Posted on 10/28/2020 3:58:32 PM PDT by Ennis85
about a whole lot more than Donald Trump, or Joe Biden.
The election has been classed as a contest between old decency and raw, rumbustious America First rhetoric. The characters of both men have been instilled in their campaigns.
One, contradictory, argumentative and bristling with brash confidence. The other, plodding pragmatic and relentlessly reliable.
Trump, the maverick outsider last time out, now has to stand on a record which can be scrutinised no matter how many rinses it gets in the spin-cycle.
Biden too has a long shadow going back over decades. He has been in the environs of Democratic aristocracy long enough to be classed as a blue-blood among rank and file.
Considering 60 million Americans have already voted, it is something of a misnomer to call November 3 “Election Day”, but it will be no less historic or epoch-defining for all that.
It has already been described as the most polarising election ever – the “United States” has seldom been less so. Passions have be inflamed and racial tensions are at dangerously explosive levels.
The 45th president of the US has spent the past four years priming “the base”. He had felt a roaring economy would propel him smoothly to a second term on Capitol Hill. The Make America Great Again momentum would obliterate all in its way once the bandwagon got rolling.
Then came the pandemic.
The red-hot economy froze and millions were laid off. Only days ago, Mr Trump raged that all he heard about on television was: “Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.”
No end of Twitter storms or mass rallies could counter the overwhelming evidence of an invisible virus, nonetheless getting the upper hand.
It has done precisely the same wherever it is allowed to run amok. Last week, the US hit a new record, registering more than 83,700 cases in a single day. Mr Trump was exposed as having no strategy to control the devastating spread. It followed he could not therefore deliver a promised economic recovery.
Mr Trump had also boasted to the faithful he would beat “Sleepy Joe”, although he has yet to deliver a cohesive argument against the Democratic nominee. The “Lock him up” chants at mask-less rallies were unlikely to reverberate too raucously in a country which has seen more than 225,000 Americans die.
It is not surprising an electorate might seek a credible explanation as to why a country endowed with wealth, experts, advanced biomedical researchers and a peerless biotech industry could be the nation with the highest death toll from the virus.
Time will soon tell whether his most unforgivable failing with voters was his unwillingness to take seriously the most acute domestic challenge his country has faced in recent history.
The question is not whether they are mutually exclusive but which takes priority. PDJT rightly says “The cure cannot be worse than the disease”.
Old and sick people die more than young people, that’s the nature of life. Saving them from dying of COVID doesn’t save them from dying of other things. With a functioning economy things can be done to protect old and sick people, but there are millions of old and sick people and you cannot protect everyone.
We agree.
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