Search This Blog

Sunday, May 14, 2017

A Refreshing Bit Of Normalcy and Reality

Remember a few days ago?  In case you missed it, President Trump fired the then FBI director, Jim Comey.  I'm joking, of course.  You couldn't miss that event, even if you wanted so long as you read news or watch it on TV or on the internet.  There's no\t much left to say (if indeed there is anything at all left to say) about that event.  Nevertheless, most news sites today have articles screaming that Trump threatened the constitutional order of America (ridiculous), Trump is ending civilization as we know it, or the President was well within his rights in firing the FBI chief.  The extreme tantrum from the left goes on and on.  No matter what Trump does, the left opposes it.  The hashtage #Resist is the rallying cry and the description of their strategy.  If Trump says yes, the left says no.  If Trump decides to switch and agree with no, then the left also switches to yes.  They offer nothing positive; they just #Resist.  For quite a number of years, while the Democrats came up with no program to help the American economy or healthcare or foreign policy or even the environment, the leftwing Democrats decided to blame the Republicans and called them "the party of NO".  It was an effective attack in that it got many in the Democrat base to focus on the GOP rather than on the inaction of their own party.  It was, however, not accurate.  There were policy disagreements, but there was no real obstruction.  The GOP stopped no major Democrat policy initiative aside from the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland.  Now, however, the Democrats have truly become the party of NO!  Even cabinet appointments were opposed with all night speech-a-thons that could only be described as meaningless shows of opposition.  The media has picked up the "no, no, no" mantra and tried to make it seem as if the whole country had turned against the president.  So has this tactic worked?

We get an answer in anecdotal evidence total from one of my favorite pundits, Selena Zito.  She is one of the few who predicted the Trump victory in the election.  Last fall during the late stages of the campaign, she drove across the USA and interviewed people as she went.  She found the incredibly strong support for Trump in the American heartland and wrote about it.  The Trump sweep of Ohio and the wins in Pennsylvania were no surprise to her.  Obviously, anecdotal evidence is not conclusive but it is important nevertheless.  So what did Ms. Zito find?  She spent her time in Paul Ryan's Wisconsin district for her latest road trip.  In her report, Zito explains that she found most people unfazed by the Comey firing.  Democrats, even strong Democrats, had been unhappy with Comey since the Hillary email mess, and they saw nothing wrong with firing him now.  But what about the House Obamacare bill?  Did that undermine support for Ryan in his home district.  Again, the answer is negative.  The general consensus Zito found was that the voters realize that the House bill is far from perfect, but they see it as a big improvement over Obamacare.  In general, voters have not really changed their minds since the election last November.  Zito's conclusion from her admittedly non-scientific and small sample is that at least in Wisconsin, there is no general dissatisfaction with Trump or Ryan.  The Democrats, media and the left may be pushing #Resist, but the rest of the country isn't buying it.  The basic common sense of the American people is still prevailing.  Most of them, unlike the Democrat/media complex, have no nostalgia for the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s against the Vietnam War.  The realize that #Resist without more against the program chosen by the voters when they selected Trump as President is not the way to go.  I wonder when this reality will dawn on the Democrats.  It may not happen until November of 2018.

No comments: