The Missouri GOP establishment is aghast at Greitens. They’re the ones who made him

Eric Greitens’ candidacy for the U.S. Senate is evidence of two truths: There are second acts in American lives. And that’s not always a wonderful thing.

Under most circumstances, Greitens’ political career should’ve ended when he resigned as Missouri’s governor in 2018, undone by accusations he’d cheated on his wife and then blackmailed the woman who testified to a Missouri House committee that he tied up and blindfolded her, then forced her to perform oral sex on him. If that wasn’t enough, his ex-wife’s accusations of abuse should’ve done the job. Public and personal scandals used to matter a lot in American politics.

These are not the olden days, though. Greitens is on the comeback trail. And there’s a pretty good chance that Missouri’s GOP voters will soon make him the party’s nominee for the seat now held by retiring Republican Sen. Roy Blunt.

Missouri’s GOP establishment is alarmed, naturally.

The new “Show Me Values” PAC has spent $1.5 million on TV ads highlighting the abuse allegations against Greitens. The group is bankrolled, in part, by Missouri mega-donor Rex Sinquefield and his wife, Jane, and overseen by Johnny DeStefano, who previously served as a top adviser in Donald Trump’s White House.

That’s good news. Missouri — and the country, and the Republican Party — will be better off if Greitens’ candidacy fails.

But let’s also acknowledge an unfortunate truth about these new efforts: The same GOP bigwigs who are now fighting Greitens — or, in some cases, silently rooting for him to lose — also laid the foundation for his possible success. They’ve spent years signaling to the broader public that a political candidate’s character is a secondary consideration, at best.

Is it any wonder if voters believe them?

Take Sinquefield. He backed Donald Trump in the 2016 general election — and gave an interview to Yahoo Finance celebrating that fact. The timing of that public endorsement was interesting: It came just days after the revelation of the notorious “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump was heard boasting about his terrible treatment of women.

Not great, Sinquefield acknowledged. But also not disqualifying.

“Even in the Republican primaries, I said this guy has a character flaw — an unbridled need to insult someone, which is really unfortunate,” Sinquefield told Yahoo. But he said Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, was no better when dealing with Bill Clinton’s scandals.

“She brutally targeted and tormented his victims, all women,” Sinqufield said. “Unbelievable. What she did was far worse — really trying to destroy these people.”

So why did Sinquefield back Trump? Tax cuts. “It’s good for everyone all around,” he said. “More people will be working. There will be less on welfare.”

There is always a reason.

Democrats aren’t exempt from ignoring character questions, of course. They’ve never really resolved their Bill Clinton problem, and an alarming number of liberals still pine for former Sen. Al Franken, who resigned from office under a cloud of harassment allegations.

But Republicans at the national level have excelled in recent years at embracing problematic men — everybody from Alabama’s Roy Moore, accused of pursuing teen girls as an adult, to Sean Parnell, a Trump endorsee who dropped out of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race amid his own abuse allegations. It’s not just Trump. Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last year gave an early endorsement to Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign in Georgia, despite Walker’s own reported history of violence.

Again, there is always a reason. Taxes. Abortion. Lib-owning. Maybe, as in Walker’s case, the allure of celebrity. Whatever the justification, Republicans have repeatedly sent the message that being a minimally decent person matters much less than being on their team. And the party’s voters have happily gone along.

So Greitens’ Republican opponents probably aren’t really too concerned about his behavior. But they’re worried that Missouri voters will care in November, and that they’ll lose Blunt’s seat as a result. Putting a problematic man in office? Who cares? The real sin is giving Democrats an opportunity to win.