The turnout for Tuesday’s party primary elections in Mississippi is expected to be terrible.
The presidential nominees have already been decided, and the incumbent members of Congress are either unopposed for their party’s nominations or facing minor opposition.
There’s just not much about which to get energized.
I’m trying to decide whether to cast a protest vote in favor of Nikki Haley, who, after taking a beating from Donald Trump on Super Tuesday, became the final GOP challenger to concede the race to him, or just not vote at all.
While driving home the other night, I heard a public radio commentator who is also a college instructor say he tells his students that to not vote is like saying the democratic process does not work.
I wouldn’t go that far, but I would say it’s not working very well these days, given the sorry choices voters will have in the presidential race eight months from now.
According to the polls, the majority of voters said over and over again that they didn’t really want a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but a rematch is what we are going to get.
Biden is trying to hang onto a job that our eyes and knowledge of the aging process tell us he’s too old to handle.
Yes, he gave a decent speech Thursday night in his State of the Union address, but reciting a speech written by others with the aid of a teleprompter does not dispel doubts that shattering the record for the oldest president in history is not something to which this nation needs to aspire. As my retired brother-in-law, at 71 a decade younger than Biden, says about himself and my sister, “We’re not getting smarter.”
Biden should have been a one-term transitional president, helping this nation move on from the chaos and nastiness of the Trump administration, but the Democrat convinced himself — or his backers convinced him — that his reelection is essential to carrying out the party’s goals.
We have seen this repeatedly in the geriatric society also known as Congress. Feeble members are propped up by their staffs and supporters to hang on way past their intellectual prime because they don’t want their home states to lose the incumbent’s seniority and the federal dollars that tend to follow it.
I also can’t get past Biden’s relatively recent embrace of abortion rights, an issue the fellow Catholic struggled to navigate during most of his political career but to which he is now deliberately hitching his reelection wagon. To sacrifice the innocent unborn in pursuit of political office is abhorrent to the faith we share. I don’t know how he’s not troubled by it.
But Trump is even more nauseating. He could be behind bars — and should be — before the general election is held. His best hope to avoid jail time is to use every legal maneuver at his disposal to put off the four criminal trials he faces until he potentially retakes the presidency. Victory in November would probably give him a four-year reprieve from prosecution, during which time he might pardon himself, creating yet another unprecedented legal predicament that the Supreme Court would have to resolve.
Impeached twice on top of being four times indicted, Trump is running his vengeance campaign based on a lie: that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
No matter how many times he says it, no matter how much his Republican sycophants try to gloss over the 2021 insurrection he sparked in a fit of sour grapes, Trump was a threat to democracy when he exited the office. He will be a threat to it again — and probably more so — if he is returned to the White House.
It doesn’t matter how good the economy was during much of Trump’s tenure, or whether illegal immigration was more under control, or whether he executed a conservative generational shift to the Supreme Court, none of that overrides these facts: Trump orchestrated an effort to overturn a valid election, and he was so desperate to not relinquish power that he was willing to encourage violence in order to stop Biden from replacing him.
No president in this country’s history has ever attempted such a coup, much less gotten away with it. To reelect Trump would be to let him off the hook.
The Republican Party had a chance to nominate someone who would promote conservative policies but without Trump’s mounds of baggage. Because the GOP nomination process is now dominated by those on the far right, though, it refused to cut him loose.
To cast a ballot for Biden or Trump not only asks voters of conscience to hold their noses. They also have to close their eyes and stop up their ears.
If they opt instead to sit out the election, that could be the most honorable choice.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
