Tuesday
is trash and recycling day on my block. Normally an invisible process, for the
past two weeks the same oversized cardboard box remained stuck in my blue bin. By
sheer coincidence yesterday I heard the truck coming down my street, and so in
my Florida man flip flops I grabbed the box and ran down the sidewalk to catch the
truck. Peering down at me from his cab, the driver pointed, indicating that I should put the box
in my neighbor’s blue bin, and within seconds my Amazon packaging was off on its
next journey.
After
last night, the Democrats could learn a thing or two about taking out the garbage.
Trash
is real; you can feel and smell it. You want it out of your home and thought of
no more. For the Democrats, once again, they made the case that wide swaths of
the electorate, that is, their fellow Americans, where nothing but trash. And
for the second time in three presidential elections, voters ran to the polls in
all manner of footwear to throw out these elites. Maybe this time the Democrats
will learn not to recycle bad candidates.
It
would also help the Democrats if they started to look around and run on actual
issues.
The
Harris campaign whistled inside-the-Beltway terms of “democracy in danger,”
“women’s health at risk,” “no guardrails,” and “Project 2025” and expected the
electorate to follow like Pavlov’s dog. Of course the electorate they needed to
target has no clue what these phrases mean—my Project 2025 is planning my 60th
birthday celebration. What drives voters is their pocketbooks and personal
safety. Apparently, eye care still isn’t covered under Obamacare, because
anyone looking north of the Rio Grande could see outright lawlessness from an
invading army of illegal aliens for whom taxpayers are being asked to shell out
for their housing, food, and legal defense. It turned Texas into a route
against the Democrats and opened up Arizona and Nevada for Republican gains.
It
also didn’t help the Democrats to demonize an entire class of the
population—that is, men. The logical extension of their abortion argument, not
lost on men, is that if you aren’t with Democrats for full abortion rights,
then you hate women. Yet when the Dems lose the critical male vote, they then
blame it on…men. It’s a circular firing squad against the voters they need most. And
because of the premise that abortion is the first, foremost, and only issue,
the idea that many Americans are facing diminishing purchasing power and
sky-high mortgage rates gets completely missed. Maybe the Dems can’t see this
clearly from all the pot smoke they are trying to legalize.
Beyond
aggravating the overall electorate, the Democrats were their own worst enemy
with their candidate. They had someone to run, namely the democratically
elected nominee and current President, Joe Biden. Instead, like a Sopranos
mob war over garbage hauling routes, they whacked the boss. Somehow elite media
didn’t seem to think this was a threat to democracy What the Democrats also
forgot is that when you stage a coup, you kill the former leader or at least exile
him to a third country where he ends his days in isolation enjoying his
ill-gotten gains. Instead they kept their petulant former boss in the White
House and sent him to Delaware for the weekends. So today’s New York Times
headline describing the country as “America Hires a Strongman” drips with so
much irony you would need a stack of napkins to wipe it off your face as if it
were a melting ice cream cone. An organic, lactose-free, free-range non-binary
cow ice cream cone, naturally.
One
last point for the Dems Project 2028, especially if they field another woman,
is the concession speech on election night (or the early morning after). It’s
the most painful thing to address friends and family after losing—I’ve had to
do it as a candidate myself. But this year and in 2016 neither Kamala nor Hillary
could do it. Heck, Hillary had even called Trump to concede. Man up and face
the people when you know you are done. Talking to cameras and some dour-faced
staffers the next afternoon makes for a terrible last image of your campaign.
The voters expect it, and men respect it.
On January 20th, trucks will roll into the two most secure residences in Washington, D.C. Men will get out of the cabs with reflective vests over their cold-weather gear. Look closely, because they are the movers taking away the previous occupants’ possessions; it’s understandable if you mistook them for taking out the garbage, but that would be deplorable.
©
2024 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved
