Lemon’s choice of words also cost him his job as CNN anchor. He said former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was “past her prime” when she announced her bid for the GOP presidential nomination. If he’d stopped there, Mr. Lemon might still have his job, but he continued putting his foot in his mouth, saying: “When a woman is considered to be in her prime, in her 20s and 30s, and maybe 40s.” (Mrs. Haley turns 52 this month.)
George Santos was a member of Congress representing New York’s 3rd Congressional District for all of 11 months before being expelled by a bipartisan supermajority vote of his colleagues. More than words, he was done in by federal campaign finance fraud charges and the opinion, as Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, New York Republican, put it, that “George Santos is a liar.”
Mr. Santos may well have the last laugh. He told the “Chicks on the Right” podcast he has been making more money in a week selling personalized online video greetings on Cameo at $500 a pop than he did from his annual congressional salary — assuming that’s not also a lie.
Susanna Gibson is less of an online video fan these days. She lost her bid for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in November after being exposed as having streamed more than a dozen sexually explicit videos with her lawyer husband in return for solicited viewer tips. The Henrico County Democrat blamed her loss on Republican operatives for what she called “an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family.”
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee won’t be Houston’s next mayor after voters rejected the 14-term congresswoman in a Dec. 9 runoff. She drew a mere 35.6% of the vote in the mayoral election, despite endorsements from both former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It perhaps didn’t help that the Jackson Lee campaign released an advertisement urging supporters to vote on the wrong day. She quickly filed for reelection to the House.
Finally, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor-turned-U.S. senator from Utah, is also still with us, but as a lame duck. The 2012 Republican presidential nominee announced on Sept. 13 that he would not seek a second term, likely realizing the difficulty of securing reelection in deep-red Utah after twice voting to convict former President Donald Trump in the bogus impeachment trials.
Mr. Romney explained to the U.K. Independent why he wouldn’t be endorsing a candidate in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries: His endorsement “would be the kiss of death.” Indeed.
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