We Should All Vote -- then All Discuss What's Gone Wrong!

The late breaks don’t seem to be falling Donald Trump’s way, so perhaps even Republican vote-suppression tactics won’t save him.

Polls have him well behind Joe Biden. Trump’s base still loves him; but he’s no longer a newcomer promising change. People have seen four years of mismanagement and illegality, beneath a thin veneer of bluster. He has a record now, notably his abject failure to deal with the pandemic; and Biden isn’t as unpopular as Hillary Clinton was.

The debates seemed a potential “Hail Mary,” but Trump aided Biden by feigning doubt Biden had sufficient stamina. That enhanced the effect of Biden’s energy and focus. Then Trump turned most everyone off by interrupting Biden and Chris Wallace constantly, without actually saying much, in what may have been a failed effort to induce Biden to stutter. Then Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, whose mere civility made both seem winners, yakked to sort of a draw. Harris “won” in the polls, though likely because she had more supporters going in.

Trump ducked the second debate because it would be “virtual.” But he needed it. Biden didn’t. And many folks might have felt like the friend who sent me a cartoon showing a mother working virtually at her computer, and a small child at her feet attending “virtual” school, and Trump saying he wouldn’t debate virtually. “If it’s good enough for my wife and daughter, why not for Donald?” my friend commented. The third debate might come too late, even if Trump could reshuffle his playbook.

Trump can’t reshuffle his playbook, to his party’s chagrin. While his base cheers his every mention of Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden, he’s losing Independents and crossover Democrats who know him better now. The “Best Hits of 2016” won’t cut it. Trump’s response is to waffle on white supremacy, feign ignorance of Q-Anon but praise its stand against pedophilia, and now float the idea that the raid that killed Ossama bin Laden was a hoax. Really?

His key points don’t appeal to non-base voters. The truth value of each is highly questionable. More important, they’re all in the past. They won’t help keep a virus-infected parent alive, or feed any of the millions who’ve slipped into poverty since the last stimulus payments.

Meanwhile, a lot of “red” states are giving Biden a look. They too have people dying. They too may be tired of the sheer noise of a Trump Presidency, more than any other in recent memory. They may have relatives and friends in the military, or themselves have served.

But the effort to skew or undermine the voting has many facets. Many swing states have “purged” more voters than they should have. In California, Republicans have insisted on using apparently illegal “voting collection boxes” which allegedly bear misleading “official” labels and lack safeguards against chicanery. In Texas, courts had to overrule the effort to allow only one absentee ballot box per county. In New Mexico, Republicans put out misleading voting information, perhaps accidentally.

The pandemic mandates more voting by mail. Trump and far-right groups are suing numerous states to make voting harder. As one conservative once told a group of evangelical leaders, “I don’t want everybody to vote [because] our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Repeated studies show “voter fraud” is extremely rare.

Whatever your personal take on the last four years is, please vote!

                                                   – 30 –

 

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 18 October 2020, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG’s website. A radio commentary based on it will air during the week on KRWG and on KTAL-LP, 101.5 FM (http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will be available on demand at KRWG’s site.]

[Trump knows right-wing “militia” members were arrested recently for trying to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and “try” her themselves in an undisclosed location. What astonishing lack of grace or good sense would allow him then to hold a rally in Michigan Saturday and enjoy his partisans’ shouting “lock her up!” and not raise a hand to say, courteously, at least that though we disagree completely with her, these are civil governmental matters, not justification for criminal violence against here? If one of these clowns shoots or “locks her up” next week, maybe this time is is legally an accessory.

Trump’s response to the “lock her up!” chant? “Lock ‘em all up!”
Some people in the audience then started chanting, “lock her up!”  He didn’t add, “Be careful, though. No violence!” Rather, he added, “be careful of her because you know they're like in charge of the ballot stuff. How the hell do I put my political and our country's political life in the hands of a pure partisan like that?" ]

[I have friends at pickleball (and elsewhere) who will vote for Trump. We kid each other, and mostly don’ actually argue. But it mystifies me that they seem not to see that this guy is a serious danger to our way of life. Not because of some crazy theories about what people allege, but simply from his own words and actions right in front of us. This is not Obama vs. Romney or McCain. This is not Clinton vs. Dole, or the elder Bush. Even George Bush, though an unqualified and lousy president, seems to have been a decent guy inside. Trump is not; and his policies are weakening the U.S. as a country in many visible ways.

Further, despite my experience with my Trumpist friends and acquaintances, Trump is personally making our political dialogue far more rancorous and hate-filled than it should be. He’s not the only cause of that. Probably we’re all guilty of contributing to that, or most of us anyway. But for him, spewing hate and insults is a way of life.]

[The quote is attributed to Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation: “I don’t want everybody to vote [because] our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” The Heritage Foundation is one entity shouting out the voter-fraud myth; but apparently its own research shows that in the past 20 years, 0.00006 percent of all mail-in ballots cast were fraudulent. Greg Abbott sure saw it that way, mandating that each Texas county have only one drop-off box for absentee ballots. Some Texas counties are bigger than a lot of countries. A federal judge nixed this obvious vote-suppression move, but a three-judge panel of Trump-appointed appellate judges put the rule back in place. ]

[But all this is easy to see and say. What is harder to discern is just how we bring ourselves back from where Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party have brought us. Or, where we have brought ourselves. We elected a con man, a carnival barker, a known racist. We need to look inward, as a nation. Trump didn’t just happen; and that folks who helped him, including the Russians, weren’t well-meaning doesn’t explain or excuse us. What was the disease or infection we mistakenly hoped Trumpism might cure?” Maybe that’s my next column, but I can’t promise “The Answer.”]

 

This guy showed up yesterday.  Expressed no interest in Trump or Biden