Does this sound like the story we expect on November 7, 2018?
Democrats were understandably excited the day after their big midterm election victories. True, they had fallen short of recapturing a majority in the U.S. Senate.
But they gained 26 seats in the House, and now had a solid majority there. They had also retaken the governorships of a number of key states, including Michigan and Ohio.
They thought they were sitting pretty, and were in good shape to knock off the aging incumbent Republican President, who often seemed not fully in touch with reality.
Sound like a familiar fantasy?
Well, what I just described was actually, reality – the way things stood the morning after the midterm elections in 1982.
Two years later, however, President Ronald Reagan was reelected by the landslide of all landslides, getting 59 percent of the vote in beating a man who had been a popular former vice-president, and winning 49 out of the 50 states.
I’m not saying that will happen again.
Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan, who was, or at least projected, a warm and sunny personality. Besides, for all his naiveté and silly beliefs on many subjects, Reagan had served two fairly successful terms as governor of California.
If he wasn’t himself a master of policy detail, he knew how to find people who were, and pay attention to them.
Trump knows nothing, couldn’t care less, and prefers chaos to a smoothly running ship. He is indeed destroying this country and the meaning of America, regardless of what the stock market is doing or where the unemployment rate is.
There is no doubt that if voters were asked to vote on this simple question: “Do you want Donald Trump to have a second term as President?” they would vote no, overwhelmingly. After all, 54 percent of those who voted chose someone else in November, 2016. Most of those chose Hillary Clinton, but seven million chose a minor party candidate.
But they won’t be asked that.
They’ll be asked to choose between Trump and some Democrat. With less than a year and a half before the first primaries, Democrats have no clear front-runner.
Trump was, at 70, the oldest man ever elected to a first term two years ago. The two best-known potential candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, would be 78 and 79 before their inauguration.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren would be 71. Traditionally, presidential candidates have been somewhere between their mid-40s and early 60s. Two potential candidates who are in that age group are Senator Kamala Harris (California) who will be 56, and Kirsten Gillibrand, 54, (New York) but they are from two of the safest Democratic states in the country.
Their candidacies would allow Trump and his minions to send the not-so-subtle claim that the Democratic Party is no longer the party for working-class white people.
Especially not the men.
Bigoted, sexist and racist?
Damn right. But it worked big-time among blue-collar white voters in 2016. This time, Democrats winning big in the midterm elections next month, may actually help Trump.
Why?
Because if Democrats capture one or both houses of Congress, it will enable Trump and the Republicans to blame everything on them and what he’ll call their obstructionism.
From the day he first took office, Trump has been blaming Democrats, and President Obama, for every policy failure he’s had. But with Republicans in charge of every branch of government, that excuse is starting to fail.
Harry Truman was nothing like Donald Trump, except that he, too, was an accidental president. Republicans scored massive gains in his first midterm elections, and everyone figured Truman was a sure loser.
But he campaigned against the “do-nothing Republican 80th Congress,” and won a tremendous upset victory in 1948.
What if this is the lead news story on November 4, 2020?
Washington — President Donald Trump won a second term Tuesday in a stunning upset, eking out 272 electoral votes while once again losing the popular vote, this time by an even greater margin than four years ago.
The Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigned hard and took back the three key states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that gave Trump his astonishing victory four years ago.
But Virginia, which voted for Hillary Clinton four years ago, when favorite son, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine was the vice-presidential nominee, switched to Trump by 13,000 votes this time. That gave the President 272 electoral votes.
Democrats, however, gained six seats and a majority in the U.S. Senate …
***
Do I think that’s likely to happen?
Not necessarily.
Do I think it could?
Absolutely.
We’ve learned by now that we should never underestimate the ability of the Democratic Party to self-destruct and do itself in, in part because of those who sulk when they don’t get their own way.
We don’t know whether all those voters who said there was no real difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton and so didn’t vote for either have figured reality out.
But what I am sure about is this:
If Democrats assume, as they did two years ago, that they can’t possibly lose to Donald Trump … they might .
***
In case you thought they were on your side … Experts agree that the dental health of many Michigan residents, especially children, could be dramatically increased if we were to follow Minnesota’s lead and create and license a new category of health care providers called dental therapists.
They would be college-trained for at least three years, and be able to do routine procedures and simple fillings and extractions, and would work under the loose supervision of fully-fledged dentists.
Best of all, they could bring affordable dental care to the many dentally underserved people in Michigan, including the poor, those in far-off rural and inner-city communities. They’ve done wonders in this regard in Minnesota, and seven other states where they are licensed.
Far from being a left-wing “socialist” measure, the legislation authorizing dental therapists was first sponsored in Michigan by State Sen. Mike Shirkey, a conservative Republican from Jackson, who argues “why would government stand in the way of letting professionals safely and thoughtfully expand their business models?’
Especially, he added, “when we know it would also expand access to care?” The dental therapy bill was passed by the Senate last year, but bogged down in the state house of representatives.
There, lobbyists from the American Dental Association has fought hard to kill it, because, they reason, it might possibly get in the way of dentists becoming even richer, and besides, they’d have to deal with the inconvenience of learning something new.
Sure enough, the chair of the Health Policy Committee, State Rep. Hank Vaupel (R-Fowlerville) has indicated he won’t let it come up for a vote. It would be nice if any voter who has ever had a toothache remembers that in November. But they probably won’t.
