The Post-Journal
I Wish This Were 2025
FEB 17, 2024
ROLLAND KIDDER
I am tired of the political campaign already. I wish it
were 2025, and that we were over with it.
Whether we like it or not, this year’s Presidential
election is looking like it will be a rerun of 2020…and we have all been down
that trail once before. The nation doesn’t need to go through it again.
The year is shaping up to be a rerun of incumbents. Joe
Biden (81 years old) is an incumbent still serving his first term. Donald Trump
(77 years old) is running as an incumbent still claiming the last election was
stolen from him. You might call him an incumbent “once-removed.” Nevertheless,
he is running as an incumbent and seems to have quashed most of his opposition,
thus far, in the Republican primaries.
A columnist earlier this year called this an election
that “no one wants or needs.” Yet, it looks like the election we are going to
get.
I think what worries me most is that this rerun between
Biden and Trump is likely to hold up anything of substance being accomplished
in Washington. The former President seems to have now dashed (or trashed) hopes
that a bi-partisan agreement on immigration will be accomplished this year.
Trump apparently thinks that he alone can
single-handedly solve a problem which he was unable to fix in his first term…
and doesn’t want anyone else to get credit for trying to help solve. If he is
elected again, perhaps he will try to build a bigger and better wall along the
Mexican border. Maybe a double or triple wall will do the job. We just don’t
know.
He would obviously need the full-time help of the U.S.
Navy and Coast Guard in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Pacific and Atlantic
coasts. Refugees can come by boat as well as by foot, as we have experienced
for many years off the coast of Florida. What we need is legislative action in
Washington.
The whole year is also going to be consumed by what
actions (or non-actions) are decided by the Supreme Court as to whether the
Constitution prohibits someone who “egged on” efforts to overthrow a
Presidential election can be prosecuted as a criminal or be prohibited by the
Constitution from running for the job.
The political conversation is already swarming around
who the candidates will be for Vice President. The odds are that Kamala Harris
will stay on the ticket with Joe Biden.
Trump will keep us on “pins and needles” as to who his
choice for VP will be…though I think you can write off any consideration of
Nikki Haley or Mike Pence. There are plenty of “wannabes” who want the job…and
my guess is that it will be someone who will take an absolute loyalty oath, and
will agree to back Trump unreservedly on whatever he wants to do on anything
without questioning it, including disrupting an electoral college vote.
The press will be deluging us all year with apocalyptic
scenarios of how bad it will be. The headlines have already been written.
Sadly, for the country, it will again be a time of
great division and not a time for finding common ground. That is not good for a
democracy, ours included.
