Premature Withdrawal

by G. Murphy Donovan (August 2024)

 

Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. —Joseph Stalin

 

Be careful what you wish for. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know! Mix a dozen trite metaphors, if you will. Trot out all the political clichés in your political kit and you will not capture what just happened to Republicans in 2024.

Déjà vu all over again.

The usual Democrat Party election year “October surprise” came early this year. Indeed, Republicans helped clear the stage for what may be the best political rabbit trick of the 21^st Century.

The premature withdrawal of Joseph Robinette Biden from the US presidential race was a stroke of Machiavellian political genius. By quitting under fratricidal fire, Biden has become a martyr to selfless sacrifice, courage, and “democracy.” Yesterday, Biden was the worst father, grifter, and president in American history. But today, the heretofore feckless Kamala Harris has been beatified as a kind of woke, ethnic, feminist saint. Deus ex machina, indeed.

If the distaff American left, a clear majority, was looking for a reason to vote in 2024, they now have one. Not only are American women a registered voting majority, but they are more likely than men to vote in any year.

Indeed, Harris is on track, if the early press is any clue, to become America’s black Joan of Arc, first beatification then coronation; indeed a putative heroine saving America from white male thugs and self-described “hillbillies.”

D. Vance may have a future, but he might be a tad premature for November.

In the new 2024 narrative, Donald Trump, political apostate, gets burned at the stake by a partisan media and a rabid partisan establishment mob. Dare we mention who still controls the deep state, the chattering class, and the “lawfare” campaign?

Overnight, the Democrat Party blew the Trump/Vance campaign, the best RNC convention ever, and the Trump assassination attempt off the front page. From now until the Democrat convention, Harris, and VP speculation, will suck all the oxygen out of the American, if not global, media market.

A woke, globalist American press does not need another excuse not to talk about the Trump/Vance ticket.

Alas, Americans love an underdog, a victim. And Harris now has at least three layers of political Kevlar; gender, melanin, and “health” care (nee abortion). Indeed, Kamala and media allies are likely to play the race, sex, DEI, and abortion cards like a string quartet. (Ms. Harris is sure not mention the black genocidal American abortion rate, five black babies to every white. By government count, nineteen million blacks have been killed by US physicians since 1973.)

And let’s not be naïve, with three months to go; the American left still has control over the apparatchik class in Washington, DC, the large cities, and the usual suspects in the media.

And let’s be clear too, should 2024 become a lost opportunity, the fail is an epic and obvious strategic blunder. It’s not as if the Republicans didn’t know that a female version of woke left was next in the queue. How did anyone on the Right not see the very likely candidacy of two firsts, black and woman; and knowing this, still put up two white guys.

Indeed, Republicans actually doubled down on the boy’s club. The optics for 2024 presidential race are now horrible even for common sense voters.

If Harris picks a white woman as running mate, stick a fork in it, the race is over after the Democrat convention in August. The last best hope for Republicans this year is that Robert Kennedy Jr. takes more votes from Harris than Trump.

It buggers the imagination that Republicans didn’t see the imperative of putting a smart conservative woman on the ticket, if for no other reason than to neutralize the sex, race, and abortion cards that Democrats are sure to play.

The logic for a woman on the Republican ticket should have been obvious on three counts, even for dullards: a woman balances the ticket; Trump can only serve four years; and if the Trump ticket won, Republicans would be in the cat bird’s seat to establish a “first female” precedent—a conservative woman in the Oval Office in 2028.

Alas, aside from the Kennedy factor, it is possible that Kamala Harris will step on her crank too, like her predecessor. A better bet is that Kamala, like hapless Joe, will be tightly scripted and controlled all the way to November.

Control, discipline, and deception worked in 2020 for Democrats. Why change the success triptych in 2024?

 

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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of Intelligence and national security.

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