The Home Stretch

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It’s the home stretch of the presidential campaign, and, as expected, the Democrats are pulling out all their familiar, nasty, tried-and-true attack points. They’ve been using the same approach for 100 years, and sometimes it works, so why change?

It’s always “take away your Social Security and Medicare,” “kill women and children,” “wreck the economy,” and this year, just for variety (though this one goes back to attacks on Andrew Jackson and even John Adams), “a dictator, an authoritarian, a king, a tyrant.” And in the final days, the Democrats have come back to “fascist” and “Nazi.”

None of these charges has any basis in fact — they apply far more readily to Kamala Harris, who really has been working to “lock him up” and whose rhetoric may have inspired two assassination attempts — but the appeal to fear is enough to convince some voters. Maybe Republicans need to start using it as well, as Trump did in his debate with Biden.

When Trump said that Biden would destroy Social Security, it was not an exaggeration. Biden’s enormous spending and deficits, and Kamala’s plans for far more, will accelerate the date when Social Security runs out of money. Social Security is paying out on current revenues and sums accumulated in the past, but soon government will be forced to reduce or delay payments or supplement Social Security from general revenues.

Already, interest on the national debt (more than $1 trillion annually) is approaching half of what is spent on Social Security and Medicare combined ($1.35 trillion and $848 billion in 2023, respectively). Eight years of Biden/Harris would add an estimated $18 to $20 trillion to the national debt, leaving us beyond the “tipping point,” where interest on the debt would be more on Social Security and Medicare combined, and far more than what is spent on national defense. It is Biden/Harris who are, as Biden said in the debate, “beating Social Security,” though that odd comment and so much else has been scrubbed from the net, along with Kamala Harris’s previous comments about ending fracking and forcing gun-owners to surrender their weapons.

My A.I. “Co-pilot” is working overtime to attempt to defend Harris’s record. I’m told that Harris’s views on fracking have “evolved over time” and assured that “political positions can evolve based on various factors.” That’s a word salad that even rivals Harris’s own.

As for seizing guns, my A.I. co-pilot states: “Remember that gun control policies are complex and multifaceted, and Harris’s approach aims to balance safety with individual rights.” Huh? Gun ownership is a constitutional right — it is not “complex.” How do you “balance” constitutional rights with “safety” or any other principle? It’s like “balancing” the right to prayer or the right to free speech with LGBT “rights” (actually, most liberals including Kamala Harris seem to think gay and trans “rights” take precedence over the Constitution).

In the final weeks, along with calling Trump a fascist and dictator, Harris has doubled down on the familiar idea of taxing “billionaires” to pay for her outrageous spending proposals. The rich, she says, must pay their “fair share,” though she is never able to articulate just what that means.

In her Oct. 23 interview with Anderson Cooper, Harris could only mumble that “we’re not going to increase taxes on anyone making less than $400,000,” though allowing the Trump tax cuts to expire would do just that.

In every political campaign, it’s always the same old “tax the rich,” as if the rich were not already taxed enough. The upper 2% pay 50% of federal taxes, and when they die, they pay another 45% of what’s left in estate tax. Most of that revenue goes to wasteful government spending such as $7.5 billion for eight charging stations. If left in the hands of “the rich,” that money would be carefully invested in productive enterprises. That is what the rich do best: they allocate capital to companies that hire workers and produce goods.

Trump needs to hammer home the facts during the final days of the campaign. Harris really is “beating” Medicare and Social Security. Her inflationary policies really are harming older Americans, like the elderly man I saw at Kroger’s counting coins out of a little change purse to pay for a loaf of white bread and a can of pork and beans. Not exactly a healthy, well balanced diet, and not one to promote longevity, but I assume it was all this man could afford — and inflation is part of the reason why.

Trump needs to talk about how Harris is killing kids as well. It is liberal policies that have left 20% of black Americans in poverty, and for children growing up in crime-ridden areas of our big cities, life is a dangerous struggle to survive, and many do not survive. It’s time to end the ghetto mentality, and only a vigorous free-market economy can do so.

Another of the familiar closing arguments for Democrats is that conservatives are “racist.” Harris has appeared before largely black audiences, sometimes with black celebrities like Oprah holding her hand, as she stumbles, charging that Trump wants to return race relations “to the past” instead of “move forward.” The language never changes: it’s always the false attack on conservatives as racists, despite the fact that it is conservatives, not liberals, who have improved conditions for blacks and for all Americans through their free-market approach. President Trump helped produce “strong income growth” for black Americans, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and poverty rates for blacks fell under his presidency.

Finally, another old line is that the conservative candidate is “unstable” and shouldn’t have his finger on the nuclear button. Sixty years ago, LBJ used this one in a devastating commercial against Barry Goldwater, despite no evidence that Goldwater was unstable. If anything, it was LBJ who was dangerous and lacked judgment in sending 2.7 million American military personnel to Vietnam and killing some 800,000 to 1.2 million Vietnamese in combat-related deaths — an escalation that began very soon after the 1964 election victory over Goldwater.

Like all of the false changes and wildly inflated rhetoric, Harris’s charge that Trump is “increasingly unstable and unhinged” is laughable, though hardly funny. Trump has been rock-solid, even as the DOJ raided his home with armed agents, even as he was subjected to four major trials, and even as he was wounded in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. By contrast, Harris becomes unhinged just by being asked follow-up questions.

This year’s liberal campaign rhetoric is disgustingly familiar and predictable — and unoriginal. (Harris couldn’t even come up with a few of her own talking points — she had to plagiarize all of them from previous campaigns.) Everyone will be glad when it’s over and Trump is elected, just so we won’t have to witness Kamala trying to remember and express the trite lines she’s been told to use. Then we can forget about the charges of fascist, racist, and unstable and get down to the business of making America great again.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).