PURELY POLITICAL

The "Other" Joe could win the Presidency

Joe Manchin For President

The radical Left has a chokehold on the Democratic Party, and its elected officials don’t have the courage to stand up to the bullying, except for one man: West Virginia’s U.S. Senator Joe Manchin.

I hate writing this, because the last thing I want to see is a Democratic Party in the ascendant. However, as I gleefully watch the party decompose, there is one way it could save itself from interment and that would be by nominating Joe Manchin as its 2024 presidential candidate.

Though he fully supported President Biden’s spending packages (other than the $1.9-trillion [or whatever] “Build Back Better” behemoth), he also, according to factcheck.org, voted with President Trump 60.5% of the time. According to Congressional Quarterly Roll Call, Manchin voted against his own party’s bills 38.5% of the time.

In the case of overturning Roe v. Wade, should that come to pass, Senator Manchin lined up with all Republicans in voting against the Democrat’s recent plan to federally enshrine abortion, thereby negating any state restrictions.

Though the public perception is that Democrats would be more “energized” by the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade than Republicans, my guess is that it would be a 50/50 wash, instilling about as much enthusiasm on the pro-abortion side as it would among the anti-abortion crowd. A recent Monmouth poll, for example, found that 44% of respondents believe Congress should allow abortion nationwide, while 43% would let states decide the issue.

Joe Manchin should announce his candidacy for president as a Democrat in early winter 2023. He would, of course be pilloried by the far Left. Alec Baldwin has already called Manchin “a traitorous Democrat” for his vote with Republicans against the mis-named (aren’t they all?) “Women’s Health Protection Act.” No doubt other far-Left types in Hollywood – and the Nancy Pilosis, Ilhan Omars and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes in Congress – would rail against him, but Manchin could possibly garner enough votes from the greater middle and saner contingent of the Democratic Party to overcome the Left’s noisy and likely nasty opposition.

It would be a long shot, but if the Democrats got their act together and nominated a Joe Manchin ticket (Tulsi Gabbard as V.P.?), they might be able to persuade enough nervous Republicans to vote for them and possibly overtake the 2024 Republican Party nominee in swing states to win, especially if the Republican nominee is Mr. Trump.

But, the guessing in my household is that Democrats will cower at the feet of the Radical Left and nominate a delusional far left candidate.

However, as long as the Senate and House are controlled by Republicans, a moderate Democrat such as Manchin in the White House would be some comfort if a Republican did lose in 2024. Many, including me, would be okay with that situation, though my preference would be a Republican president and a Republican Congress in order to expedite the changes necessary to save the Republic.

What Would Trump Have Done?

Last week I proffered that no one knows for sure how a President Trump would have handled a series of situations, but guessed that he would likely have handled them better than the current White House tenant. Here’s more thinking on that.

1)    Let’s assume Russian President Putin would have gone ahead and invaded Ukraine despite the warning from President Trump that there would be “dire consequences” of such an act. I do believe Trump would have acted more quickly and decisively to help Ukraine resist. After all, during the Obama presidency, the U.S. refused to give or sell to Ukraine defensive weapons; President Trump okayed the purchase of defensive weapons by Ukraine soon after taking office. Biden’s first impulse? Offer Zelensky safe passage out of town, which elicited the Ukrainian president’s famous retort: “I don’t need transportation; I need weapons.” Plus, that $40-billion package of aid for Ukraine would not have fallen completely on U.S. taxpayers. President Trump would have required that the other NATO nations pony up their fair share of the costs of defending Ukraine.

2)    The $100-plus cost of a barrel of oil would never have happened under a Trump presidency, as the U.S. had already attained energy independence, the putative mission of the Department of Energy. As any war progressed in Ukraine, the U.S. would have ramped up energy production and ensured that Western Europe’s energy needs could be and would be supplied by U.S. companies.

3)    Covid-19 restrictions, lockdowns, and mask mandates would not have been a factor in the resurgence of the virus; such procedures would never have been mandated country-wide. Instead, a public policy of education and virtuous encouragement would have been instituted. The Press would then have been able to blame a million Covid deaths on Trump, but nothing would have changed; the results would have been the same. Luckily – for the Republican Party and for President Trump – Mr. Biden owns the 700,000-plus deaths that have occurred since he became president and that virtually no one in mainstream media ever blames him for. The ever-present “Death Clock” mysteriously disappeared after Biden’s inauguration.

4)    The overturning of Roe v. Wade would be a positive development, and a President Trump would have calmly overseen the government’s timely acceptance of the Supreme Court’s decision, whatever it turned out to be. We can expect the Biden administration to weaponize the decision if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

5)    There would probably have been an “inflationary spiral” regardless of who was president. Mr. Trump has frequently stated how much he liked “other people’s money,” but my guess is that the overly generous $1.7 trillion pandemic “American Rescue Plan” act drawn up in 2021 that sent money indiscriminately to voters would not have been so generous and that, while there would have been some inflation, it wouldn’t have been nearly as high. A President Trump would have moved to “fix” the supply chain disruptions a lot sooner than the flat-footed Biden administration.

Laugh of the Week

This week’s belly laugh was uttered by former Democratic National Committee chairman and failed presidential candidate Howard Dean, who said on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that Democrats are “the party of hope,” and that  Republicans were “the party of fear, anger, and pessimism.”

Speaking about Republicans, Dean opined, “They believe that there is no future for human beings, and they are creating an America, or trying to, where there is no future for the United States of America. I think they are going to lose because of that.”

Democrats “the party of hope?”

Republicans “the party of fear, anger, and pessimism?”

“No future for the United States”?

You and I know nothing could be further from the truth but if Mr. Dean really believes this (and I don’t believe he does; he’s just jabbering nonsense as left-wing talking heads often do), he and his party are more delusional than anyone has seriously suspected up until now.