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Politics and Selling fear
Posted at: Dec/14/2023 : Posted by: Mel
Related Category: Politics & Gov, Watching America,
In America there are a lot of entertaining sports to watch. Baseball with its long season and lethargic pace of play allows for lots of commercial breaks. College and professional football demonstrate lots of coordination and exciting plays. Basketball offers a regular season followed by a playoff structure that seems nearly as long. But if you are a fan of an extended season, over the top personalities, rules that continuously change….nothing beats watching American Presidential politics. Dusting off an old playbook, the Biden team and their prognosticators have now switched to that last and most desperate play, selling FEAR. The hysteria on the left about the 2024 election and Biden’s likely opponent Donald Trump is spinning so fast, parts may soon fly off. For months we have heard “Trump will destroy democracy” as the central theme of Joe Biden’s campaign. “Trump will be a dictator!” “Trump will destroy the Constitution!” “Trump will execute his political opponents!" (Yes, a ranting Joe Scarborough actually said that last one.) Not since the Grinch stole Christmas has anyone been so hysterically vilified. The establishment media is spewing out Trump alarmism at warp-speed. I know that’s not a real thing, but you get my point. The Atlantic recently published an entire special issue, featuring more than twenty pieces on "how a second term could shatter norms with the courts, education, the military, foreign policy, immigration, abortion rights, science, gender", according to the magazine. Fear makes people say and do strange things, but this is hysterical fear. Common sense tells us that one person simply can't have that much of an impact, but fear is not necessarily driven by rational thought. Why this sudden surge in scaremongering? There are really three simple reasons: 1. Trump might win: The polls have been showing Trump in front of Biden for months. The only statistical change has been a decline in President Biden’s approval rating. 2. Biden has nothing else to run on: Unlike campaigning from the outside, Biden has been President for 3 years. We have seen his agenda, listened to him tell the same personal stories over and over, and watched his declining heath. His foreign policy, economic agenda and special interest support are on the table for all to see. 3. It worked before. On that last point – remember that in 2016 Hillary Clinton’s team, when they weren’t conjuring up fake news about Trump colluding with Russia, pushing a narrative that had Americans quaking and shivering in front of their gas stoves. In his first year in office, they predicted, Trump would plunge the country into recession and cause a stock market crash! He would ignite World War III! He was going to deport 11 million illegal immigrants and terminate equal rights for women! He’d give Europe to Putin and bring back torture! Apparently our democratic system works and no one person has absolute power, not that Trump ever wanted to do any of that anyway. But Trump proved to also not be the evil doer many claimed he would be. Of course, Trump did none of those things. Instead, he helped pass a massive tax overhaul, put Neil Gorsuch on the court, began dismantling President Obama’s suffocating regulatory excesses and executive orders. He drove down illegal immigration. Most consequentially, he put China and the rest of the world on notice that the U.S. was not to be trifled with. How? By bombing Syria during a dinner with China's President Xi at Mar-al-Lago; over what Trump described as a "beautiful piece of chocolate cake," he stunned the Chinese dictator by announcing the surprise attack. That set the tone. He implemented policies that brought energy prices down and stimulated the economy. In 2016 to the surprise of virtually every pollster, voters tuned out the alarmist talk and elected Trump over Hillary Clinton. All those balloons never got to drop. It would be difficult to say if Trump actually won on agenda, or if voters were merely choosing between business as usual from Hillary Clinton, or significant change from a Washington outsider named Donald Trump. That didn’t prevent Biden from resorting to the same line of attack in 2020; this time it worked, which is why they’re going there again. To be clear, in 2020 Joe Biden won with 51% of the vote which hardly represents a sweeping mandate. The second reason for turning up the Trump hysteria is that Biden has nothing else to sell. He has pitched Bidenomics incessantly, only to find his boasts falling flat with the 60% of voters who disapprove of his handling of the economy. Rumor is that the White House is backing off the term, and who can blame them? Personalizing big spending, big government and big inflation by putting your name on it seems beyond stupid. In Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address to Congress he said he had added 12.1 million jobs. While that sounds like a record, he took office at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic, a very unusual time. Research by the Labor Department has shown that nearly all those jobs were not new, but recovered from the 22 million jobs lost during COVID-19. Biden also proudly touts his climate agenda, which is becoming less popular by the day. EV car sales are plunging, no one wants to surrender their gas stove, and everyone sees that we won’t have the power generation or distribution grid to go all electric for decades. Vice President Kamala Harris was recently at COP28 in Abu Dhabi and bragged that the Biden White House has committed $1 trillion to climate initiatives. For those voters not keeping track, that must have been a head-turner. Some might wonder, where is that trillion dollars going? Where, indeed? One of the biggest objectives of the Inflation Reduction Act (what’s in a name) was boosting electric vehicles by greatly expanding the number of charging outlets. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts that "The United States will need about 28 million charging ports by 2030 to meet the demand for electricity by zero-emission passenger vehicles," up from roughly 2.6 million today. It was recently reported that not a single charging station funded by these same government dollars has been added since that bill passed sixteen months ago. On the economic front, Biden claims to be “building the economy from the middle out” by bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. The Labor Department’s numbers would appear to show only recovery and not growth. Pre-COVID they reported 12.9 million manufacturing jobs, their most recent report shows just hitting 13 million. In the last race, Biden hid in his basement, under cover of the pandemic; the voting public as a consequence did not get to hear him speak or see him age. Biden’s mumbling, stumbling and dependence on cue cards are a daily embarrassments and won’t get any better. There is also the credible accusations about corruption, bribery and lies with his involvement in his son’s business activities. The persona of an honest statesman is clearly gone. For the GOP the agenda opportunities in 2024 are abundant. The border catastrophe, homelessness in our “sanctuary cities”, fentanyl, drug gangs and large-scale retail theft. Critical to almost every aspect of our economy is a viable energy policy. On the security front there are challenges with China in the Pacific and Russia in Eastern Europe, and Iran in Asia. This is going to be a very unusual election. If the final ballot is printed with Joe Biden and Donald Trump, there will be no secrets. Both men have been in the oval office and created their own versions of a Presidential Legacy. We know what they will do because we know what they have done. We know how they will conduct themselves because we have already seen that. Democrats are increasingly terrified that Donald Trump could win in 2024. A new Wall Street Journal poll puts Trump ahead of Biden by 4 points and by an even greater margin if third-party candidates are in the mix. All these polls also express a concern that the mythical “silent majority” is difficult to poll. There is a very scary practice that is putting our democracy at risk and usurping the Constitution. This practice is the use of prosecutions and government agencies to eliminate the opposition. Typical of those governments we loosely call “banana republics” is the use of the courts in this manner by those in power to eliminate or jail their competition or circumvent their own prosecution. Putin has been doing this for years and then claiming Russia is holding an open election. I would like to believe this is not happening in America, but the evidence is mounting to the contrary and may turn the Constitution into a mere historical item like triangle shaped hats. Back to the core subject: In 2020, Trump was rarely ahead, but today is very different. Voters now know what a Joe Biden presidency looks like, and they know what a Donald Trump presidency looks like. Currently Trump wins on nearly every issue – inflation, crime, securing the border, the Israel-Hamas war and creating security by projecting strength. Regardless of who wins, no one gets to throw away the Constitution or execute their domestic rivals. But if touting that is the only move the Democrats have left, they must be getting pretty desperate.
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