{UAH} SORRY BUT TRUMP DOESN'TCUT IT AS A CAMPAIGN STRATEGY

Obsessing over Trump is a luxury the working class cannot afford

by Tiana Lowe  

January 12, 2022 06:45 AM

Democrats in Congress, including the 26 who have already announced they will not run for reelection, have accepted that this year's midterm elections will likely be their downfall. But never underestimate the zeal of a convert.

While liberals lament the lack of progress on climate change and social spending packages, and while centrists panic over inflation fueled both by monetary and fiscal policy, the Never Trump Democrats remain in stage three of the grieving process: bargaining.

Over at the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin advises that Democrats campaign for 2022 on pure whataboutism.

"Don’t expect the media to blanket their coverage with headlines of the GOP’s transgressions," Rubin writes, as insightful as ever. "Since the media surely won’t do it, Democrats themselves should point out to voters that putting the Republicans in the majority would be a recipe for nonstop chaos, confusion, infighting and paralysis."

That chaos, predictably, is not any policy problem fomented by Republicans in power but rather anything and everything related to former President Donald Trump's eleventh-hour meltdown over losing the 2020 election.

"Midterm voters must decide," Rubin writes. "Do they want to give the unhinged party that can’t admit their cult leader lost and still makes excuses for the domestic terrorists the reins of power?" (You may have to read that sentence twice — I apologize for the Post's apparent failure to edit Rubin's work.)

If you, like Rubin, have been able to spend the last two years earning a full salary in pajamas behind a MacBook screen, maybe you can afford to be a single-issue voter obsessed with someone no longer in office. But the working class literally cannot.

This year has seen the highest inflation since the Volcker era, fueled in no small part by Democrats continuing to blow out the budget. The average worker has taken an effective pay cut of around 2% in the past year. And the distribution of inflation is effectively regressive, with goods that comprise a greater share of the working class's budget, such as gas and food, seeing disproportionate rises in price. And even as paychecks shrink and goods become more scarce and expensive, public schools in Democratic districts are already beginning to shut down again. Once again, this threatens the income prospects of working parents, disproportionately working mothers, who have to take leave to accommodate the farce that is distance learning.

Rubin's buddy Bill Kristol published a similar bit of wishcasting.

"How much could Trump-caused, Trump-aligned, or Trump-adjacent madness damage Republican candidates in 2022?" Kristol asks. "We don’t know, partly because we’ve never really had a situation like the current one. What we do know is that the great bulk of the Republican Party’s candidates will be aligned with and perhaps seen to be marching behind a former president who’s not popular with swing voters, whose visibility could motivate lots of Democrats to vote, and whose behavior could make it far easier for Democrats to link Republicans to unpopular causes. The report by the January 6th Committee could play a role here too."

Sorry, but nobody living outside I-495 is going to cast a vote based on what the Jan. 6 committee produces.

One proof of this is that Terry McAuliffe already tried it — and in a state President Joe Biden had won by 10 points just a year earlier. He uttered Trump's name so often that it seemed he was brain-damaged and had forgotten who was president. You could say the same of Biden, who came to campaign for McAuliffe and spoke almost exclusively about Trump. Unsurprisingly, this didn't work.

Running against Trump in 2018 and 2020 made sense because Trump was actually president. He is now, as Biden rightly calls him, the "former guy," chilling on his golf course in Palm Beach. He is not responsible for reopening your children's schools, getting the ports unclogged and your packages to your doors, making food abundant and cheap enough to feed your family, or securing enough gas for you to fill your tank.

The public may hate Trump as a person, but they already hate Democrats as the party in power even more. When Biden entered office, about 43% of the country thought we were on the right track. That figure is now down to 30%.

Even if Biden were on the ballot, it wouldn't help much. Biden has squandered a 55% approval rating at the start of his presidency on the minimal expectation that he simply not be as bombastic as Trump. He is now 10 points underwater.

If obsessing over Trump didn't work in Virginia, a blue state, why would it work in the Senate battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, or Pennsylvania?

Sorry, "but Trump" doesn't cut it as a campaign strategy.

EM         -> {   Gap   at   46  } – {Allan Barigye is a Rwandan predator}

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
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                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
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