ARE THE DEMOCRATS BLOWING IT?

5/21/20

As loyal readers know, yours truly believes that President Donald Trump has little or no chance of defeating former Vice-President Joe Biden in the looming 2020 showdown.  (See PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL NOT BE RE-ELECTED, 4/22/20 in which, as you can tell from the title, I mince few words.)   A friend of mine asked a few weeks ago, though, whether the Democrats might be blowing it with their reaction to the set of circumstances, medical, epidemiological, and economic, that we refer to collectively as the COVID crisis.   He had a point then and the point only gets sharper as the days go by.

While it would be beyond foolish and utterly classless to conjecture, as have some on the fringe, that the Democrats welcome the COVID crisis, there is no doubt that the Democrats initially benefitted from the ravages the coronavirus has inflicted on our country.  Not only does the COVID crisis give the Dems something else to blame on President Trump, it also keeps Joe Biden out of the public eye, which, given Mr. Biden’s propensity to mis-speak and otherwise show signs of what some might interpret as unfitness for the big job he seeks, has a salubrious impact on Mr. Biden’s chances.  (See the later sections of the aforementioned post regarding Mr. Trump’s unelectability.)   However, the Democrats are showing signs of overplaying a very good hand made even better for them by COVID.

For years, the GOP has tried to tag the Democrats with an image that the Dems have done little to dispel.  This image, which is what ultimately got Donald Trump elected, is that the Democrats

·         are insufferable busybodies who are forever injecting themselves into people’s business,

·         feel that, by virtue of holding public office, or being accessories to public office, and immersing themselves in the right way of thinking, they have somehow acquired a state at which they, and only they, have the answers to every problem America faces,

·         believe that knowledge and wisdom emanate from either coast, but from the left coast only by transplantation and pollination, and can’t manage to make its way very far inward due to the density of the intellectual terrain it encounters in such attempts,

·         fervently hold to the proposition that all progress springs from the beneficence of government and the progressive, obviously superior minds that control, or ought to control, it,

·         secretly, and maybe not so secretly, agree with their last presidential nominee’s characterization of much of the American populace as “deplorables,” and

·         will use any crisis, or even difficulty, real or imagined, as an excuse to advance a statist agenda.

  

In the wake of the COVID crisis, we see the Democrats in Congress and their most prominent of governors in the bluest of states ordering us, at least until the political heat gets too intense, to stay home, shut up, eschew work, close our businesses, and let the government take care of us while our philosopher rulers, with the help of “science”  (See the nearly instantly seminal WE MUST “FOLLOW THE SCIENCE”…BUT ONLY IF DOING SO ACHIEVES MY POLITICAL ENDS, 5/12/20) figure it all out.   What about the Dems’ approach to the COVID crisis does anything to dispel the above stereotypes that Donald Trump and the GOP so gleefully promote?    Whether the Democrats are right or wrong in their approach to COVID and its economic aftermath is nearly immaterial from a political standpoint.   What is material is that the Democratic response to the COVID crisis reinforces the image of the Democrats that made Donald Trump president.   And that self-burnished image might manage to elect Donald Trump again.

Though a smattering of polls has emerged that shows the presidential race tightening and President Trump doing especially well in the Midwestern states that will likely decide the election, yours truly is not yet ready to reverse my prediction that Joe Biden will become our next president.   However, I am continually amazed at the unremitting propensity of the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.   So while I just can’t see even the Dems blowing this one, they just might.   And they are so far out of touch with the typical voter that, if they do, they won’t understand why.   See the 2016 election.