Beating A Bully Requires Strength And Cunning…

An elder­ly African-American man asked me a cou­ple of days ago, “son do you think they gonna get Trump out­ta there”?
I thought the ques­tion a lit­tle odd, you know, since there is real­ly no “they”, just us.
I had no answer for him, except to say that I have no way of know­ing what the out­come of the elec­tions will be, con­sid­er­ing that American elec­tions can swing one way or the oth­er at the last moment on a sin­gle issue.

In my life­time only two (elect­ed) American pres­i­dents have been vot­ed out of office after only one term.
They are Presidents Jimmy Carter and Herbert Walker Bush.
That means that in 28 years or sev­en elec­tion cycles, the nation has not had a one-term pres­i­dent.
It is not the eas­i­est task to unseat a sit­ting pres­i­dent, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the oth­er par­ty is immersed in a long drawn out pri­ma­ry slugfest.
Herbert Walker Bush became pres­i­dent, after being Reagan’s vice pres­i­dent for eight years. He was swept into pow­er on the nos­tal­gia many Republicans, Independents & faux Democrats had of Ronald Reagan, after his two terms in office ended.

It is not often that a par­ty gets three terms in the exec­u­tive man­sion either, as was evi­dent after the increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar Bill Clinton’s sec­ond term was up. Even though Clinton was impeached and acquit­ted, his per­son­al pop­u­lar­i­ty con­tin­ued to climb long after he was out of office.
Unfortunately, Clinton’s vice pres­i­dent, Al Gore was unable to cash in on either his for­mer Boss’s econ­o­my or his pop­u­lar­i­ty. Gore chose to run away from Clinton, claim­ing he was his own man, even though Bill Clinton enjoyed tremen­dous pop­u­lar sup­port after he was impeached and acquit­ted, and left the econ­o­my in excel­lent shape and a lot of new mil­lion­aires to boot.

Even though President George W Bush had acquired the pres­i­den­cy under a cloud of hang­ing chads and vot­er sup­pres­sion in Florida where his younger broth­er Jeb was Governor, and even though he was immense­ly unpop­u­lar, the events of September 11^th, 2001 all but guar­an­teed him a sec­ond term.
But though Bush 43^rd had got­ten two terms as a result of the September 11^th attack, by the time he was through his sec­ond term, a tank­ing econ­o­my and gen­er­al malaise as a result of the Iraq war, the nation could not wait to elect a Democrat.
That Democrat was Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American to be elect­ed pres­i­dent.
Two terms lat­er and hav­ing saved the nation from finan­cial col­lapse, the nation was on a sol­id eco­nom­ic foot­ing.
Despite the strong eco­nom­ic indi­ca­tors, stag­nat­ing wages and a widen­ing gap between the haves and the have-nots, was enough to keep many vot­ers home. and even though Hillary Clinton won the pop­u­lar vote by over three mil­lion, the nation vot­ed for a right-wing pop­ulist, or so they said.

It is almost an impos­si­ble task to unseat a pres­i­dent when the econ­o­my is doing well.
Whether this cycle will be dif­fer­ent is any­body’s guess. Elections are nine months away, any­thing can hap­pen in that time. If there is to be a down­turn in the econ­o­my, it would have to hap­pen in time for vot­ers to start feel­ing the effects of that down­turn in order to blame who­ev­er is occu­py­ing 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The prob­lem with this cycle, is that the sit­ting pres­i­dent is not only a white nation­al­ist, which gives him a huge leg up with a seg­ment of the elec­torate, he under­stands the val­ue to be derived from pro­pa­gan­da.
And so he has already begun the process of bla­tant­ly lying that the COVID-19 virus is a hoax by the Democrats, designed to take him down.
Democrats run­ning to replace him have been so busy tear­ing each oth­er down all of his prepo­si­tion­ing of those lies have gone unan­swered.
By let­ting the lies stand, Democrats are not only ced­ing ground to Trump’s die-hard low infor­ma­tion zealots, but they are also ced­ing ground to wishy-washy so-called inde­pen­dents who are look­ing for some­thing to believe in.

Even if there is an eco­nom­ic down­turn as a result of a pan­dem­ic, or because the Obama econ­o­my has final­ly run its course, and even though Trump has nev­er reached the 50% mark in his approval rat­ings, Democrats are at extreme risk of los­ing to him because they are not nim­ble enough to know that they have to attack, attack, attack on all fronts.
Beating a bul­ly is nev­er easy… I sim­ply do not see a bul­ly-beat­er in the present crop of Democrats run­ning to unseat him.
By the way, where is Barack Obama when he is needed