Race for the White House # 84

 87 Days Until Election Day

I am really having a hard time remembering what happened this week and what might have happened a week before and if I bothered to write about it or not. Needless to say, I find talking about the various statewide races to be more fun.

We continue to inch closer though to the Presidential election. Under normal times, people would be spending their days following the results of the big Summer Olympic events in Tokyo. Instead, somehow I find myself working from home and following the Stanley Cup Playoffs. It was an exciting week however.  Next week will be the last one before the convention and I would imagine we will probably know whom Joe Biden has selected as his running mate. Reports have indicated that the final two are Kamala Harris and Susan Rice, while interestingly enough a story late this week had him meeting secretly with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Delaware.

 In some ways this was a bad week for Biden, at least in terms of political junkies who follow the news and actually have some occasional exposure to him. He continues to be a gaffe machine and continues to need to clean up comments, such as getting angry at a black reporter and asking him sarcastically if he were a "junkie." Then, the very next day, Biden made some odd comments about how Latinos are diverse in contrast to African-Americans. It was confusing what he was truly trying to say, but it seemed like he was suggesting he is automatically expecting nearly all of the black vote while the Latino vote will be more divided because Cuban-Americans for example are traditionally Republican. All of this may be technically true, but you sure are not supposed to say it aloud as the candidate, and thus there is much speculation that Biden hurt himself with black voters. I really do not know. Just like Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and keep most of MAGA nation, I do not think there is really any gaffe Biden can make that will prevent him from overwhelmingly carrying the black vote, simply because he is the vehicle to vote against Trump. With that, it makes sense that we now know that GOP operatives appeared in on the steps to get Kanye West on various state ballots.

 Trump fans look at these Biden gaffes and some moderately tightening polling data and seem giddy that their man is on the comeback. To me, it seems pretty clear that he has a definite ceiling that he cannot rise above politically. The incumbent is still taking steps to target the mail in voting and many on the left now have various conspiracy theories about the Post Office. Some of them sound crazy, but some perhaps not so crazy. Trump is in feral cat mode and will literally say anything, such as his recent comments that Biden is "against G-d" Joe Biden may be far from a perfect person, but I have no doubt he has actually cared more about his relationship with the Lord than Donald Trump ever has or ever will.

According to Trump, mail in voting is horrible and will lead to fraud and we might not know the true winner of the Presidential election for "years" but it is ok in Florida, where it is "tried and true." Talk about mixed messages. Clearly, GOP officials in the Sunshine State were worried about voters not using a method that has been very successful for them. 

 Fighting on Capitol Hill continues over unemployment insurance and things like that. Frankly, I do not have the time or energy to follow the ins and outs of it. Trump seems to want to bypass everything though through Executive Orders. During the Obama years, Republicans rightly condemned the proliferation of those orders at the expense of working with Congress though the Constitutional process. Democrats were fine with it though. Now, Trump is doing this even more, and Republicans are fine with it and Democrats are the ones complaining.

I am sure other noteworthy events happened this week, but I am not going to stress my brain too much to think about it. It continues to be tragic how many Americans die on a daily basis. Yes, Americans and humans always die on a daily basis, but it seems like a special waste when so much might be prevented by people simple wearing a mask at relatively brief periods of their everyday life. The loss of former Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain to the virus not long ago was a sad one. 

Trump who had a downright horrific interview with a reporter from Axios that made a lot of news early in the week, but now seems surpassed by more current events said of the deaths, "it is what it is." That sounds sort of like the attitude Obama used to have about radical jihadism. I did not like it then and I do not like it now. In this circumstance, there is more a President may actually be able to do though or at least show leadership. Instead, we hear over and over again that the virus will "go away." Yeah, maybe one day but at what cost? It is also true that to really get ahold on fighting the invisible enemy into total defeat, we may need Donald Trump to politically "go away."