"Missing the Forest for the Tree"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Missing the Forest for the Tree”

May 19, 2021

 

“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

                                                                                Attributed to Albert Einstein, but also to Mark Twain and others.

 

A principled stand by a politician is admirable. Too often, politicians follow the road of least resistance (or the one with the most voters). But when a principled stand evolves into stubbornness, the forest can be lost in concentration on a single tree. That, in my opinion, is the problem of Elizabeth Cheney (R-WY).

 

Most Republicans do not want to denigrate President Trump, but neither do they want to elevate him. Benign neglect is the preferred path. The good of what he did – freeing up the economy from restrictive regulations and confining taxes, repatriating more than a trillion dollars in corporate cash, raising wages for the lowest income workers, and creating the most jobs ever for Black and Hispanic; taking real steps to resolve the border crisis; addressing the bureaucratic morass in Washington; calling out international governmental bodies for their undemocratic ways; getting NATO nations to pay a greater share of their defense; confronting enemies of freedom like Communist China, Russia and North Korea; signing the Abraham Accords and instigating Operation Warp Speed to get a COVOD-19 vaccine out in record time – was overshadowed by a supersized ego and mean-spirited, feckless Tweets.

 

Democrats, on the other hand, would like to keep the spirit of Donald Trump front and center. While it is true that his ardent Republican supporters do not want to give up on him, neither do Democrat leaders who see him as someone around whom they can rally their troops. Trump Derangement Syndrome helped Mr. Trump with the public when he was President because complaints about him were so outrageous. But it hurts the Republican Party and their chances today when anti-Trump opinions are voiced by other Republicans. “Prudent Republicans,” wrote Andrew McCarthy in the May 15^th issue of National Review, “perceive that the best way to move on from Trump is to stop talking about him.” I agree.

 

If Republicans want to take control of the House and Senate in 2022, they will have to focus on issues, not on the personality of the former President. Single issue politicians detract from legitimate policy debates. In refusing to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump has done no more than what Al Gore did in 2000 and Hillary Clinton did in 2016. In all three cases (2000, 2016, 2020), there were certainly electoral irregularities, but there always have been. However, from what we now know, none of those elections would have been reversed. “If questioning the results of a particular election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath,” writes Mollie Hemingway in her forthcoming book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, “nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated following the 2016 election.” It is not that Mr. Trump’s character should be ignored, but that it must be kept in perspective.

 

As for the January 6 protests that culminated with a number of people making their way past security into the Capitol, an independent commission has been created to investigate exactly what happened. But to call the event an “insurrection” is argumentative and misleading. More than 400 individuals have been arrested, with dozens incarcerated without trial. What ever happened to one of the most sacred principles in American justice, the presumption of innocence? None of those entering the capitol that day, according to reports, carried a firearm. The only individual shot and killed was a thirty-five-year-old female protester, Ashli Babbitt, from California. She was shot by a police officer who has been cleared of any wrongdoing and has never been identified. Would media silence have reigned were roles reversed and had the protester been a Democrat? Nevertheless, we should await the finding of the commission, and trust it will be as non-partisan as possible – a difficult, if not impossible, task in this factional age.

 

While it is still too early to claim the Biden Administration a success or failure, its start has certainly done little to heal a fractured nation, despite promises in his Inaugural. On the other hand, his Administration’s policies have offered opportunities for his opponents. His positive ratings have slipped, while his negative ones have risen. As Gerard Baker wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal, this is what happens “when you construct an ideological dreamscape made up of impossible promises, implausible assertions and dishonest propositions.” A few of the Biden policies that offer opportunity to Republicans: The crisis on the southern border, with children being smuggled in by paid “coyotes,” and sometimes abandoned on remote desert ranches; a rise in urban crime amid continued calls to defund the police; an education system that looks to end meritocracy and free speech, while promoting racial differences rather than encouraging melting pot commonalities; urging schools to adopt the segregationist and Marxist views embedded in Critical Race Theory, and the simultaneous “cancellation” of our history and literature; threatening economic expansion by paying people not to work; a continued rise in federal debt to historic levels; a federal budget that proposes a 16% increase in non-defense, domestic discretionary spending, with only a 1.6% increase in defense spending; a Federal Reserve that seems unconcerned regarding the inflationary consequences of an expansive monetary policy; sharply higher gasoline prices and shortages in six states; abandonment of the Abraham Accords and a rise in Middle East violence; an aggressive China, which threatens Hong Kong and Taiwan; and Russia, with increased troops on Ukraine’s eastern border. 

 

With the “forest” so ripe with issues beneficial to Republicans, it would be a shame to let the “tree” that is former President Trump be the focus of Republicans looking to take back the Senate and the House in 2022. While Republican leadership must understand the reasons for Mr. Trump’s popularity (and they must appeal to his supporters), they must also highlight and concentrate on all that which has gone wrong in the first few months of Mr. Biden’s Administration. For Republicans, to repeatedly bang on the anti-Trump drum is a form of insanity that will surely lead to political losses.  On the other hand, the misdeeds and errors of the Biden Administration would be, as Rahm Emanuel might say, a terrible thing to waste.