Jay Feely’s Congressional Dreams Have Doinked Off The Uprights

Tuesday sure delivered. The blue wave—a bluenami—is a great relief to people with brains and functioning moral senses, but much of the strongest juice produced Tuesday night was drawn from a few individual races. Some of those were incredibly stirring. It feels amazing to wake up in a world where Susan Collins is out in Maine, Greg Abbott is out in Texas, data centers took a beating everywhere, Virginia finally and resoundingly overturned a Jim Crow-era voting restriction, and Vivek Ramaswamy ate a fat one. A strong contender for the funniest result, though, came in the race for the U.S. House seat from Arizona’s first congressional district. Voters there did what ESPN so far has failed to do, and waved away a braying MAGA jackass of a former NFL special teams player.

Jay Feely kicked for six NFL teams over a 14-season career, with notable stops in Atlanta, Arizona, and East Rutherford, where he had stints with both the Giants and Jets. His playing career petered out in 2014. By then, he’d already made himself known as a right-wing blowhard. Feely is buds with Fox News host Sean Hannity, and it was on Hannity’s show, back in 2009, when he was kicking for the New York Jets, that Feely foreshadowed the rise of MAGA nationalism. What he said was stupid, of course, but in listening to Feely summarize a bunch of hazy, barely coded, haphazardly gussied-up criticisms as legitimate concerns over Barack Obama’s unwillingness to “defend America’s greatness,” you could hear an irritating future Republican elected official finding his form.

Feely’s notional appeal, as an ascending conservative striver, is that he once had a manly job, can formulate a complete sentence, and projects masculine authority, often ostentatiously. That, plus a square jaw and a razor-sharp hair part, made him a natural for football broadcasts, and eventually a contender for some cushy political office in an ironclad conservative sanctuary. If he were half an inch taller or played a skill position, today he might be Secretary of Blowing Up Brown People.