By CONRAD BLACK, Special to
the Sun
- Can the President override the Democratic press’s thunderous campaign to terrorize the country over the coronavirus?
- Can the president successfully connect Vice President Biden’s campaign to the hooligans, anti-white racists, and urban guerrillas who effectively are being encouraged by the corrupt Democratic mayors of many of the nation’s largest cities?
- Will the economic recovery and the decline in the unemployment generated by the COVID-19 shutdown continue at its recent pace and strengthen the economy as a pro-Trump electoral argument?
- Will the Republicans make adequately clear to the country the authoritarian and Marxist implications of the Biden-Sanders unity document?
- Will special counsel John Durham indict senior members of the Obama Administration over their handling of the spurious allegation of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government in the 2016 election and Justice Department violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and how will Mr. Biden himself come through it?
Apart from the Durham question, the president has it in
his power to produce answers favorable to himself on the other four questions.
He has a defensible record in his handling of COVID-19,
was prescient in restricting direct air travel from China and Europe to the
United States (which the Democrats opposed), and cooperated even with governors
who had been extremely antagonistic prior to the pandemic. He sought and
accepted the guidance of leading epidemiologists in taking drastic measures to
“flatten the curve,” and he showed evident executive ability in quickly
developing world-leading coronavirus testing capacity and supplying essential
equipment throughout the country.
Mr. Trump has been represented as cavalier about the virus
itself — a perception problem that has arisen due to his efficient response and
move to reopen the economy more quickly than the Democrats, who had hoped that
they could prolong the shutdown until the election in order to blame the
president for the resulting economic depression.
The president effectively declared victory and sponsored
a back-to-work movement and the Democrats have responded by using their
iron-fisted control of the national political press to portray the President as
cruel and incompetent, while they espouse a completely fatuous policy of
indefinite lockdown, colossal emergency income substitution from the treasury,
mass testing and tracing of everyone that has been in recent contact with those
who test positive and badgering them to self-quarantine.
It is absurd. The President moved on Tuesday to counter
this campaign in his first coronavirus press meeting for many weeks. He was
businesslike and effective. What is needed is a full-scale public relations
campaign including news film of the president at key distribution sites and
medical centers. Excessive staging and histrionics must be avoided, and the
reduction in fatality rates, improvement in techniques for protecting the
immunity-challenged, and administration of therapeutics should all be
emphasized — it being understood that 90% of the national political press will
go to extraordinary lengths to deny the president credit for anything. At some
point, there should be a backlash in the President’s favor to this heavy press
bias.
Urban violence, defunding police, and the balance between
curbing police mistreatment of African Americans and doing everything
reasonably responsible to discourage and punish crime, have now become a great
chicken game.
The president has already begun to taint the Democratic
Party by identification with notoriously corrupt and incompetent Democratic
civic political machines. The Democrats have governed in Chicago for 89 years.
Their ethics and competence have been in decline for decades and latterly in
freefall, and the present mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is a racist and a seeming
idiot. The Jussie Smollett case was a vivid depiction of the venality of the
Chicago Democrats; they are so rotten it is a wonder that the roofs are still
on the public buildings.
In New York City, the surrealistically inept mayor, Bill
de Blasio, has squandered almost everything his distinguished predecessors
Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg accomplished. Eric Garcetti in Los
Angeles, Ted Wheeler in Portland, and Jenny Durkan in Seattle are all hopeless
and the last two, as well as Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago, effectively have sided
with rioters and arsonists against their own police departments.
Parts of Chicago and New York are just 360-degree
shooting galleries as the demoralized and defunded police essentially have
given up, and murder rates have skyrocketed. The president will have to judge
when it is better to exercise his constitutional duty to defend federal
government property and ensure the enforcement of the nation’s laws than it is
to allow the sanguinary spectacle of the disintegration of municipal government
in some of the nations great cities to illuminate the depths of Democratic
urban decay and hypocrisy.
As the country awaits the president’s timing in these
matters, there is no reason to doubt that unemployment will continue to descend
quickly. A huge amount of new demand has been injected into the system by
relief measures and people prefer employment to unemployment, a preference
further economic assistance measures should encourage.
The Democratic pantomime of posing as the chief enemies
of the coronavirus rather than its political beneficiary, and as the authors of
emergency job or replacement schemes more remunerative than work itself cannot
last much longer.
There is no need until after Labor Day to paint too
vividly the implications of the “progressive” unity agreement between
presumptive Democratic nominee Biden and Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders. It
should be a strong argument in September and October, especially the intended
elimination of the oil, gas, and coal industries and their 7 million jobs, the
destruction of the southern border wall the president has been building, the
reopening of the United States to unlimited illegal entry, the enactment of a
substantial part of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s infamous $52 trillion healthcare
plan, sharp income tax increases and likely a wealth tax.
Important to note, too, is their intentional strangling
of the American ethos of self-advancement through hard work and merit as well
as their push for the destruction of independent schools in order to reinforce
the monopoly of the strictly Democratic teachers’ unions. The hope of these
Democrats is to impose more of the slothful philistinism and the largely
anti-American current spirit of American schools and universities. Lazy and
unpatriotic Americans tend to look toward Democrats for salvation.
Joe Biden is an implausible candidate; the Democratic
Party has disgraced itself by its reliance on pestilence and racist mobs, and
its platform consists of exploitation of public COVID-19 hysteria, the creation
of lawless urban chaos while blaming it on Mr. Trump, a Marxist economic
redistribution, and the embrace of unlimited undocumented immigration.
A Democratic Party victory would cripple the free market,
strangle the American tradition of earned upward mobility, buy votes with
unprecedented cynicism and extravagance, and entrench a regime of socialist
wealth redistribution which has never attracted significant public support
anywhere in the United States.
Only the dementia of fanatical Trump-haters and the
almost airtight political bigotry of the national political media have
permitted this levitation to continue as long as it has. It will not make it to
Election Day.
