What’s Enough?

What’s Enough?

By

Leonard Zwelling

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/opinion/sunday/trump-losing-his-grip.html

This is the last blog before Election Day. This year, 2020, has been monumental in so many ways, but only in one that counts. No, it is not that it is a presidential election year or that it’s an Olympic year that got cancelled. It’s all about the virus. Some of my readers believe though that had it not been a presidential election year, we would have handled the virus better instead of using it to close the economy and damage Trump. I don’t believe that, but anything is possible, I guess.

At this time last year, 2019, Donald Trump seemed as unbeatable as George H. W. Bush was in 1991 following his successful prosecution of the Gulf War. Then look what happened. It was “the economy, stupid” in 1992 and Bill Clinton won thanks in no small extent to the help he got from Ross Perot.

Flash forward to 2020. We all thought that President Trump was incapable of civility, that he was constitutionally predisposed to rudeness (see article by the great Maureen Dowd). The debate on October 22 proved that incorrect. Clearly he can exercise self-control and actually have a meaningful debate. What that means is that his persona of a child-like two-year old having a tantrum is one of his many options. He is not genetically crude. He opts for this behavior.

My point is only this, and it comes in response to the many I know who will be voting (or have already voted) for Trump. He’s not worthy of your vote. Even if you don’t think Joe Biden is a great candidate (I don’t either) he is empathetic, an adult, cares about America, and is not confused about who are our enemies and who are our friends. Trump is a spoiled brat, supported by his father every time he got into trouble, is an inveterate liar, and is hopelessly mean.

The driver that causes most of the people who I know that will vote for Trump to do so is concern that Biden will usher in an era of socialism and cost them money (he probably will cost them a bit if they earn more than $400,000, but give me a break. Your country needs you). Their other concern is that Biden will not stand up to the forces on the left (i.e., Bernie and AOC or worse, antifa) and we will have chaos in the streets. This is ludicrous for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris are radical leftists (she made a career out of prosecuting criminals for goodness sakes), and the leftists, while vocal, have no more sway now than they ever had under any president, and that includes Barack Obama.

The United States is still a right of center country and will remain as such no matter who is elected president. For my friends who are worried about their 401K’s or the rabble coming over the front yard fence, worry more about who will secure the economy of the U.S. which only grew under Trump as a continuation of the last three years of Obama.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow or if we will even know by the end of the day who the next president will be. I do know that if Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida all go to one candidate, that’s probably the ball game.

I also know that there’s a good chance the Senate will turn blue again and the House will remain so. If this happens, perhaps we can begin to make some progress on the future of our infrastructure, health care for all, better education, and a withdrawal from foreign wars. All of these things were supposed to be addressed by Trump, but were not.

I suppose the country can stand four more years of poor leadership. It has before. But it is more likely that 2020 will go down as a transition year for America. If Biden wins, it will mark the beginning of the next chapter of the Democratic Party because at almost 78, Mr. Biden is not that party’s future. Who will be? Harris? Maybe. How did that work out for Humphrey, Mondale, and Gore?

This is also true of the GOP. Mr. Trump is 73. That means both candidates are currently older than the men we elected in 1992 and 2000. Neither Trump nor Biden can be the future. What will be? Who will be? Stay tuned. Please vote if you haven’t yet.