Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

Friendships suffer grievous collateral damage

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Quiz time, kids: What part of our political existence has suffered the most grievous example of collateral damage from the current political climate?

Time’s up. I’ll offer my own belief. The greatest casualty happens to be, in my view, the political friendships that at one time survived whatever political differences existing between politicians.

The wounds being inflicted these days almost appear to be mortal in nature. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump calls Kamala Harris “not very smart.” He questions her ethnicity. The convicted felon accuses the current president, Joe Biden, of being the most corrupt politician in history.

For her part, Harris will not let anyone forget about the disgraceful conduct Trump endorsed during his term as POTUS.

There once was a time in this country when losing presidential candidates would lick their wounds, concede to the winner and then pledge to work with the winner to solve the nation’s problems. Trump brought us a whole new element into how not to lose an election. He never conceded he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 and then commenced to sic the mob onto Congress to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral result.

I will presume that Harris wins this election. Can you imagine Trump doing anything different from what he did in 2020? Hillary Rodham Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, even had the good taste and grace to offer to work with Trump as he sought to build his administration. So did Mitt Romney and John McCain, who lost to Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008, respectively.

These days political foes have become mortal enemies.

I much prefer the time when foes would batter each other with hammer and tong … and then shake hands when it ended. It’s the democratic way.

 

national news, political news

Harris seeks to continue ‘normal behavior’

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Joe Biden promised us in 2020 when he decided to run for president a return to what we all think of as “normal behavior” in our head of state.

The former vice ;president was appalled at the Charlottesville, Va., riot launched by Klansmen and Nazis and declared he would campaign for the “soul of our country.”

By and large the president has succeeded in restoring normal behavior and in recapturing our national soul.

He now wants to hand those tasks off to Vice President Kamala Harris, the current Democratic presidential nominee.

I, too, share in the desire for Harris to continue to trek toward normal behavior and I want her also to keep the scrub brush handy as she fights to restore a national soul damaged so egregiously by Donald Trump’s hot pursuit of an authoritarian presidency.

When you watch and listen to Harris and Trump side by side, it becomes — to my ear — literally impossible to believe that Trump’s inarticulateness ever can lead to anything good. Donald Trump does not have an original thought in that brainless skull of his.

I have to mention, too, that Trump cannot string enough sentences together to deliver any sort of cogent thought. Kamala Harris is fully capable of weaving thoughts into the fabric of sensible policy. That ability by itself sets her apart from the incompetent foe she faces as this campaign winds down to its finish.

national news

It’s the brevity … stupid!

Just suppose for a moment or two what the public reaction to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign would be had she been in the hunt for, oh, the past year and a half.

Do you think we’d still be as excited about the energy the vice president has brought to the race? Would she wear us out with her exuberance, her enthusiasm, her energy?

I want to offer a notion that might not go over well among some readers of this blog. It is that Harris’s late entry into the campaign after President Biden pulled out of the race has filled the air with excitement that might not have the staying power that many of the VP’s allies say it would.

Vice President Harris launched her campaign from a dead stop with fewer than 100 days to go before Election Day. Joe Biden’s horrible debate performance got tongues wagging about his mental acuity. He stood firm, said he would stay in, then, in an instant he was gone.

Harris stepped up with the wind blowing hard at her back.

Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are in a dead sprint toward the finish line, which is just 70 days from now. My strong hope is that Harris and Walz win, that they vanquish Donald Trump and JD Vance to history’s dust bin and then deliver on the myriad promises they are making.

A part of me, though, just might always wonder if the brevity of this campaign could have been the decisive factor in her victory.

Whatever. A win is a win.

political news

Biden made unprecedented move

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I want to bask for just a little while longer in the afterglow of the Democratic National Convention, which wrapped up Thursday and sent its presidential and vice-presidential nominees to fight the Republican ticket.

My point is to echo the praise we heard from the convention podium about the selflessness exhibited by President Joe Biden as he dropped his re-election bid, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him … and he did this on his own.

I won’t quibble or quarrel over what motivated him to take that dramatic action. Biden said he loves being president but added quickly that “I love my country more.”

Indeed, when you ponder it for just a moment, the act of voluntarily giving up political power has to rank as one of the most improbable acts imaginable.

Could the president reverse his political fortune and defeated the GOP ticket? I believe it was possible. The seamless handoff to Kamala Harris, though, has energized Democrats beyond all expectation.

I also agree with Biden about the imperativeness of keeping Donald Trump away from the Resolute Desk … forever!

If that was Joe Biden’s primary motivation in surrendering power, then I’m all in on that effort.  I also join others who have hailed this act as one of high political courage.

As former President Obama said at the end of his stemwinding speech at the DNC: Let’s get to work!

Joe Biden

Getting ready for curtain call

Many readers of this blog perhaps can recall a time or three when I have revealed that I can be a bit of a sap when my emotions get the better of me.

Therefore, when I turn on my TV Monday to watch the Democratic National Convention, I am prepared to lapse into my sappy mode that evening.

Democrats are going to stand and cheer the incumbent president of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., and likely won’t stop cheering for a good while. They are going to thank the president for the job he has done during his term in office … and thank him for stepping aside and handing the party nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Of course, I will be far from the Chicago convention site; I’ll be watching from my North Texas living room. I might even join the crowd in giving the president my own expression of thanks. It’ll make me feel better.

Joe Biden had vowed to stay in the contest after his godawful debate performance in Atlanta. Then he decided to put his country first by stepping aside and delivering to Harris his blessing as she transformed in an instant from loyal VP to the party’s standard bearer in the effort to keep Donald Trump as far away from the White House as is humanly possible.

But … first things first. President Biden is going to stand before the nation and the world Monday night in Chicago and receive the raucous curtain call he so richly deserves.

May the emotions flow.

national news

A landslide in the making?

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Let’s get to the first thing I must say … which is that I dare not even try to predict the outcome of the 2024 election for president of the United States.

I can, however, offer an opinion of what I believe might be playing out as we speak.

What was beginning to look like a Donald Trump rout over President Biden might be turning in a 180-degree reversal, with Vice President Kamala Harris coming out on the long end of an electoral landslide.

The landslide might manifest itself only in the Electoral College. What do I mean? I am going to speculate that the popular vote of all Americans might not meet or exceed landslide proportions, which generally is about a 10% or greater margin of victory.

The Electoral College could be a different matter. Polling data released since Biden ceded the nomination to Harris tells us the VP is making serious headway in many swing states, that she is either tied or leading Trump that the GOP nominee was leading over Biden.

Political experts across the spectrum who once said the race was “Trump’s to lose” now say the tide is turning dramatically in Harris’s favor.

I am just a spectator to all of this in the middle of what once was called Trump Country.  I am not going to venture any guesses on what I think will happen, I am left only to offer what I hope occurs on Election Day …. and my hope is looking more realistic all the time.

A landslide might be developing, but not in the manner to which many of us have grown accustomed.  All eyes will be turned on the Electoral College.

national news

Who’s lost his mind?

All that idiocy about whether President Biden’s butter has slipped off his noodle seemingly ignored a more critical issue facing voters in this presidential election year.

It is whether the guy nominated by the Republican Party has flipped his wig, gone ’round the bend, booked a one-way ticket to la-la land.

Biden resolved the issue about whether he was a drag on the Democratic ticket by stepping away from his re-election bid. He handed the frontrunner mantle to Vice President Kamala Harris, whose rollout was flawless; she has picked an outstanding running mate in Tim Walz and the two of them have been wowing the faithful ever since.

Then comes this nugget of nonsense from Donald Trump: He accuses Harris and Walz of faking the huge crowd sizes at all those rallies through the use of artificial intelligence. Yep, those thousands of cheering partisans were AI creations. They weren’t real, according to the Madman in Chief.

I don’t know what part of that moronic declaration is most astonishing.

  • That Trump would say it out loud.
  • That he would believe anyone would take it seriously.
  • That millions of Americans would swallow that bait.

I’ll go with all three.

The Republican Party nominee for POTUS has lost his mind.

national news

Harris reshapes election

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Kamala Harris’s stunning 11th-hour arrival in the center of the US political conversation drives home a point I want to make about the length of our election process.

It need not drag on for months and months!

It’s almost impossible to comprehend, but the vice president has been campaigning for president for less than a month. Less than one month!

She and her team have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, she has picked a vice-presidential candidate to run with her, she and Donald J. Trump have agreed to a debate on Sept. 10, Harris is formulating an economic strategy.

All of this and more has occurred in less than a month.

Circumstances overwhelmed the previous presumptive Democratic frontrunner, President Joe Biden. He pulled out and endorsed Harris to take over the top spot. If there has been a more perfect roll-out of a presidential campaign, then someone will have to show it to me. Because this one looked like perfection in real time.

It all just goes to demonstrate that we need not drag this process out forever and then some!

I’ve never wondered aloud how we could shorten the length of time we devote to political campaigning. Would it require a federal law enacted by Congress? An amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Does each state have the power to ban campaign activity?

We ought to look at all of the above.

local news, media news

Blogging gets new life

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I resigned from my final full-time journalism job on Aug. 31, 2012, having been informed by my publisher that I no longer would do what I had done for the Amarillo Globe-News for the past 18 years …. and I thought I was pretty good at it.

Silly me.

I would learn later that the publisher had me in his crosshairs when he announced that everyone’s job description had been changed. I fought for my job fiercely, telling the publisher ultimately that the industry I entered in 1976 bore no resemblance to what it had become by 2012. And that he was asking me to do things only a little different.

It didn’t work.

Immediately, I. began focusing my attention full time to High Plains Blogger, a platform I created a few years earlier.

I have mentioned many times on this blog how much I enjoy writing on it, offering my assorted views on this and/or that policy issue.

I have boasted from time to time that writing comes easily to me. I won’t brag about the quality of the prose I produce, just say that it does flow fairly easily off the tips of my fingers.

The subject matter helps determine the ease. I’ll be candid. Prior to President Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign, it was becoming a bit problematic to find issues on which to comment.

Up stepped ‘vice President Kamala Harris. Biden endorsed the VP. She launched a full-frontal campaign from a virtual dead stop, raised a few tons of cash and injected this campaign with an energy level I haven’t seen since, oh, 2008 when Barack Obama took the nation by storm.

What does this mean for your friendly blogger? It means the proverbial chest where I store my ideas is full again.

I intend to remain engaged fully in this campaign. The blog is the only venue I have to offer commentary on the status of the effort.

So … I will weigh in. It feels good to be relevant.

national news, political news

Feeling energized by campaign revival

I cannot recall the last time I felt such a palpable, tangible and visceral re-energizing of a political campaign.

The current campaign for president of the United States falls into a unique category of an effort once thought to be DOA but is now a living, breathing organism.

Thank you, Vice President Kamala Harris, for giving life to this effort.

She had help, of course. It came mostly from President Biden, who ended his re-election effort after it became clear to him — reportedly — that he couldn’t defeat Donald J. Trump, the moron he defeated in the 2020 election.

I had hoped Biden would stay the course, but he chose otherwise … and I chose to back whatever decision he made.

Up stepped VP Harris. She is now the Democrats’ nominee for POTUS. She is taking the fight directly to Trump. Her fundraising effort has been spectacular, raising $300 million in the first month.

Harris and Trump now reportedly will debate in September. I am rubbing my mitts together in anticipation of that event. I look forward to seeing how Harris might respond to Trump’s “stalking” of her on a debate stage, a la what he did against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

I am acutely aware that Harris still has to catch Trump, who still, inexplicably, continues to cling to a narrow lead. Oh, how I hope she does.

I quit watching polls during election campaigns, as they tend to reflect the nation’s mood of the moment. The mood during this campaign, is of a highly energized electorate.

It’s contagious, too!