Kremer’s Corner: It’s about the election stupid!

Jerry Kremer

The Bill Clinton days are not that long ago. Back in 1991, the Democratic candidate was in the middle of a challenge against President George W. Bush. The incumbent was riding high on a strong economy and had the benefit of a successful Desert Storm victory.

In the closing months of the campaign then everything turned bad and Clinton ousted the Republican incumbent.

As he raised his right hand to take the oath of office, one of his chief advisors, James Carville, was asked what the formula was to win a tough election.

Carville said “it’s the economy stupid” and those few words summed up the reason for Clinton’s success. The deeper you look into the actions of President Donald J. Trump in 2020 there is a simple conclusion to his actions and his motives. It’s all about the election stupid.

In early January, when word filtered out that China was experiencing a virus that could kill millions of people, the president scoffed at the idea that the virus was any threat to America. Afterall, the economy was humming along and unemployment was at its lowest number in years, so why get hung up on some sick people in Wuhan, China.

The safest bet was to declare China off limits and there was no way that the virus would ever get here. The latest numbers show that even after the blockade of Chinese visitors, at least 40,000 additional Chinese came to America.

Bad news was not going to get in the way of a re-election campaign. Somehow the president never saw a memorandum addressed to him from his trusted trade representative Peter Navarro, warning that there may be a pandemic in this country that could kill millions.

When you are an incumbent in an election year no one wants any bad news, especially if it will impact on the stock market.

A booming Wall Street was the key to success in November, so some harmless ailment wasn’t going to get in the way of his campaign. Week after week the president played down the threat of the Coronavirus calling it something that will “go away very quickly” and only “impacted on fifteen people.”

For six precious weeks, Mr. Trump downplayed the growing threat to America until late March when faced with rising deaths and a broken system, he proclaimed “I always knew that this would become a pandemic.”

To ward off his critics he blamed his impeachment hearings as a distraction that threw the country off guard.

When he wasn’t trying to link the virus to the Democrats in general, he proclaimed that this was another problem caused by former President Barack Obama.

He complained that effort to stop a pandemic was weak because he has been saddled with an “archaic testing procedure.” He ignored the fact that the broken testing mechanisms developed by the Center for Disease Control, took place on his watch.

The distribution of masks, ventilators and protective garments is supposed to be a non-partisan effort to keep America safe.

But as time goes by, we will learn that many precious supplies were given out to states that are critical to his re-election. While New York and Michigan were begging for help, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron De Santis was given 100 percent of what he asked for, well ahead of the growing patient count.

Bad news flies fast in this social media age and every effort is being made to stifle that information.

By law, most federal departments must have an inspector general, who is an independent overseer of that body to keep it from being politicized. How does a president deal with an IG who may tell the public that federal virus funds are being mismanaged? You fire them.

After the tragedy of 9/11, Congress created a special commission to investigate the pros and cons of America’s conduct.

Someday, probably not in my lifetime, such a commission will be formed. Its conclusion won’t be hard to predict. This year’s pain and suffering was the product of one man’s desire to win at any cost. 2020 was all about the election stupid!

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