Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

Welcome back, Mr. POTUS 44

Barack Obama appears to be getting back into the game.

He’s been out of action since leaving the presidency in January 2017. I reckon he has seen and heard enough from Donald J. Trump to bring him back into the action.

President Obama is all in with the man who served as vice president during his two terms in office. He is thoroughly and completely behind Joe Biden. That is no surprise, of course. The two men, Obama and Biden, forged a remarkably close personal and professional relationship for eight years in the White House.

I have learned recently that their friendship didn’t materialize immediately after they took office, but that it evolved and developed over time. At the end of his time as president, Obama was referring to himself and his family as “honorary Bidens.” He has called Joe Biden his “brother.”

So it has developed and matured.

After nearly four years of Donald Trump, though, and listening to Trump’s constant drumbeat of denigration of his time in office, I figure President Obama believes he needs to do what he can to remove Trump from an office he never should have won in the first place.

To be fair, Trump did win. Along the way to the White House, Trump continued to belittle Obama’s record. Since taking office, Trump has sought specifically to erase Obama’s name from legislative accomplishments. Target No. 1 has been the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature domestic legislative achievement. The ACA remains in effect, more or less, but Trump continues to vow to remove it forever. Is there a replacement? Umm. No.

As one American voter who wants Trump defeated, I am going to welcome Barack Obama back into the fight. He remains a U.S. citizen and is entitled to speak his mind whenever he pleases. Yes, it is not “normal” for a former president to weigh in so heavily.

But … what the hey. Let’s watch the battle be joined.

national news

When Trump departs …

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I cannot believe I am thinking about this, but I am.

My thoughts are wandering toward that blessed day when Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States. My thoughts deal specifically with this blog.

What will be its future? Well, it looks bright no matter when Trump departs the White House for the final time. It could be this coming January. Or — and I have to swallow hard right about now — it could come four years from January.

High Plains Blogger has been my vehicle for venting about Trump. I used this platform relentlessly during the 2016 campaign. I had high hopes almost until the very end that Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump. I went to an election night “watch party” with friends in Amarillo. We were prepared to uncork the bubbly in celebration.

Then came some words I didn’t want to hear. When Pennsylvania swung to Trump, I heard the great Democratic political operative James Carville say, “I don’t like what I’m seeing.”

The night didn’t end well for our friends or for wife and me.

My blog has been my release ever since.

Now we’re on the cusp of another election. Joe Biden is positioned at this moment to unseat Donald Trump. If the former VP wins and sends Trump packing, then I this blog likely will need to fill cyberspace with commentary on a whole array of non-Trump issues.

I am prepared to deliver that to readers of High Plains Blogger.

There might be a caveat to add: Some of that will depend on what the former president (I hope) does as he slinks off into a non-political life. I fear he’ll keep blathering, blabbing and bloviating about public matters, mostly I am certain dealing with his election loss. The good news for you and for me is that he becomes entirely irrelevant once he returns to private citizenship.

We’ll just have to await the returns. I’m prepared to stand watch until they come in.

I do look forward to commenting on policy matters emanating from a shiny new administration that has a lot of cleaning up to perform. I hope that day comes sooner rather than later.

national news

‘I’ll look at it’

There you go. The president of the United States had a chance this week to shoot down in flames the latest lie about a politician who happens to be “of color,” that she somehow isn’t constitutionally qualified to run for public office.

Instead, Donald Trump said “I’ll look at it.” The “it” being reports that U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat who is now set to be nominated as her party’s vice-presidential candidate, was born somewhere other than the United States.

This is a racist rant that needs to be plowed under. Why in the name of presidential statesmanship doesn’t Donald Trump do so? Well, I know why. It’s because he is no statesman. Trump is a racist chump who trades on innuendo and invective.

Moreover, Trump is a card-carrying member of the lunatic/wack job/fruitcake/racist wing of what used to be a great political party.

Trump, you’ll recall fomented a similar lie about President Obama. Then he surrendered, offering a tepid “He’s a citizen of the United States” response to a question about the birther lie.

For the record, Sen. Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican man and an Indian woman. They met in California. They got married and they produced a daughter. Little Kamala came into this world in Oakland. Calif., in 1964. There. She’s a U.S. citizen. She is fully qualified. End of argument, yes?

Hardly. It will continue for as long as Donald Trump gives such idiocy any sort of currency, which is what he did with his “I’ll look at it” non-answer.

I like the response given by Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who called the birther baloney a “racist, ignorant lie.”

It’s all of that … and I also would call it “hate speech.”

national news

It’s no ‘hoax,’ Mr. POTUS

Joe Biden vows to restore our nation’s soul.

The presumed Democratic Party presidential nominee wants to lead the nation into a battle against the pandemic. I get it. I want him to take the reins of power soon.

His first order of business if he is able to assume the presidency in January is to wipe out the “h-word” from our political glossary of phony, fraudulent terms.

Donald Trump has called the pandemic a “hoax,” cooked up by Democrats, the “enemy of the people fake news” media. He refuses to enact a national strategy. He has sent myriad mixed messages, all of which do nothing but confuse governors, city and county officials, school administrators, and just plain folks like, um, you and me.

Trump’s initial response to the pandemic was to declare it would vanish like a “miracle.” The warm weather of the spring and summer would kill those nasty germs. Kill ’em dead.

Well, here we are, with 165,000 Americans gone forever. That number will climb and, so help me, we have no idea on Earth where it will top out.

Trump continues to boast about the job he and his response team are doing. Therein, I submit, lies the hoax. Trump’s so-called “success” is every bit the hoax.

Joe Biden promises to lead the nation. He vows to take charge. He promises to heed the science at every turn.

I am going to hold him to all of that. As you should, too. We all must demand that the new president deliver on this promise. The stakes for letting this status quo continue are too grim to even ponder.

The former VP wants to restore our national soul. I support that noble goal and want him to keep that promise.

The place to start is to eradicate the word “hoax” from the context of the grievous battle against a killer viral infection.

environmental news

Let’s start with climate change

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Donald Trump has labeled a number of existential threats as a “hoax.” Thus, he has refused to deal with those threats.

If he gets the boot on Election Day and vacates the presidency next January, I am hoping the new president, Joe Biden, will take charge of those so-called “hoax” issues and start to deal forthrightly with them.

Let me start with climate change.

It’s real, man. Earth’s climate is changing to the detriment of every living creature inhabiting this fragile planet. Donald Trump has refused to recognize the threat. He continues to push for fossil fuel development, which necessarily spews more carbon emissions into the air.

Trump decided shortly after taking office to roll back the water and air quality regulations enacted by President Obama. He just could not stand the idea of Obama’s imprint being left on anything.

Trump doesn’t discuss climate change. He doesn’t feel the need to call our collective attention to the reality that Earth’s average annual temperature is rising; that the polar ice caps are melting; that sea level is rising; that coastal communities are being threatened; that nations’ deforestation endangers nature’s habitat and deprives the world of vegetation needed to replace the oxygen being consumed.

Joe Biden pledges to return the United States to the Paris Climate Accords. He promises to put climate change front and center on his agenda of issues with which to tackle. I intend to hold him to those pledges, although I have far greater faith in Biden keeping his word than anything that flies out of Trump’s mouth.

We have just one planet, ladies and gentlemen. We need to care for it. We need to cherish it. A new president can deliver on the need to deal head-on with a serious existential threat to our very existence.

national news

Battle is now joined

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We have just witnessed the first exchange in what is going to be more than likely the most miserable campaign for the U.S. presidency that many of us can remember.

Maybe in all of American history.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Kamala Harris spoke to us back to back about the abject failures of the Donald Trump-Mike Pence administration.

My initial takeaway, though, has to do with a personal aspect of the relationship between the members of the Democratic Party presidential team.

It is that Joe Biden does not carry a grudge. It was Harris, you’ll remember, who drew a bit of Biden’s blood during a Democratic presidential joint appearance when she hit him hard over his Senate opposition to federally mandated busing of school children.

The fact that Biden would select Harris to run with him tells me in stark terms: That’s OK; you took your best shot and I survived. Now, join me in this fight to the finish.

I am looking forward to watching this campaign unfold, even though the misery we can expect will be deep and will be intensely personal. That’s how Trump rolls.

national news

Welcome to the show, Sen. Harris

There once was a time when candidates joined national campaigns and their opponent would offer them a tepid “Welcome to the fight” greeting.

Not these days.

U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris became former VP Joe Biden’s running mate this week and Donald Trump began a Twitter torrent lambasting the California Democrat for being a weak Democratic primary presidential opponent.

Trump said Harris is the kind of candidate he dreams about. He calls her a champion of the “far left.” Hah! I’ll go instead with some of the progressive outfits who complain that Harris isn’t “far left” enough for them.

In reality, the more I consider Harris’s candidacy, the more I buy into her mainstream moderate approach to governance.

She is a former prosecutor, meaning she hunted down bad guys and put ’em in the slammer. She is no one’s fool. Harris is tough, resilient and vows to work as hard as she can to elect Biden as the next president of the United States.

Harris teamed up once with the late Beau Biden, the former VP’s son, in pursuing fraudulent bankers. Beau Biden happened to be attorney general in Delaware while Harris ran the California justice department.

The old days of common courtesy are gone. Donald Trump is lying in wait (pun kind of intended here, if you get my drift). He is going to cast every possible aspersion he can on Sen. Harris, not to mention what he plans for the former vice president.

Neither of them needs to respond in kind. They have plenty of political action organizations ready to do their own version of the kind of dirty work they can expect from the Donald Trump-Mike Pence team.

national news

Digesting this VP choice

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I admit my political bias regularly and without apology. I mean, we all have bias, we are imbued in it, it propels our political principles.

At least it propels my principles.

I lean toward the Democratic Party. I have been voting for president every four years since 1972 and not once have I cast a presidential vote for a Republican. I don’t regret my votes, although as I look back on one of them with decades of experience under my belt, I might have thought differently about the 1976 race between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.

I say all this as a cautionary tale to the excitement many of my fellow pro-Democratic Party voters are feeling today with the selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as the party’s latest vice-presidential pick.

She’s already made history by being the first woman of color to be chosen. She is black and she is of Indian descent; her father hailed from Jamaica, her mother from South Asia. That’s historic!

Sen. Harris now stands on the brink of making even more history in 88 days by being elected the first woman as vice president.

I am trying mightily to temper my excitement. I am going to succeed in tamping it down. How do I know that? Because I fear that Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, has the resources and the willingness to deploy them to win re-election to a second term. He will do whatever it takes to win.

Now, I most certainly don’t want that to happen. It is a fear that well might keep me up at night as we get closer to Election Day.

My bias remains as strong as ever. My desire to see Joe Biden elected president is at full boil. I intend to use this blog toward that end. I feel compelled, though, to reel in my excitement at the prospect until we get much closer to the election. I need assurances that the excitement is warranted.

I am hoping Kamala Harris can excite millions of Americans who are as frightened as I am at the prospect that Donald Trump can repeat the astonishing political fluke he performed in 2016.

national news

Sen. Harris? Let’s ponder this pick

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I will start with a bit of candor about U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris.

She was not my favorite choice for Joseph R. Biden’s vice-presidential running mate. Of the names that rose to the top, my preference gravitated toward Susan Rice, the former national security adviser during Barack Obama’s second term as president.

I also would have gotten fully behind U.S. Rep. Val Demings, U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Harris, though, is the one.

Now, that all said, I am left to place my faith in the selection process that Biden — himself a former vice president — used to make this dramatic selection. Biden served with great distinction as VP during the eight years of the Obama administration. President Obama has said many times that his selection of Biden was the “first major decision I made” as a presidential nominee and he never regretted it.

So, Biden presumably went through the same grueling process to which he was subjected during his own vetting to be VP during the Obama years.

In one respect, Biden’s selection of Harris suggests that the former VP, indeed, holds no grudges. It was Harris who drew blood from Biden during one of the Democratic primary debates when she challenged his boasting of being able to work with segregationist senators. Biden could have held that against her. He didn’t.

As some observers have noted already, this new Democratic team reminds them of Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush teaming up in 1980 after Bush called Reagan an adherent of what he called “voodoo economics.” The Reagan-Bush team steamrolled to two landslide victories.

Do I have any concerns now about Kamala Harris? Again, I will defer to Joe Biden’s knowledge of the vetting process. If she checks all the boxes to Biden’s satisfaction, then that is good enough for me.

Just as Joe Biden wasn’t my first pick to lead the Democratic challenge against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris wasn’t my first pick to join him in that effort.

Now that they’re a team, I’m all in.

national news

Who’ll make the call?

(AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Tradition is a big part of Election Night.

The TV networks and news agencies, with their analysts on hand to parse the results, make their calls on states as the vote totals roll in. Eventually, we get a winner. Someone crosses the 270-electoral vote threshold to become elected president of the United States.

In November, we’ll go through it again.

One of two men, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, will emerge the winner. I hope it’s Biden. You know that already.

Suppose the polls we see today showing Biden winning big on Nov. 3 hold up. Biden wins. Tradition dictates that the person who falls short calls the winner to concede, to offer his congratulations and, presumably, his support and cooperation during the transition.

Then, according to tradition, the winner strides to a microphone to declare victory. While making that declaration, though, the winner usually mentions the “gracious and warm phone call” he gets from the opponent.

Ahh, that’s where it might break down … if the guy I want to win actually wins.

You see, Donald Trump has said a number of things that seem to put that Election Night tradition in some jeopardy. He might not accept the election result. He might challenge  it. He’ll accuse someone of “rigging” the result. What’s more, we’re likely to slog our way through the campaign with heaps of mud being slung … from Trump to Biden and perhaps some in response from Biden to Trump. These men will not end this campaign as friends.

I have this fear that the tradition we long have boasted about — the peaceful transition of power from one party to the other one — might not play out once we get the ballots counted.

Does anyone expect Trump to say anything gracious about his foe no matter the result? For that matter, should we expect Biden to speak well of his foe given what we can expect to come from Trump throughout the remainder of this political bloodbath?

Tradition is in trouble, I fear, as we await the result of what is sure to be a most consequential election.

Then again … we can hope that sanity prevails on Election Night.