2024: What I Want, Expect, and Wish For – Part 1, Presidential Candidates

Here’s what I want — part of what I want — to see, but likely won’t, in American politics and government in 2024; some things I expect to see but mostly would rather not; a bit of wishful thinking, because at least that makes me smile for a minute; and a few things Americans can do this year.

This is the first of two posts. This one focuses on presidential candidates, with an MLK Day bonus and an election denier bonus (to use a phrase I don’t like, because no one denies the 2020 presidential election actually happened). The second post considers other topics, still mostly in our national politics and government, and therefore somewhat related to a presidential election year.

I Want Different Presidential Nominees

I want to see the major parties nominate presidential candidates other than Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In this I am with the majority of Americans, supposedly, but that may not matter. In any case, both men are known quantities.

President Trump was far less a president than we needed, especially through COVID, with its outrageous flexing of institutional tyranny at multiple levels of our government. He has an honesty problem, an ego which far outsizes any justified self-esteem, and a tendency toward childish, vindictive distractions. But at least he wasn’t sold on (and directly complicit in) dismantling our country and culture.

President Biden has been far less a president than Trump — and far worse in terms of freedom, truth, prosperity, playing a coherent role in the world, and preserving anything resembling a nation. (For example, a nation has borders and doesn’t demolish its own culture.) As anyone who paid attention before 2020 already knew, he was never a uniter. He was never a competent actor in international affairs. His mental powers were never considerable, and they are much diminished now. Any political principles he may have espoused from time to time appear to have been born of political convenience. He is a serial liar, including about his own past. And he is and long has been politically corrupt.

Alternatives?

Formally, it’s not too late for the GOP primaries to produce a different nominee, but it will only happen if President Trump withdraws soon. Nikki Haley will do well enough in New Hampshire, where the GOP primary is open and likely to be flooded with independents and short-term Democrat crossovers. She’ll also finish well in her home state, South Carolina. Soon after that it will be over for her and for Ron DeSantis, at least numerically, if President Trump remains in the race.

The most likely route to a viable Democrat candidate other than President Biden is for him to withdraw after the primaries and let the convention select a nominee. There are minor primary candidates who may hope Biden will withdraw much sooner, but the party doesn’t want Marianne Williamson or Dean Phillips.

They especially don’t want Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who began as a Democrat but now runs as an independent. He’ll likely pull votes from both Biden and Trump, but it’s hard to say how many from which at this early date.

(Since this section is about what I want, I want the Biden administration to stop denying Secret Service protection for RFK, Jr. His father’s and uncle’s assassinations in 1968 and 1963, respectively, should make this a no-brainer. But this administration is utterly childish about some serious things. I hope this one ends better than Afghanistan.)

The substitute candidates the Democrats might want aren’t in the race; hence the talk about the convention. It’s hard to imagine the Democratic Party with its current obsessions nominating Gavin Newsom, a white male, even though he has already done to California so much that the Left wants to do to the nation at large. They’ll want a black woman, and it won’t be Vice President Kamala Harris. She polls worse than President Biden, and that’s barely even possible. Hence the recent buzz about Michelle Obama.

Such a substitution at the convention would obviously be less democratic than primaries, but if it happens they will surely call it Saving Our Democracy™.

Michelle Obama

The former First Lady said last week, in a carefully crafted interview, that she’s “terrified” of the possible outcome of the election. This recalls President Biden’s facile declarations that he entered the 2020 race because President Trump praised Nazis at Charlottesville. (President Trump didn’t do that, but it’s been a useful narrative.) Mrs. Obama would be a weak candidate in some ways, but the campaign would be short; she could probably get away without debating her major opponent (because Trump); Big Everything would have one coordinated, perpetual paroxysm of joy; and we’ve proven in the last two elections that American voters will elect just about anybody to the highest office in the land.

In any case, I don’t have Adam Schiff’s fiendish love of lies or Mitt Romney’s moralizing indifference to due process. If either Trump or Biden is to leave the race, I want it to happen in a politically healthy manner, by the candidate withdrawing or the voters making a different choice. Notably, if either man is to be convicted of any crimes — I realize this will sound strange in our time — I’d like them to be actual, significant crimes which he actually committed, as proved by actual evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m not willing to countenance lies or lawlessness by judges, the Justice Department, or any other part of the weaponized leviathan. And even if the evidence of President Biden’s long-standing corruption has grown overwhelming, impeaching him at this point would be a waste of time and political capital. He’s not likely to be convicted in the Senate.

So we’ll likely see Trump vs. Biden this time, just as we saw Trump vs. Biden last time — which was no improvement at all on Trump vs. Clinton before that. The major parties have failed us yet again.

Three Strikes, We Should Be Out

I want to see tens of millions (not mere millions) leave any party that nominates Biden or Trump. Three strikes, we’re out. A national party which is no longer interested in or capable of nominating a fully functioning, minimally corrupt, encouragingly competent human being to the Oval Office doesn’t deserve to exist. And the only honorable way to destroy it, given our freedom of association, is for its members and donors to leave it in droves.

2020 Election Bonus: Prosecute Their A**es

It is axiomatic that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure election in the history of the known universe. They concluded and announced this even before Election Day, and it must be true. Big Democracy™, Big Government, and Big Media all agree, and Big Tech happily suppressed most dissenting opinion on the web as “disinformation.”

With that recollection vivid in your mind, do you remember all those poll workers who swore affidavits saying reams of never-folded mail-in ballots were counted, even though legal ballots had to come in official envelopes, and for that they had to be folded? Remember the poll workers who swore they saw stacks of suspiciously identical ballots being counted once or even multiple times? How about the poll workers who swore that ballots postmarked too late or without postmarks were counted? Remember the GOP poll watchers who swore affidavits saying they were physically barred from approaching the vote counting near enough to observe the vote counting? Remember the sworn testimony that ballots were counted after poll watchers were sent home for the night? (Tangentially, remember the judges who said some of those practices were no problem?)

Swearing affidavits means all those people testified under oath. Since we know the election was secure, we know their testimony was false. They all lied under oath. They committed perjury, a felony. Every last one of them should be prosecuted.

. . . Unless we’re afraid that the courts still aren’t fully coopted by the revolution, that evidence might surface in a proper investigation and trial to undermine the narrative that says no evidence exists. Then it would make sense that not one of them has been prosecuted for perjury in the past three years. It’s difficult to make a perjury charge stick to someone who is telling the truth.

What I Expect

I’d give better-than-even odds that November will bring us Biden vs. Trump. There’s a reasonable chance Biden will be gone. I don’t see much of a chance Trump will be gone. The various prosecutions of him are basically a clown show, and the Supreme Court is likely to determine that due process — as in a conviction — is required before someone can be removed from a ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment’s insurrection clause. (That word’s legal definition is far narrower than common usage, these last three years.) It matters that somehow, despite all the charges hostile prosecutors have conjured against Trump, not one has charged him with insurrection, the one charge they’ve wanted most. And they can’t cite the second impeachment (which played fast and loose with definitions and facts). That led to an acquittal.

Meanwhile, the Bigs will continue to deluge us with low-grade fecal matter. They seem to believe, as Jim Geraghty (@JimGeraghty on X) put it, that after all these years “the reason Trump supporters . . . are still with him is because they haven’t heard enough negative information about him.” For that to be true, they — tens of millions of them — would have to have been comatose all these years. That seems improbable, given that they voted for him. Like the dead, the fully incapacitated swing heavily Democratic.

That said, there are still a lot of Trump opponents who haven’t reconsidered their hatred of the man, even though several of the pillars on which they built that hatred have since collapsed, such as the fabricated Russian collusion narrative, the false praised-Nazis-at Charlottesville narrative, Big Media’s imaginary commitment to truth, and so on. Most of these will not reconsider in 2024 either, and I don’t completely blame them. If they begin to care more about the truth, they can still find ample reasons to despise the man and want him far from the Oval Office. I do.

An MLK Day Bonus

We’ll continue to be told (usually not in these words) that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was wrong. Now we know better: it’s not the content of a person’s character that matters; it’s the color of his or her skin. And oh, by the way, even if you’re black or brown (as to skin color), if you don’t vote for Democrats, you’re actually white. And all whites are inevitably and irrevocably racist — as are math, science, the English language, expectations of punctuality, reason itself, etc. And — because everything is rhetorically connected for the Left — the only way to keep the planet from melting down and disproportionately harming people of color is to sell all our freedom to a jet-setting, authoritarian elite in exchange for their snake oil promises of safety, security, and an endless supply of salve for our unenlightened consciences.

In my mind and heart, the Reverend Dr. King was right. It is the content of character that matters, not the color of skin. If the antiracist racists want to call that racism, I’ll own it.

My Wishful Thinking

I wish for a compelling independent presidential ticket I could vote for — specifically Ron DeSantis and Tulsi Gabbard.

DeSantis could leave the GOP and its de facto death wish. He’s not flawless but has been the country’s most credible governor these past several years, so much so that Big Narrative took up the chant for a while, when they thought he might win the Republican nomination, that he was already worse than Trump. (Here’s a good, relatively brief summary of why I like Ron DeSantis and, secondarily, why President Trump was so much less than we needed in 2020.)

Gabbard is an authentic American liberal (not leftist) who already left the Democratic Party, which didn’t want her anymore. She was too American for them. Her military service alone made them squirm with deserved inferiority. Her steady defense of the First Amendment vexed them. She even protested the massive breach of due process in the first Trump impeachment. (Read this Vox piece about Tulsi Gabbard, including her statement in the latter part.)

Full disclosure: I left the GOP in 2016 and can’t vote in their presidential primary anymore. But in Utah the Democrat presidential primary is open, so I voted for Tulsi Gabbard in 2020. Her politics and mine intersect on a few key points among many; she’s a liberal and I’m a conservative. But she sounds and votes like an American.

A DeSantis/Gabbard ticket wouldn’t appeal to the loud extremes of either party, but majorities of both, plus independents who still like being Americans, might flock to it — especially if the major party choice is between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Crazy, right? But the thought of it makes me smile.

What Can Americans Do?

We can abandon political parties which abandon America.

We can work to stay informed, gathering news, analysis, and opinion from diverse sources. We can find and follow thoughtful people across the political spectrum. We can suspend our belief, especially of things we really want to believe, until we’ve given matters enough time, thought, and attention that we have a reasonable sense of what might be true and whom to trust and how far.

(If your views mesh smoothly with the New York Times, Hamas, or, say, Fox News, you’re not doing it right. If you think the Saviors of Democracy™ are saving actual democracy by doing every non-electoral thing they can to keep the voters from being able to vote for the wrong candidate, consider Victor Davis Hanson‘s argument this week.)

We can vote from sober reflection, not fear. If you can’t find a perfect candidate on the ballot — you really can’t — do the best you can for the country.

I’ll have more suggestions next time.

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Photo credit: BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

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