A Toss-up Presidential Election Gerry OShea
The polls
suggest that there is at least a 50 – 50 chance that the electorate will choose
a woman for the first time as president on November 5th. This
history-making possibility is even more significant because the Democratic
nominee, Kamala Harris, is also a black woman.
In 2016,
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by close to three million but lost in the
Electoral College, a remnant of a past era baked into the American constitution.
The United States, alone among the world’s democracies, does not accept the
popular vote as determinative of victory in national contests.
Everybody,
regardless of gender, is capable of both toughness and tenderness. However, for
some people, women are associated with softness and with an aura of weakness in
confrontational situations, which raises questions about a female’s ability to
confront foreign bullies in a crisis situation in the Oval Office.
The Republicans released a brilliant ad with a
clear gender subtext that features actors playing Vladimir Putin and a tea-sipping
ayatollah, both deemed alpha males, gleefully watching videos of the aspiring
female presidential candidate in Washington.
It ends with
a picture of Kamala dancing while Trump is seen walking on the tarmac with
a military officer and a Secret Service agent. The tag in this powerful ad ends
with the statement: “America doesn’t need another TikTok performer. We need
strength that will protect us.”
Never mind
that Trump is on record as a devotee of Putin’s dictatorial style of leadership
and that he speaks about his love for the North Korean despot, Kim Jong-un, and
his admiration for the autocratic Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. These preferences
confirm his former chief-of-staff John Kelly’s damning judgment that Mr. Trump
“admires autocrats and murderous dictators.”
Still, promoting
Trump as a swaggering, decisive, strong man deemed readier to face down foreign
leaders than a woman seen as inherently weak will bolster Trump’s chances of
winning the support of what could be a pivotal slice of independent voters.
JD Vance’s
wife, Usha, an emigrant from India, who is evidently a crack debater, prepared
her husband well for the important verbal clash with Tim Walz. He showed that
he had absorbed the techniques of a fine public speaker, and he had his
opponent struggling until the final straightforward question asked by Walz about
who won the last presidential election in 2020, which led to visible
consternation in the Republican’s face.
Would Vance
support Trump’s blatant lies about this question, or would he try to dance
around it with some excusatory rhetoric? He mentioned some vague focus on the future and
left no doubt that he was mouthing the lies of his political boss. His demeanor
and verbiage indicated clearly that he had no credible answer for this crucial
question.
Donald Trump
and his entourage claim that Joe Biden didn’t win the last presidential
election. Over sixty judges attested to the results, and Kristopher Krebs, then
President Trump’s director of election security, described it as the fairest
election in his lifetime. Krebs was fired the day after he expressed this clear
and conclusive opinion.
The election
victory by the Democrats is not a matter for debate. There is no rational case
against the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. Donald Trump’s claims that the
results were spurious simply because he lost are preposterous.
In addition,
he tried to prevent President Biden’s confirmation in the House of
Representatives by encouraging a riot at the Capitol Building. The mayhem and
terror of the January 6th events have resulted in prison sentences
for 378 rioters. Mr. Trump speaks of them as patriots and has declared that one
of his first acts, if elected, will be to give his benediction to thuggery by
granting the marauders a full pardon.
Readers will
remember that the insurrectionists called for the hanging of Vice-president
Mike Pence, who, to his great credit, followed his constitutional duty of
confirming the winner of the election. He was threatened by the mob, and the Secret
Service had to usher him to a safe space in the Capitol Building. On hearing of
his perilous predicament in hiding, Trump callously dismissed his vice president’s
situation with “So What!” suggesting clearly that he couldn’t care less about
the wellbeing of Pence or his family.
Religion plays
an important part in every American election. The evangelical community and
many traditional Catholics look askance at the liberal ideas that predominate
in the Democratic Party. In the last national contest in 2020, with Joe Biden,
a practicing Catholic, facing Donald Trump, Biden split the votes of his co-religionists,
far from a resounding clap in the back.
A clear majority
of evangelical Protestants remain a core part of the Trumper movement. However,
repeated murmurings from these churches suggest some level of disenchantment with
this Republican candidate. Tim Alberta, the son of an evangelical preacher and
himself a devout churchgoer, described Trump in his widely read book “The
Kingdom, the Power and the Glory” as “a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.”
Pope Francis
surprised everyone by declaring that both candidates were in breach of the
moral order, the Democrat because of support for abortion rights and the
Republican for his extreme rhetoric about immigrants, leaving American
Catholics to choose the lesser of two evils
About 70% of
the Jewish community vote Democratic, providing many stalwart leaders in the
Party. Mr. Trump has stated that Jews voting for Kamala should have their heads
examined, and even more quizzically claimed that if he loses the election,
somehow, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with it.”
The ongoing events
in Gaza, as well as in other Arab and Muslim countries, will impact the vote of
that community in the United States. This is especially the case in Michigan,
where the Muslim community is strong, and reports from there convey a sense of
turmoil and betrayal by the Biden/Harris government in Washington – a bad omen
for Democrats.
Pennsylvania
presents another major worry for the Harris/Walz team because Republicans have
registered many more new voters than Democrats. The polls suggest that this
state, with a popular Democratic governor and Senator Casey likely to hold his
seat, remains on a knife edge in the presidential race.
More on the
election next week.
Gerry
OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com
Comments
Post a Comment