Negativity is Not a Strategy

Two weeks before the 2020 election, candidate Joseph Biden issued this statement: “America was an idea. We’ve never lived up to it but we’ve never walked away from it before.“

The implied racial component in that recrimination encapsulated Biden’s negative campaign, one candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign and media surrogates are repeating.

Americans are generally optimistic. Along with hard work – something Harris herself assiduously avoids – optimism and positive thinking largely account for America’s character and prosperity.

Shared values – family, communities, faith, public safety, a sense of history, constitutional rights and freedoms – are the “ideas” that bind loyal Americans of all races.

Knowing that even a superior nation can improve, most regular Americans tune out the apocalyptic hysteria of modern politics. Majorities don’t seek revolution, repudiate the nation’s founding documents, nor do they wish to wreck the political, cultural and social institutions that have made America successful.

A unique “American idea,” institutionalized to correct historical inequities, created history’s longest-lasting, most stable and fair system of government. America represents the attainable idea that anyone who studies, works hard and lives responsibly can make better lives for themselves and their families.

It was their own party that lacked the ideals Biden and Harris claim the nation failed to reach.

In 1860, at the height of American slavery, only 1.6 percent of Americans, all Democrats, owned slaves.

After instigating and losing a Civil War to preserve slavery, Democrats became the party of the KKK, Jim Crow and segregation. It was Democrats who used water cannons and released dogs on blacks seeking civil rights. Democrats fought the Civil Rights Act, voting rights for black Americans and school desegregation.

Today, Democrats resist racial healing, because racial division better serves their party’s interests.

Harris took a knee for Black Lives Matter, promoted a fundraiser to bail out the rioters who trashed Minneapolis, and she has labeled anyone opposing the invasion of illegals over the borders Biden/Harris opened during their first days in office as “racists” and “xenophobes,” even though millions of never-vetted, unassimilated, military-age illegal males include criminals, child and drug traffickers and terrorists.

Joe Biden’s “America was an idea” remark, plus his and Kamala’s allegations of America’s “systemic racism” reveal and underscore their ignorance of the nation they sought – and seek – to govern.

Kamala Harris has other flaws, as well. The ability to think on one’s feet is essential in politics. The physical and mental strain of high profile public speaking and debates can be crippling, especially for people like Harris whose extemporaneous vacuity exposes her intellectual incapacity. Kamala desperately avoids going off-script.

Initial “enthusiasm” for Harris appears to have been an ephemeral combination of media hype and relief that Biden’s out.

However, media’s shameful, often scandalous efforts to whitewash/suppress Harris’s history and inadequacies must fail. No matter how media reinvent her, “Potemkin Kamala” will still be…Kamala.

The daughter of avowed Marxists, Harris has pushed Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, increasing personal and corporate taxes, censorship, racial reparations, defunding the police, outlawing fracking, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and halving the military, none of which she has personally disavowed publicly. Now, she’s trapped between her party’s extremes – traditional Democrats and the radical cultural/socialist/Hamas wing of which Harris is a part. Threading the needle will satisfy and energize neither.

In fact, Trump derangement is the lone thread that binds Harris and her party’s disparate elements. In the absence of a positive Biden/Harris record, the core components of Kamala’s campaign are contrived “joy,” empty promises, falsehoods, scare tactics and negativity.

But, Harris faces former President Donald Trump’s impressive record of successes and, arguably more importantly, his positive America/Americans First message that stands in stark contrast to Kamala’s negativism.

Voters know that Donald Trump is not a perfect man. But, Americans of all races thrived during his presidency, and, as history’s most investigated, viciously attacked and smeared president, people feel they know him, while Kamala is a chameleon.

Plus, Trump’s first term results confirm that he has done/can do the job, where, together, Biden and Harris have failed.

That’s why Democrats targeted Trump with grotesquely-partisan, Soviet-style court proceedings, are slandering him/his voters as “racists,” and insultingly trivializing black Americans as “victims.”

Kamala Harris’s negative, cynically-divisive, dishonest, issue-free messaging confirms that she and her party have nothing better to offer people of color – or, for that matter, anyone else.

https://www.pottsmerc.com/2024/09/08/jerry-shenk-negativity-is-not-a-winning-message/