The Underlying Challenge in Voting Democrat Today

Ever since the beginning of the Republic, political parties have had to ask their voters to disregard a few occasional disagreements, and look instead at the bigger picture, in hope that their agreements would outweigh the disagreements, winning them their votes in the end..

For example, the Federalists might ask their supporters to forgive their support for a possibly unconstitutional bank, and support them anyway because of their broad and amazing economic and foreign policy successes… while the Jeffersonians (a.k.a. the Democratic-Republicans, back then) would ask their supporters to forgive their support for slavery and their Indian double-dealing, and vote for them anyway out of respect for their commitment to limited-government. Yes, even way back then, voters sometimes had to forgive some big errors in order to support a political party.

It could be argued, however, that today’s Democratic Party has exceeded all past examples in the sheer number of failures that they must ask their voters to “look beyond.” Please, they seem to be begging, disregard this failure and that mistake, pay no attention to this error and that outright lie, forget about the mounting stack of crimes and scandals, and just support us anyway.

Never before in American history has one party had so many issues to sweep under the rug as an election approaches.

Just consider some of the outrages, the misjudgments, the destructive policies that today’s Democratic candidates must convince their voters to forgive or disregard:

Today’s Democrat voter is asked to believe that there is no vote fraud anywhere… in this deeply divided nation, voters are asked to believe that many precincts, sometimes even whole wards, could go 100% for one presidential candidate, without a single vote being cast for his opponent.

Rational people know this is a statistical impossibility, but there are whole wards in Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and other fraud-ridden big cities, in which the Democrats and election workers make that claim, reporting 100% votes for the Democrat candidate, and their “honest voters” must find a way to deny this clear conspiracy of fraud by their party, and support them anyway.

Today’s Democrat voter is asked to believe that you can take an inner-city school full of gang recruiters, rapists, drug dealers, and muggers, who terrorize their fellow students and their teachers on a daily basis, and you can turn that den of iniquity into a model of academic excellence by funding a basketball program and tweaking the teacher-student ratio.

All sensible people know that such schools are doomed until you lock up the criminals, and keep them locked up. Nothing – not better textbooks or more teachers or prettier gyms – is going to change these schools if we don’t carve the cancers out of them. But Democrats ask their voters to disregard the criminals, and just throw money at bricks and mortar and teachers, as our inner city schools devolve into tragic chaos.

Today’s Democrat voter is asked to believe that a distant government knows exactly how much every employee is worth, and how much every company can afford to pay them. Today’s Democrat voter is expected to demand a living wage, a salary sufficient for raising a family, even for starter jobs, for part-time jobs, for entry-level foot-in-the-door kinds of jobs that were meant for teenagers, students and moonlighters.

Since anyone with the most basic understanding of mathematics knows that companies cannot afford to pay such wages, Democrat voters are expected to blind themselves to the undeniable fact that minimum wage rules reduce the number of jobs available, resulting in greater joblessness, reduced opportunity, a shrinking economy. And despite this frontal assault on productivity, Democrat candidates expect their voters to still consider their party to be “the party of the worker!”

Today’s Democrat voter is asked to believe that blood-thirsty armies – people who behead people for fun, throw bombs into packed church services, and use their own little children as suicide bombers – will turn suddenly peaceful if we just apologize to them for imagined past injustices.

Sensible people know that there are people who can reform, and people who will not. Sensible people know that the islamofascist threat, as represented today by ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, and the Muslim brotherhood, fears and respects nothing but greater military force, and will continue their efforts toward world conquest as long as their current methods are working… and they do certainly seem to be working, don't they?

Democrat candidates need their voters to look the other way and pretend that the last six years of growing islamofascist attacks on Christians, Jews, and others across the world – tens of thousands of murders across dozens of countries – haven’t actually happened on their watch. Democrats need voters to find someone else to blame, or just accept it, or forget about it… anything but acknowledging the fact that recent Democrat foreign policy has completely reversed all prior gains against such terrorists, both at home and abroad, making our world a MUCH more dangerous place.

Today’s Democrat voter is asked to believe that a nationalized healthcare system that has massively increased costs, outrageously reduced people’s healthcare coverage, and driven medical professionals and whole hospitals out of business entirely, is still, somehow, in the best interest of the American people.

Democrat candidates ask their voters to forget how many laws were violated to pass Obamacare, how many lies were stated and how many promises were broken… remember “You have to pass the bill to see what’s in it!” and "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor!" and "More people will be insured if we pass it!" – all in the interest of unionizing a seventh of the American economy and bringing it all under miserable government control.

Any rational viewer can see that Obamacare has been an unmitigated disaster, and ought to be repealed immediately, making room for a fair debate on the many free market options for fixing the system’s problems that were shunned by the Democrats in power in 2009-2010. Anyone with common sense can see that the Republican party is the one supporting better and more affordable healthcare for the common man, so the Democrats need their voters to shut off their common sense, and never acknowledge it again.

Today’s Democrat voter is told that we can solve rampant unemployment by importing and legalizing tens of millions MORE immigrant workers. The Democrats tell their voters that employers will expand if only we give the vote to tens of millions of illegal aliens, and invite them in to compete against natural citizens, and against law-abiding immigrants who followed the rules, in competition for those scant few jobs.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that a nation that’s shedding jobs needs more jobs, not more potential workers. It’s almost impossible to believe that a political party that wants to welcome in more unemployed people – by the millions – could ever again win the support of America’s working class… but that’s exactly what the Democrats are asking their voters to believe.

Today’s Democrat voter is told that Democrat policy is good for our energy bills, good for domestic manufacturing in the energy sector, good for the energy worker… even though the Democrats in office have launched a frontal assault on the coal mines, oil rigs, natural gas farms and pipeline industries that support domestic energy and employ millions of American energy workers.

Anyone with sense can tell that closing coal mines and denying oil drilling permits both kills jobs for American workers and increases energy costs for all of us. Anyone paying attention can tell that government favoritism shown to the manufacturers and importers of grossly inefficient Chinese solar panels and even less productive European windmills reduces our energy availability, incredibly increases our energy costs, and drives Americans out of work. And yet, the Democrats want their gullible victims to keep on voting for the party that has promulgated all this economic destruction.

Today’s Democrat voter is ordered to believe that convicted criminals aren’t really a threat, so we should let them out of jail, and let them vote, and let them collect food stamps and return to their pre-capture habits of rape, robbery, and assault… but in fact, the voter is told, the real threat to our society comes from church-going Christians, and hunters, and football fans, and police, and insurance companies and entrepreneurs, and manufacturers and merchants – the very people who used to be considered the honorable foundation of the community, before the Democrats got in charge.

Any impartial observer can see that the nation has been turned upside down over these past eight years. The wheels of government now work for illegal aliens and against legal immigrants… the government now invites disease-ridden foreigners in, rather than closing the borders to protect Americans from such public health threats… the government now offers food stamps, free college tuition, and even military recruitment services to illegal aliens, when native-born American citizens and legal immigrants find government assistance and military jobs heavily restricted or even closed to them. But today’s Democrat candidate demands that voters disregard all such value judgments and outrageous prejudices by the modern Democrat establishment. They know that just acknowledging the existence of such outrages might cause a voter to rethink his vote.

Today’s Democrat voter has been raised on a steady diet – from school to press to pop culture – of anti-Republican, anti-conservative, anti-religious, and anti-Capitalist propaganda. Today’s voter has been told that only the Left, only the Democrats, are honest enough to be entrusted with the reins of government.

The Democratic candidate must talk his potential voters into blinding themselves from all the evidence staring them in the face, proving that all of the Democrats' claims of moral high ground are a lie.

We see the intentional abandonment of our embassy at Benghazi, following an illegal war on Libya, We see a painfully won war in Iraq surrendered to the conquering army of ISIS, We see flagrant financial waste at the White House, starting at the very top with First Family vacations that would make 18th century Bourbon monarchs shudder, Corrupt government loans to bankrupt but connected firms in the Department of Energy, Abuse of the audit power by the Internal Revenue Service, Toleration of campaign finance crime by the Federal Election Commission, Attacks on private employers by the Environmental Protection Agency, Politicizing of everything from curricula to cafeteria by the Department of Education, The complete failure of a multimillion dollar healthcare website, ill-designed by a crony of the First Lady…

And despite all this and more, the Democratic Party demands that voters dismiss all such issues from consideration at election time. The voter is just told “not to worry;” despite all evidence to the contrary, the Democratic Party holds the moral high ground here. The Democratic Party must be considered the height of ethics, however ridiculous a claim that may be.

For 220 years, Democrat voters have been asked to disregard a lot of painful truths. But for a long time, it wasn’t all that hard, because the good points long seemed to outweigh the bad.

But today, when the triumvirate of Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi has been able to do so much damage on so many fronts, weaving corruption into the very fabric of every policy they’ve promulgated, the evidence may at last be too overwhelming for even the most casual American voter to overlook.

However great one’s desire to give the benefit of the doubt may be, it is no longer possible to deny that the current administration, enabled by the Democrats of both houses of Congress and the state capitols, is utterly counterproductive. Whether it be intentional or unintentional, whether it be failure or plan, criminal fraud or merely negligence, the fact is unmistakable: Democrat leadership has become destructive, to an unimaginable and heretofore unpredictable degree.

Democrat voters are continually asked to avert their eyes, to look away from this, and that, and this, and that…. But when there’s nowhere that’s safe to look, eventually, the only thing to do is open your eyes and admit the truth.

It would be best, of course, if the Republican Party were better at enunciating conservative policies, but that can come with time. In the meantime, at least, the first step for the voters is to acknowledge reality.

As hard as it may be to admit that you’ve been lied to and cheated for decades, let’s look at the bright side: if you can put up with the abuse, simply admitting to being a victim can’t be as hard as enduring the abuse itself. Open your eyes and face the truth.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based international trade compliance trainer. A former minor Republican party official, campaign consultant, and movement conservative activist, his columns regularly appear in Illinois Review. He has now been a recovering politician for over seventeen years.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook or LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo.

Minimum-wage increase proposals are NOT about minimum wages.
It's about UNION wages (read government employees mostly) and UNION DUES.

Like "Artie" on another thread wrote.

"but my theory is that
this is one of the foundations of single payer.
Down the road, as single payer replaces ObamaCare,
all healthcare workers will become in essence government employees.
Think about how many thousands of new, dues paying union members will magically become part of the SEIU.

Barry had sealed this deal with Andy Stern years ago.
Barry promised Andy and the SEIU thousands of new members,
Andy says
great,
this is the wage structure we need
so we can pay the slush fund.
Gotta pay a living wage to all of the new union members
so dues can be extracted
and kickbacks to the dems can be made.

It’s convoluted
but what dem scheme isn’t,
especially when large sums of cash are involved?"

So read the following:

Union Support Of Minimum Wage Hike Is Self-Interested

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, ... was quick to emphasize that her organization's support of a more-than-twofold increase in the minimum wage was "not about growing unions." This may be true — but it's also undeniable that such a move would have a profound impact on growing union paychecks, even if those unions don't count a single minimum-wage employee in their ranks. The fine print can be found in union contracts. Each year, the Department of Labor's Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) releases a number of union collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). Unsurprisingly, many CBAs available in the OLMS database LINK union salaries and wage rates to the federal minimum wage. There are a number of methods that unions use to accomplish this end. The two most popular appear to be setting baseline union wages as a percentage above the minimum wage, and mandating a flat wage at a set level above the minimum wage. One example is a series of CBAs signed with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). Their contracts mandated that"(w)henever the federal legal minimum wage is increased, minimum wage (in the agreement) shall be increased so that each will be at least fifteen (15%) percent higher than such legal minimum wage." There's also an SEIU local's contract, which ordered that"(t)he minimum hourly wage rates shall exceed any statutory applicable minimum wage rate by 50 cents." Some unions have also arranged contracts where the employer MUST renegotiate their contracts in case of a minimum-wage hike, NO MATTER HOW LONG is left on the pact's life span. The possibility for abuse here is staggering:Unions with average wages WELL ABOVE the minimum wage CAN INSERT such clauses into their contracts, FORCING negotiations in industries not otherwise affected by a wage hike. Given the limited number of CBAs available in the OLMS database, it's impossible to determine just how widespread this practice is. But at least one union has trumpeted this arrangement as "one of the many advantages of being a union member." Earlier this year on its blog, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union proudly boasted that "oftentimes, union contracts ARE TRIGGERED TO IMPLEMENT WAGE HIKES IN CASE OF MINIMUM WAGE INCREASES." This is a stunning admission of SELF-INTERESTt for an organization that's actively PUSHING minimum-wage hikes at both the state and federal levels of government. It also raises questions about unions' growing use of nonunion "worker centers" like the Restaurant Opportunities Center, OUR Walmart, Fast Food Forward and other organizations that have made headlines in recent months. These groups advocate many policies that would affect those businesses that pay a minimum wage — restaurants, retailers, etc. — and a minimum-wage hike is often the FIRST demand that these union front groups make. This only casts further suspicion on the motives of the labor unions funding these groups. No matter how you look at it, the benefits that these unions stand to reap from a minimum-wage hike should raise questions about their real motives — and whether they're only manipulating the debate over fast-food wages for their own benefit. Berman is the executive director at the Center for Union Facts.

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