His understanding of history, particularly U.S. history, is to real history what the Harry Potter novels are to science.
And his math skills?
Well, let’s just say that he’s the kind of guy who can add one and one and come up with 4,674—if 4,674 is the number he needs to gain his objective, which generally is some sort of nakedly self-serving goal disguised as an ideological quest.
What makes all of this dangerous is that Beckwith’s inability to perform simple computations or comprehend basic history enables him to delude himself and a smattering of other truly gullible souls into believing he is the second coming of William Jennings Bryan, an evangelical populist with massive public support.
That was the essence of his response to a bill filed by Indiana Rep. Danny Lopez, R-Carmel, that would require candidates for governor to choose their running mates by naming a lieutenant gubernatorial candidate prior to July 15 of an election year.
Lopez’s bill is designed to prevent episodes such as the one that landed Beckwith in office, when he foisted himself on Gov. Mike Braun at the 2024 Indiana Republican Convention by narrowly defeating Braun’s choice, Indiana Rep. Julie McGuire, R-Indianapolis.
Beckwith called Lopez’s bill “the Micah Beckwith”—because, really, everything is always all about Micah Beckwith—and derided Lopez as a “DID,” or Democrat in Disguise. Beckwith also claimed his convention win was a victory for the people over the “establishment.”
Like so many of the things Beckwith says, it’s more fiction than fact.
The truth is that Micah Beckwith has tested how appealing to voters he is on his own only once. He sought the Republican nomination for Congress in a GOP-friendly district in 2020. He finished a distant third in the Republican primary.
He won 12.7% of the vote.
That’s right.
Even among Republicans—the people who are supposed to agree with him already—he couldn’t capture even 13% of the vote.
That’s why, in his endless quest for self-advancement, he settled on a different strategy. He decided to do the retail salesmanship of persuading delegates to the convention to support him rather than the wholesale—and truly populist—method of persuading mass numbers of citizens to support him.
Even then, he needed to catch a break.
Braun was so confident—overconfident, it turned out—that he had enough votes to secure McGuire’s nomination that he let a fair number of his delegates leave early and miss the vote. If he hadn’t done that, chances are McGuire would have eked out a victory and Beckwith would have gone back to being another wannabe braying away from the fringes.
Somehow, Beckwith interpreted this lucky escape from anonymity as a divinely inspired appointment as the voice of the people. In office, he has acted as if he’s not accountable to anyone.
Not the governor whose administration he’s, in theory anyway, part of.
Not the Indiana state government that grants him whatever limited authority a lieutenant governor possesses.
Not the state constitution he took an oath to defend and obey.
What Beckwith seems to be arguing here is that a lieutenant governor should be a kind of free agent, one who uses taxpayer funds to cause trouble and jam up the works wherever he or she sees fit.
We tried that at the national level.
At this nation’s birth, in our presidential elections, the person who became president was the candidate who received the most electoral votes. The vice president was the person who received the second-most votes, even if that candidate was from a different party.
It didn’t work.
President John Adams, a Federalist, and Vice President Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, spent their four years together at loggerheads.
Things went from bad to worse. Jefferson became president and Aaron Burr assumed the vice presidency.
Before Jefferson left office, his administration would charge Burr, by then out of government and Jefferson’s mortal enemy, with treason.
It was at that point that wiser heads decided that presidents and vice presidents should form a willing partnership, not have their relationship be the product of a shotgun wedding.
Particularly if the second-in-command thinks of it as an open marriage.
But that’s Micah Beckwith for you.
Bad at math.
Bad at history.
But good, oh so good, at deluding himself and others.
