If elected, Hawley will be the youngest senator (two years younger than Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton) in a body where today the average age is 63. Although never is heard a discouraging word from Hawley about his party’s leader, Hawley is educated and thoughtful, so it is possible to hope that he is as insincere in his praise of the president as McCaskill is in her insistence that she is really not like those anti-Kavanaugh hysterics led by almost all of her Senate Democratic colleagues. She supported the gross violations of due process that were mandated by the Department of Education in response to hysteria about the fictional “campus rape culture.”

This is an era of “let’s pretend” politics, as Republicans who control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue run trillion-dollar deficits during full employment while pretending to believe in fiscal rectitude, and Senate Democrats pretend to be thoughtful while their combined votes on two Supreme Court and 29 appellate-court nominees are 391 for and 1,084 against. Hawley, who hopes to serve on the Judiciary Committee (a Republican seat is opening: Utah’s Orrin Hatch is retiring), is an actual, not a pretend, conservative — although he has written a serious but too-admiring book mistakenly calling Theodore Roosevelt a conservative. Hawley can be part of the GOP’s intelligent future, if it chooses to have one.