Tag Archives: Joe Biden

The more the better

Democracy is a “participation sport.”

That is to say that the more citizens who participate in the democratic exercise of voting, the more representative the government that results is of the people it is designed to protect and defend.

This is my way of furthering an argument I used to make while working in daily print journalism. I aimed the argument at voters who failed to participate in local elections. Local government elections generally draw abysmal voter turnouts. I witnessed it in Oregon and Texas, where I worked for nearly 37 years as a journalist.

I sought to urge voters to cast their ballots so they would have a voice in the government that sets tax policy, determines the quality of law enforcement and fire protection, picks up the trash and provides water for us to drink.

So … how does this logic play out now as the nation prepares to elect a president of the United States? The same argument applies.

However, Donald Trump and his Republican pals want to suppress voter turnout. We have a pandemic raging across the country. Millions of voters are afraid of getting sick by voting on Election Day; they want to vote by mail. Trump opposes that idea, promoting a specious argument that mail-in voting is inherently corrupt. Except that it isn’t corrupt.

The Trumpkin Corps wants us to believe we cannot vote by mail without our ballots being stolen or compromised in an unspecified nefarious manner.

It is imperative that we do all we can to encourage more voters to decide this election. Not fewer of them. I do not want others to determine who we elect as president of the United States.

If we are able to vote by mail, I intend to cast my vote in that fashion. Absent that, I intend to vote early in Texas, even though I have a lengthy history of reciting on this blog my loathing of early voting. My preference is to vote on Election Day as a hedge against the candidate of my choice doing something stupid or criminal that makes me regret my vote.

The pandemic changes that dynamic for me.

Thus, it should be imperative that we allow more people to vote. The reasons are as straightforward as they are regarding local elections.

Democracy works better when more citizens — not fewer of them — take part in this fundamental element of living in a free society.

Most important … ever?

(AP Photo/John Minchillo)

We hear it every presidential election cycle, about how “this election is the most important in our lifetime … or in the past century … or in the history of our glorious republic.”

Take your pick. It’s one or some or all of them, right?

Well, I happen to think the election we’re about to conduct might qualify as the most important election ever. As in ever in the history of the great nation we love and cherish!

Donald J. Trump became president by trading on voters’ unhappiness with the “status quo,” whatever that meant. What the nation got has been a lesson in chaos, confusion, incompetence, disloyalty and an obsession with hostile dictators at the expense of our national intelligence community.

Who would think they ever would hear a president trash his predecessors’ records in the White House while extolling the “love letters” he receives from a murderous Marxist dictator? Moreover, who would have thought that another dictator would stand accused of paying bounties on the lives of American service personnel and our commander in chief would refuse to punish him; the president has betrayed the oath he took to protect the men and women he sends into battle.

Joseph Biden stands poised — I hope! — to remove Donald Trump from the White House, a place he never should have been allowed to enter, let alone as president of the United States.

I have tried to make a singular point about Donald Trump, which is that this individual’s entire adult life — all of if! — has been focused solely on enriching Trump. Public service has been totally foreign to him. We now are witnessing the consequences of what I have sought to tell readers of this blog. He doesn’t comprehend the public service aspect of his job.

As President Barack Obama noted in his speech Wednesday night, Trump views his office as a “transactional” endeavor, meaning that he would enact public policy in exchange for favorable treatment.

That is not good government. It is not in keeping with public service at any level, let alone at the highest level possible.

Yes, we are faced with a monumental election in just a few weeks. Americans who were fed up with the status quo now have learned what they got. They got a president who doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t care to learn anything about the office he occupies or the limits built into it.

We need to rid ourselves of a president who is endangering the very democratic principles he took an oath to protect.

Is this the most important election we’ll ever decide? It looks like the real thing to me.

Barack Obama delivers

Barack Hussein Obama delivered the goods and laid them directly at the feet of Donald John Trump.

Those goods contained a fairly detailed recital of precisely why — in my own view — Trump is unfit for the office he holds and why former President Obama’s “brother,” Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., deserves to be elected the next president of the United States.

The media are making quite a lot of the “unprecedented” nature of a former president taking a sitting president to task so directly and so harshly. Hmm. Well, my own sense is that Trump merely is reaping what he has sown.

Why? I consider equally unprecedented the level of direct criticism, denigration and disparagement that the current president has laid on his immediate predecessor. I feel the need to point out that President Obama had remained essentially silent in the face of those unfair and unwarranted attacks … until now!

Obama said Trump has failed to grow into the office. He has failed to grasp the gravity of the awesome responsibility he inherited when he walked into the Oval Office. He said Trump has failed to rein in his angry impulses, failed to cease labeling foes as the “enemy.”

Yes, the 44th president delivered the goods. As did Sen. Kamala Harris, the VP nominee who’s running with Biden against Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

What’s next? Joe Biden has a steep hill to climb tonight when he accepts his party’s presidential nomination. He will need to at worst to meet the level that Obama and Harris reached with their speeches.

Biden has a stirring and compelling personal story, full of heartache and tragedy and perseverance. We know the story. He needs now to tell us where he intends to lead the nation if he becomes elected as our 46th president.

I am all ears, Joe. Talk to me.

Not missing convention noise

Given the nature of presidential nominating conventions and their evolution from actual conventions to televised infomercials, I am prepared to say that I do not necessarily miss all the trappings of the way the conventions used to be piped into my living room.

The Democrats have nominated Joe Biden as their 2020 presidential candidate; they’re about to select Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate.

They’re doing all this remotely, per the conditions brought on the COVID pandemic.

We’re getting the speeches, the TV spots extolling the candidates, the testimonials. Just like before. The only thing missing is the thunderous applause in the convention hall and the sight of delegates cavorting on the floor of the place wearing the goofy hats and buttons.

I get the drift of what the Democratic Party is trying to tell us. Next week the Republican Party will do its thing. They’re both going to be “virtual” conventions. The one big difference will be that Donald Trump will make his acceptance speech in the White House, a publicly owned, federal building that is supposed to be exempt from partisan political activity. Aww, but what the heck. Trump doesn’t give a rip about risking federal employees to potential criminal liability by making them violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits them from participating in partisan activity.

But … the beat goes on. We’ll have two presidential tickets named after next week. We have broken from the normal way we usually do these things. It’s still legitimate.

Now comes the rest of it, which is the sprint to the finish.

May the better ticket win. Oh, and I hope with every fiber of my being that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris cross the finish line first.

Why the squabble over GOP support?

I hear that some Democrats are miffed because their virtual presidential nominating committee includes testimonials for Joe Biden from, get ready for it, Republicans.

My answer: Get used to it.

The presumed Democratic presidential nominee is known as a bipartisan kind of guy. He worked across the aisle during his 36 years as a U.S. senator from Delaware. As vice president, he did the same thing, working with Republican legislators on critical fiscal matters.

That the Democratic presidential nominee would welcome the endorsement of Republicans is no surprise. One of his best friends in the Senate was the late John McCain, the Republican Vietnam War hero. McCain was no fan of Donald Trump. The late senator’s wife, Cindy, is going to line up behind her friend Joe Biden’s candidacy.

So has former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former EPA administrator and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Democrats who are grumbling about the infusion of Republicans standing up for the Democratic nominee need to get over themselves.

Their party is on the verge of nominating someone who knows the value of compromise and who uses that concept to further the cause of good government legislation.

The nation needs more of the bipartisan spirit that Joe Biden seeks to bring to the office of president of the United States.

Trump unhinged

I am trying to fathom the reasons that millions of American voters are continuing to argue for the re-election of the man pictured here.

So help me I am at a total loss.

Donald Trump keeps threatening to do bodily harm to our democratic process if the November presidential election doesn’t turn out the way he wants.

He is indicating he might not accept the result of an election that favors Joseph R. Biden Jr. He already has said that a Biden victory would guarantee a “rigged” election. So he’ll do what? Demand a recount? Toss the ballots out? Start over?

Then he said he deserves a “do-over” because President Obama and Vice President Biden “spied” on his campaign during the 2016 election season. Spied? Oh, that was when the FBI and others reported to the Obama administration that Russians were interfering in the election, so the Obama folks wanted to take a closer look at it.

The FBI already has determined there was no “spying.” That hasn’t shut Trump’s pie hole.

The latest gem is that he might seek a third term if — and I am swallowing hard to say these next few words — he wins re-election.

Oh, but wait. The U.S. Constitution’s 22nd Amendment says a president can be elected twice. That’s it. No more. Is he going to demand an amendment to the Constitution? Good luck with that one, Donald.

Watching The Donald flail and flounder this way simply brings to mind my astonishment in the support he continues to pull from the roughly 40 percent (give or take) of the American voting public. What on Earth, in the name of political sanity, do they see in this individual?

The third term suggestion might be some sort of Trumpian joke, although The Donald seems to possess no discernible sense of humor. The “spying” allegation is just one more smear that Trump insists on leveling at Barack Obama, given what I believe is his intense envy at the sophistication his immediate predecessor demonstrated during his two terms in office.

Whether to accept the election result if former VP Biden wins? In some sort of macabre way, many of us saw that one coming long ago … about the time he rode down that Trump Tower escalator to declare his candidacy for the only public office he ever sought.

Trump is unhinged.

The moment swept me away

I find myself at times trying to avoid getting caught up in moments when I see things occurring in real time.

It happened to me Monday night watching the opening of the Democratic National Committee’s virtual presidential nominating convention.

I have no need to stipulate that I want Joe Biden to become the next president. Oops! I just did!

Watching the assorted celebrities, politicians and oh yes, former first lady Michelle Obama make their case for why Biden is the right man at the right time to correct the wrong policies that Donald Trump has enacted almost swept me out of my chair.

The first night event was quite stirring, with testimonials from pandemic victims’ loved ones, from Republican politicians speaking on behalf of a Democratic politician. I also must give a shout out to the spine-tingling way the DNC presented the singing of the National Anthem.

I am left to wonder: How are the Republicans going to top this? How does Trump make anyone apart from the fervent base feel better about re-electing him as president? What is he going to say? How is he going to say it?

I am acutely aware that the Republican National Committee has its share of marketing geniuses and gurus. They’ll put on a show, too. Right now I am having difficulty imagining how they will top what the Democrats are prepared to deliver as the 2020 presidential campaign kicks into high gear.

Voting early: an option for sure

I cannot believe I am about to admit to possibly doing the following thing: voting early.

Donald Trump’s open warfare on the vote by mail process being promoted by Democrats has given me serious pause to break from my Election Day tradition.

I much prefer voting in person, at the polling place, on Election Day.

The COVID-19 pandemic, along with Trump’s campaign to dismember the U.S. Postal Service is giving me second thoughts.

I am not exactly a full-throated backer of mail-in voting. Given the threat of standing in line with dozens or hundreds of other voters while we’re battling a killer pandemic, I prefer voting by mail to the normal voting process. Trump is threatening to forestall mail-in voting by cutting funds for the USPS. He even admits to seeking to derail the Postal Service for political reasons: mail-in voting favors Democrats, Trump says, and we just cannot have that.

This is a disgraceful politicization of an agency that for many decades has been held in the highest regard by the American public.

Meanwhile, I am left to ponder whether I want to stand in line on Election Day or vote early, when the crowds traditionally are much thinner.

Given the stakes, I am leaning toward voting early. Oh, man. I cannot possibly articulate why that troubles me. It just does.

However, if the option — absent a vote-by-mail program enacted in Texas — is to wait on Election Day in a crowd of strangers while we’re all fighting a viral pandemic that could kill us … you get my drift, yes?

Time for a vision

There won’t be cheering crowds. No balloon drops. No demonstrations of delegates wearing goofy hats and festooned with buttons of all sizes, colors and slogans.

No. The Democratic National Convention is going to be a “virtual” event with speakers talking to the nation from their own living rooms, or their dens, or their basements.

What has to happen at this event, in my humble view, is not unique to this uniquely delivered political event. What we need is to hear a vision for the future from presidential nominee Joe Biden, from vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris and from the assortment of speakers who will talk to us over the course of the next four days.

You see, that element has existed in political conventions going back through the history of our great and beloved republic.

I do not expect to hear a futuristic vision from Donald Trump, the Republican whose party convention occurs next week. Trump is trading on division and disunity, on distrust of others and on fear. I look for him to keep beating that drum all the way to the election.

What’s left for Democrats? They have to lay out a plan for how they intend to fix what Trump has damaged. Trump has wrecked our international alliances; he was impeached over his attempts to bribe a foreign leader for dirt on Joe Biden; he has sought to dismantle environmental protections; Trump has threatened to deport U.S. residents who came here as children because their parents sneaked into the country without proper documentation.

The Democrats’ strategy is as traditional as any part of this nominating process that hasn’t been altered by the coronavirus pandemic. They need to speak plainly and honestly to Americans who will tune in.

I will be one of them. I am awaiting a message of hope and revival and I damn sure don’t need a cheering crowd to persuade me to prefer their message over the fear-mongering that will come from Donald Trump.

Cease-fire? Really?

The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris presidential ticket has made a pledge it might have difficulty keeping.

They have declared a “partisan cease-fire” while Donald Trump is mourning the death of his brother, Robert. It’s a grand gesture, showing a brand of empathy and compassion we complain has been lacking in the current president.

But how are Joe Biden and Kamala Harris going to avoid taking shots at Trump while their political party stages its virtual convention in Milwaukee beginning on Monday?

Presidential nominating conventions by definition are the most partisan events imaginable. Speakers usually spend their podium time trashing the folks in the other party. You know?

Well, let’s just see how this plays out.

Donald Trump certainly is entitled to an appropriate amount of time to mourn his brother’s death. However, politics awaits.