[ Posted Monday, July 6th, 2020 – 16:51 UTC ]
The Trump campaign is setting itself up for a rather large tactical failure. Whether the campaign fails overall in November is a bigger question, of course, but they seem to already be failing in one crucial aspect of any successful presidential campaign, and that is to define your opponent early. This worked wonders for Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, and it also did the trick for George W. Bush against John Kerry. Throughout the spring and summer, the incumbent president successfully defined their challenger in a very negative way with the public.
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[ Posted Friday, July 3rd, 2020 – 15:25 UTC ]
Instead, please enjoy the following column, which ran on the Fourth of July, 2008. Just to remind everyone, at that particular point in time Barack Obama had secured the Democratic presidential nomination, but the general election was still months away.
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 30th, 2020 – 16:00 UTC ]
Every so often I like to tempt fate by writing an article which could easily (and monumentally) be proven wrong within mere hours. Today is one of those days, because I feel pretty confident in predicting that Colorado and Utah will essentially show the rest of the country how a mail-in election should be done. I seriously doubt we'll see scenes of frustrated voters not being able to cast their ballots in a timely way, because with universal mail-in voting, that's not really a problem. No long lines, no machines that don't work right, no poll workers who don't know how to operate the machines, no voter-suppression efforts (both overt and covert) at all. And while Colorado is at the end of a long journey from being a purple state to a very blue one, Utah is still about as staunchly Republican as it gets -- proving that mail-in voting is not a partisan issue at all. Or it shouldn't be, at the very least.
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[ Posted Friday, June 26th, 2020 – 17:29 UTC ]
America, led by President Donald Trump and (mostly) Republican governors across the country, launched a grand experiment a few months back. Rather than following guidelines and milestones recommended by top epidemiologists, each state would reopen its economy as it saw fit. If your governor felt comfortable enough with the state of things, then the doors would be thrown open. This all started just before Memorial Day weekend, when Trump decided he was bored with the pandemic. And now it's becoming pretty obvious that this experiment has failed, and failed badly. And tens of thousands of Americans are paying a very steep price for this exercise in unfounded optimism.
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[ Posted Friday, June 19th, 2020 – 18:14 UTC ]
As time goes by, it is looking more and more like the television show Trump: The Reality-Show President is just not going to be renewed for a fifth season. After all, Fox News just released a poll showing Donald Trump a whopping 12 points behind Joe Biden. That's tough news from your sponsoring network, obviously. When CNN released an earlier poll showing Trump down 14 points, he had his lawyer try to intimidate the network into retracting the poll. It didn't work, of course. So what will Trump's lawyer now have to say to Fox?
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[ Posted Thursday, June 18th, 2020 – 16:48 UTC ]
To President Donald Trump, today's Supreme Court ruling was not actually about the hundreds of thousands of young people whose legal residence in this country hung on this court case. Instead, it was about one thing and one thing alone, which is pretty much the same thing that everything is about for Donald Trump: himself. After learning of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision denying Trump the ability to strip legal protection from the "dreamers," Trump petulantly took to Twitter to ask: "Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me?" Once again, Trump reduced an issue of monumental importance to the level of schoolyard gossip (about him, of course). Maybe if the Supremes really really liked Trump, things would be different? Because that's obviously what it's all about, not all that legal mumbo-jumbo or hundreds of thousands of young people's lives.
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[ Posted Friday, June 12th, 2020 – 18:07 UTC ]
President Donald Trump seems to have settled on a theme for his campaign, as he doubles down on blatant racism. Think that's too strongly put? We don't. Consider the following, from just the past week:
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[ Posted Thursday, June 11th, 2020 – 16:46 UTC ]
While the overall news on the coronavirus pandemic has gotten better on a national scale, we could be seeing the very beginnings of a second wave developing in individual states. This is worrisome, but what is even more concerning is that we may be about to repeat the mistakes of the first wave all over again. The process of closing down the economy and sheltering in place was painful, and the reopening and lifting of restrictions got very political, which adds up to an enormous reluctance by governors to go through it all over again. Which, if true, would mean that the second wave may prove to be worse than the first.
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[ Posted Monday, June 8th, 2020 – 16:58 UTC ]
I know we all have plenty to worry about these days, so I apologize in advance for adding another possible item to the list. But we could be heading for a very worrisome situation indeed, because contrary to how Americans have experienced past presidential elections (well... other than in the year 2000...), we may not actually know who won on the night of the election. There are a combination of factors which have set up this rather unique situation, and it may not even come to pass if a few of these variables change by November. But the possibility now exists that we won't know for days -- or even weeks -- who won the Electoral College and thus the presidency. Which, obviously, could lead to chaos, especially considering what Donald Trump will be saying and tweeting in the meantime.
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[ Posted Friday, May 29th, 2020 – 17:16 UTC ]
Anyone "tired of all the winning" yet? Just asking....
In the same week America passed the grim milestone of 100,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic, a black man was suffocated by a white police officer while three other cops stood by and either helped him commit this crime or did absolutely nothing to prevent it. Since then, there have been sometimes-violent protests in the streets of not only Minneapolis but in several other cities across the country. The dead man was accused of the crime of trying to use a fake $20 bill at a convenience store. The cops, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, provided him with a death sentence -- for the transgression of trying to pass a fake twenty.
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