Will 2020 Be Another Watershed Election?
The 2016 General Election was a watershed.
In 2016, America suffered from a listless economy, joblessness, chaotic foreign policy, illegal southern border intrusions, and national security threats.
President Bill Clinton served immediately after the Cold War ended. Barack Obama’s presidency began at a time when Iraq was at least stabilized, the Middle East was largely quiet, and terrorist threats to the American homeland were minimal.
Mr. Clinton enjoyed a post-Cold War peace dividend. Mr. Obama anticipated another.
But Obama’s foreign policies destabilized of much of North Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pre-reelection, Obama insisted that al-Qaeda was “decimated” and “on the run,” even though security and intelligence sources warned of homeland threats, including terrorist infiltration across our southern border, by ISIS/ISIL, an al-Qaeda offshoot, which controlled large areas of Iraq and Syria.
Obama belatedly launched an anti-ISIS/ISIL bombing-only campaign, but the resulting conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and the residual effects of his/his administration’s policy blunders in Libya, Egypt. Iran and Afghanistan outlived Obama’s presidency.
On the domestic front, fewer Americans were employed at the end of Obama’s two terms than when he took office; poverty and food stamp use had soared; household income was declining; and America’s national debt had ballooned by three-quarters.
Furthermore, Obamacare raised the cost of health insurance and diminished access to care.
Frankly, there was nothing in Barack Obama’s meager background to suggest he would be an effective president, so any successor faced a major clean-up.
In 2016, gleeful, over-confident Democrats “welcomed” Donald J. Trump’s unlikely GOP nomination, but, despite general mockery, a largely-demoralized America elected the combative political outsider.
An inelegant extemporaneous speaker with a checkered personal history, perhaps, but, Donald Trump resonated with and inspired voters by rediscovering, re-expressing and rejuvenating the American public’s native optimism and common sense.
America was rewarded. In the three years before a Chinese virus shackled America’s economy, manufacturing jobs grew at the fastest rate in more than 30 years; median household income set records; and unemployment, including among African-, Hispanic- and Asian-American workers, reached historic lows.
Consumer confidence soared, as did equity markets, pension funds and personal 401ks. Tax cuts benefitted every American taxpayer. The poverty rate fell to a 17-year low. Violent crime dropped.
In addition, trade agreements were favorably renegotiated; America became an energy exporter; ISIS/ISIL was defeated; and American forces began exiting Iraq and Afghanistan.
All that progress – and more – occurred while the president endured constant, hostile attacks from national media, Obama holdovers in politicized federal agencies, and congressional Democrats.
The 2020 election could be a watershed, too, only in reverse.
Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, vice-president during Obama’s two-term malaise, has allowed avowed socialists Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, to create a 110-page “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force platform,” effectively a blueprint for advancing a Marxist agenda behind the veneer of a “return to normalcy,” “centrist” campaign conducted by keepers of an elderly, easily-manipulated Washington relic hiding in a Delaware basement.
The “Unity” scheme contains, among other impracticalities, a $2 trillion Green New Deal mandate to eliminate conventional energy sources from America’s power grid in fifteen years, a stealthy, incremental Medicare-for-All plan estimated to cost more than Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined, open borders, full amnesty for illegal aliens, radical racial/gender/“social justice” tests for public and private institutions, including enforced quotas, and an end to school choice, plus other Big Labor giveaways such as banning “right to work” laws that would force American workers to pay union dues.
Additionally, the “Unity” “fair housing” mandate would remove zoning control from communities, including prosperous suburbs, at the same time “Unity’s” impulses to defund police would encourage alarming increases in violent crime everywhere.
Furthermore, Biden-Sanders’ tax plan would reverse President Trump’s tax cuts, confiscate more money from family budgets, small businesses and communities, and impose nearly $4 trillion in new taxes over ten years, including one on real estate.
In truth, “Biden-Sanders” is a “Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez” plan, so, if he were to win, Joe Biden would merely serve as front man for policies he allegedly “beat” in the primaries.
Americans, especially Trump-haters, interested in restoring, maintaining or improving their communities and living standards should consider the Democrats’ 2020 alternative. Carefully read the “Biden-Sanders Unity” plan, and the eye-opening public statements “explaining” it.
Then decide what, if anything, about curbing Americans’ natural rights to life, safety, private property and equal protection, seems “normal” or “centrist.”
