Friday, August 02, 2024

Focus

After the June 27 presidential debate, I fell into the camp of this presidential election being Donald Trump's to lose. And when Trump showed remarkable poise (and even some rarely seen grace and humility) mere minutes after he was almost shot to death at the Butler, PA rally in mid July, I believed his victory in November was all but assured. Less than a week later, Trump and his fellow Republicans had one of the most uplifting unifying national conventions in the party's recent history. As such, complete GOP control in D.C. (POTUS, House and Senate) suddenly seemed plausible. 


But a mere three days after the Republican National Convention ended, the trajectory of the race began to change when President Joe Biden announced he was not seeking reelection. Since that fateful announcement on Sunday, July 21, the Republican presidential ticket has been bordering on inept. With VP Kamala Harris now the presumed Dem nominee, Trump et al are focused on nonsense such as allegations of her being a "D.E.I. hire" or wondering aloud if she's legitimately black. 


As conservative commentator Erick Erickson astutely points out, there are plenty of lines of attack to levy against Harris without alienating much needed independent voters. 





Along those same lines, Abigail Shrier at The Free Press gives the GOP a treasure trove of policy issues in which to use against Harris.


In 2019, she expressed remarkable hostility to American energy. On CNN, she said there was “no question” she would ban fracking and offshore drilling. She fully supported Biden’s disastrous, inhumane policy of encouraging not only hormones but also gender surgeries for vulnerable minors and of flinging open the doors of women’s jail cells to biologically male offenders.

When Joe Biden was running for election in 2020 and referred to the “Latino community,” she corrected him on X: “the Latinx community,” she wrote, preferring the agender, woke neologism unpopular with the Latino community.

In June of 2020, Harris urged her supporters to post bail for BLM rioters who had ransacked our cities, even tweeting a payment link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund just four days after rioters burned a Minneapolis police precinct to the ground. “They’re not going to stop and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop,” she said on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, referring to the BLM protesters. “They’re not going to let up, and they should not.”

Each of these positions is out of step with the moderates in her party and the vast majority of the American people; had they come out in a primary, they would have been quite damaging. For good reason, Harris was ranked the “most liberal” member of the senate by the government transparency organization GovTrack, which recently memory-holed the webpage bearing the accolade.


Definitely read the entire piece.


It's political malpractice that the Trump campaign hasn't been hammering these points home since the millisecond Biden (or some twerpy White House intern) hit the "Post" button on his tweet announcing his exit from the presidential race. In a little less than three weeks, Harris will become the official Democrat nominee at the party's convention in Chicago. As balloons are dropping from the United Center rafters upon conclusion of the DNC on August 22, there had best be GOP political ads hitting Harris on her undeniably radical positions. Remember, there was a reason her support cratered among Dem supporters in the 2020 primary race, so much so that her presidential campaign didn't even make it to the Iowa caucuses. 


It's not too late, Trump campaign. But time is definitely running short. 


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