Before I get into the meat of this column, let me make one basic point. Which is that I like Joe and Kammie very much and will vote for either or both of them again in 2024.
That being said, I am increasingly concerned about the growth of what the fake news is calling Trump’s attempt to create an alternate political ‘operation’ to the GOP, not because he would succeed, but because he might fail.
I happen to believe, and the data backs me up, that Trump represents the weakest Presidential candidate that the GOP has ever had. He won the 2016 election because Hillary couldn’t be bothered to campaign in three states (MI, PA, WI) that swung red by less than 2/10ths of one percent of the total votes in those three states. He held more than 60 big rallies in 2018, claiming that the off-year election was a plebiscite on him, and the GOP lost more House seats than in any off-year election since 1974. We all know what happened last year.
The bad news is that the GOP Establishment appears to be coming together in an attempt to derail Trump. So, for example, yesterday CNN ran a story that had to have been planted either by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell or some of his friends. Basically, the story said that Trump was losing his grip over the GOP because many of the candidates running in the 2022 election refuse to follow his anti-McConnell lead.
Putting a serious analysis on what any politician says about any issue almost a year prior to the next election is about as reliable a gauge for judging political trends as believing that I will lose 20 pounds over the next four months because I lost 2 pounds this past week. I have lost 2 pounds the first week of every diet I have gone on over the past 10 years. I have also gone on at least 20 diets over the last ten years. Get it?
Trump will be holding a rally in Arizona later this week, a state whose 11 electoral votes went to Joe by 10,000 votes out of 3.4 million total votes cast. Of course, Trump claimed that the results were a ‘fraud,’ and he will no doubt tell the rally audience later this week that he won the Arizona vote. Good for him. I would give anything to see this rally start a boom leading to Trump heading the GOP ticket in 2024.
Yesterday I was briefly watching a movie on my Direct-TV. During the advertising break there was an ad for some product or other which featured quick video flashes of different family groups. One of these groups had an inter-racial couple with two kids, another one of the families was two gay guys who kissed each other on-screen.
Whether you like it or not, this is the future of this country – more diverse, more accepting of different life-styles, more racially, ethnically, and culturally heterogeneous than any other place. The fact that the most openly, avowed racist happened to win a national election because his opponent rolled over and played dead the last two months of the 2016 campaign, doesn’t change the way in which American society will continue to evolve on a path different from any other nation-state.
And by the way, it doesn’t hurt that in the midst of a pandemic and all the scare talk about inflation (that’s tomorrow’s column), a supply-chain crisis, everyone out of work and nobody with a buck to their name, the national economy continues to roll along at a record-setting pace.
What was the Dow at today? Thirty-six thousand and change? Oh, I forgot. The unemployment rate has now jumped up to 4.2 percent. That’s because nobody wants to work and the few who do want to work can’t find a job, right? I heard that statement yesterday from one of the AM shock jocks who without Rush Limbaugh around doesn’t know what to say.
But none of the good news necessarily means that Joe will get re-elected if he runs again in 2024. Unless, of course, he runs against the same opponent that the GOP put up the last time around – hope, hope, hope.
I too will vote for both President Biden and his Vice-President Harris. This country has never been in better hands.
Our President has been faced with many challenges during his first year in office. He had the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan yielding the control over to the Taliban. Some people say that this cost the lives of U.S. troops, but you have to remember we were in a war and the definition of a war is that people get killed.
We had a resurgence of the coronavirus pandemic that came this summer then the one we're in now. This has been all out of our President's control.
And for the failure to win the Senate backing of his $1.75 trillion…