THREE BIG REASONS WE CAN PLAUSIBLY HOPE FOR A SUNNY 2024 ELECTION
by Dick Polman
Columnist
Democrats have entered the hand-wringing phase of the election season, fretting about Joe Biden and poised to leap from their windows. But everyone needs to chill. I foresee many reasons why Uncle Joe is likely to defeat the worst excuse for a human being to ever fail upward.
Wow, deja vu! I wrote that same opening paragraph way back on April 12, 2020.
The conventional wisdom at that time was that Biden was a shaky candidate with shaky prospects of beating Trump. But I said the old guy was being vastly underestimated – and I was proven right in November when he won all the swing states, plus Georgia and Arizona, and racked up more votes than any presidential candidate in history.
What I said then is just as true now. I wouldn’t change a word, for these three reasons:
Biden is the anti-fascism candidate. Trump’s 2020 coup plot, his Jan. 6 incitements, and his current vows to end democracy as we know it, obviously play well with duh dolts in duh Republican base, but the majority of the electorate refuses to swallow his criminal swill. President Biden says, “Our (campaign) message is clear, and it is simple: We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it. Because it does.”
And Biden has the wind at his back. According to a newly-released national poll, most Americans, by a decisive margin of 56 to 33 percent, say that Trump is “definitely” or “probably” guilty of a crime in connection with the “illegal effort to overturn the 2020 election.” Most Americans, by an even more decisive margin of 63 to 33 percent, say that Trump’s Jan. 6 insurrection actions should either “disqualify” him from the presidency or, at minimum, “cast doubts on his fitness for the job.”
Biden is the abortion rights candidate. Trump committed political suicide by rigging the U.S. Supreme Court with an anti-Roe majority, and Biden will relentlessly twist the knife. No other issue has inflamed the American mainstream more than the MAGA war on women’s reproductive rights and privacy. Democrats reaped the rewards in the 2022 midterm elections (despite conventional wisdom predictions of a “red wave,” Republicans barely won the U.S. House), and in a slew of 2023 contests.
This year, Biden will rightly warn women voters that if Republicans win the presidency and both congressional chambers, they’ll push for a national abortion ban. Trump has cut and run on the national ban plan, but the forced-birth movement within the Republican base wants it bad. Keep it up, zealots. Biden will appreciate it.
Biden is the healthy economy candidate. Yeah I know, millions of Americans don’t think things are all that great, and Fox News in particular continues to feed the fiction that Biden is ruining us. But this year he’ll have ample opportunities to share key facts with the majority of Americans who presumably still believe in facts.
Gas prices at the pump continue to plunge, GDP growth hit 5.2 percent in the last quarter, and interest rates are projected to drop this year (thus helping more people to buy houses). Biden’s numerous legislative achievements have created jobs, saved shaky labor pension plans, bolstered domestic semiconductor manufacturing ($200 billion in new private investment, thanks to Biden’s CHIPS Act), and generally improved millions of lives in real ways.
Starting this week, for instance, all the major insulin manufacturers are offering $35-a-month caps on their products – an expansion of the caps that were previously reserved only for Medicare recipients, as mandated by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
This is called governing. It’s not as exciting, as, say, threatening the lives of judges or smearing feces on Capitol walls, but governing for the common good still seems to me like a campaign asset.
Yeah I know, the polls continue to claim that Biden and Trump are virtually tied, but it’s a waste of time to take the public’s pulse far in advance of election day. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were all deemed to be in deep trouble on the eve of their re-election bids, and Democrats in particular are notorious for peeing their pants. What I see this year (barring some unforeseen event) is an experienced president with a solid record of accomplishment facing off against a craven fascist with 91 felony charges and a track record as an adjudicated rapist, adjudicated fraudster, and adjudicated insurrectionist.
So get a grip, people. Skip the woe for Uncle Joe. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who virtually stood alone in 2022 when he presciently mocked the “red wave” meme, wisely wrote the other day that we ended 2023 “on an upbeat, optimistic note…with momentum, in my view in a far better place than Republicans, who are, in just about every imaginable way, an historic s— show.”
And if, as I anticipate, the majority of voters in swing states cast their ballots for sanity, the forecast for America will be sunnier in 2025.
Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com
The post THREE BIG REASONS WE CAN PLAUSIBLY HOPE FOR A SUNNY 2024 ELECTION appeared first on The Moderate Voice.