Only twelve more days
Published 10-22-2020
Campaign 2020, bizarro world edition is drawing to a close... at least the voter participation part of the every four year ritual. And while I know just a bit further down our path lies the inevitable recount insanity no matter who is ultimately declared winner, I can’t help but be glad to see the campaign season end so we can just get on with whatever is coming next.
From a cancelled Zoom debate, to Biden’s recent drive in rally, complete with honking cars instead of applause, urban unrest and the President’s ‘rona diagnosis, you could not come up with a more crazy set of events and plot twists for this campaign season if you tried.
In all the years I’ve watched politics, this cycle has been mostly entertaining and almost always fascinating. At least when I remember to stay philosophical about it all.
Between polling shenanigans and the hard left burning cities across the fruited plains, the recent “October Surprise” detailing evidence of Biden family corruption and sordid activities that Hunter participated in has been the least surprising.
Especially since a lot of this information, without the corroborating emails, was outlined in a report by Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley earlier this year.
And while much of the media and elected Democrats would like to claim Russian disinformation it maybe a little harder to do so with a straight face since the hard drive has been in the FBI’s hands since December of 2019 and the information is easily verifiable for comparison to what the New York Post published.
Outlines of business ventures and payouts that border on racketeering and quid pro quo’s are prevalent on the hard drive. While Vice President Biden would rather talk about his milkshake from Cookout and bluster about campaign smears, the lack of a denial about the ownership of the computer speaks just as loudly.
Beyond the corruption, which sadly probably won’t move America’s needle nearly as much as it should, is the censorship our leading social media and tech companies employed as a knee jerk reaction to the Post’s publishing of text messages, photos and emails from the hard drive.
Web links were squashed before they could even be posted, the New York Post’’s Twitter account is still locked and media made the story into the reaction. Both left and right.
As any parent of a teenager can tell you... banishment only makes ideas seem more worthwhile, not less, and censoring a major news story featuring big money, sex, drugs and greed inside the Vice President’s inner circle guarantees higher circulation.
Like Wile E. Coyote with Acme’s latest rocket, there’s only one result that could happen... interactions with the story doubled, and the details of the story were amplified many times over as the story morphed into censorship and information control on the right, and Russian disinformation on the left.
The more salacious details of the story, namely the sex and drugs part, are sad and bear little on what kind of President Joe Biden will make.
The fact that America’s foreign policy would probably depend on where his family can make the most money from “foreign investors” is a bit higher on the things I’m alarmingly concerned about list.
But Hunter Biden isn’t the only child of rich and powerful people to go on to be rich and powerful because of those connections. The sons of Speaker Pelosi, Secretary of State Kerry and Senator Romney were all involved with Rosemont Seneca as partners at one time or another, and invested in Ukrainian energy sectors.
This is not a new or unique problem. Nor is it partisan.
No, the plot twist in this story is apparently Joe collected a cut too, while in office, for giving access to all these political actors. That is if the emails can be believed.
Funnily enough, the Presidential Debate Commission agreed with their media brethren and changed the topic for the third (well, actually second) and final debate from foreign policy to COVID, leadership, race relations and climate change... topics covered in the first debate. Only one of these topics is in America’s top five right now.
That this absolute brazenness on the part of the media and our elected officials has been normalized to this point it isn’t shocking. It’s just another of the 57,000 reasons why Trump won in the first place.
I’m not expecting a Biden sprint to the finish line of this campaign after the candidate basically took this week off to prepare for the debate in Nashville, instead sending out surrogates including President Obama and Senator Harris.
Not when the media won’t ask why he can’t, or won’t, do both and treating anyone who does ask as if they’ve sprouted a second head or taken up sorcery.
The best part of this crazy campaign season ending... the national horse race polling does too.
As in previous cycles, media companies are ending their head to head polls just ahead of voting day. Although that leaves 12 days of repeating the same ridiculous polls that concluded earlier this week.
And we will know soon enough who was right. Were pundits and prognosticators correct in assuming the electorate will be Democrats +12 or more as some of the most reported national polls were? Obama didn’t enjoy that generous of a voter base, but hey, who am I to argue with the experts that think Biden is outperforming Obama levels of enthusiasm.
President Trump is more of a motivating factor for most of the enthusiastic left than President Obama, just as President Obama was more of a motivating factor on the right in 2012 than candidate Mitt Romney.
There’s more than that one correlation that can be made between the Obama-Romney race in 2012 and this one. Including actual data, stuff like voter registration, mail in ballot requests and early vote totals, that are just starting to get noticed by the national media.
It will be interesting to see how the last week unfolds. Where do the candidates go? What are they saying when they get there? And how many people show up to hear that message?
Is Biden in traditionally blue states shoring up support? Is he in the north east or mid west? Is Trump pushing to expand his map, or having to revisit red states and the South?
It’s crunch time for the candidates, and the country.
And it can’t wrap up soon enough.