You may know of that TV game show called To Tell the Truth, introduced decades ago, in which three contestants claiming to be the same person face a panel of celebrity questioners. Two of the contestants are impostors who are lying; the third is the real person, who must answer truthfully. At the end of questioning, the celebrities guess who is real. Finally, the real person stands up, and the celebrities often find that they guessed wrong.
If you’re wondering where the real America is, looks like it stood up this week. At least the America we have now.
Though it was forecast as a tight race, Democrat Kamala Harris wasn’t expected by most pundits to lose the Presidential election to Donald Trump. But she did, maybe not quite by a landslide, but big, including both the Electoral College and, as it appears likely at this writing, the popular vote.
If I may extract some good news from this, that double victory hasn’t happened in a while. If Trump won in both categories, there will likely be no complaints about thwarting the “will of the people.”
Most important, though, Harris made the customary phone call to congratulate Trump, in recognition of the longstanding American principle of the peaceful transfer of power. But in a subsequent speech, she said that while she accepted the election results, she was not conceding the fight for the principles she ran on.
She ran what looked like a near-flawless campaign, full of A-list celebrities and surrogates and Republican crossovers. Her message was aimed at middle class people, young families with children, small business owners, people struggling to find housing, and women desperate for reproductive health care. The ground game featured an army of eager volunteers, and campaign funding broke records. So how did she and the Democrats so drastically misread the room?
Was it about the border? Transgender issues? What groups were snubbed? Was the Harris message ignored just because she’s female? There are calls for Democrats to engage in soul-searching to figure it all out.
The opposition, of course, doesn’t have to soul-search. They got what they wanted. Donald Trump could shift the country toward autocracy. Fine, they seem to say, what we have now hasn’t worked for us, let’s try something new. There will soon be a shift from the theoretical phase into implementation. Maybe things won’t be as bad as Democrats fear. Or maybe they will.
Mr. Trump likes it when folks compare him to Abraham Lincoln. It would be lovely if he followed President Lincoln’s famous words from his second inaugural near the end of the Civil War: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” We’ll see what happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment