Taking Out The Garbage

 

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 60^th 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 20^th, 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