President can beat Dems, media with focus on what matters, rather than playing into distractions
By Eddie Zipperer, LifeZette:
Exit polls from the 2016 election divided voters into all the same categories of conventional political thinking — race, gender, income, and religion. They should have included categories such as “those who mow their own grass,” “those who wear coveralls to work,” “those who lose sleep worrying about their job security,” “those who can go through the whole day without being offended” and “those who have no idea what Uber is.” Categories like these would make it crystal clear how President Trump won. There are no existing statistics on those categories, but I guarantee Hillary Clinton wasn’t competitive among those groups.
There’s a beat-up, 1980s Chevy pickup I always see around town, and the guy who drives it probably falls in all those categories.
He should leave that stuff to people who are good at it and focus on the business of the people who elected him who obviously don’t care what The New York Times or The Washington Post has to say.
The entire back window is covered with Trump stickers — Trump/Pence 2016, GOP elephant wearing a Trump toupee, Veterans for Trump, Proud Deplorable, et al. That’s not out of the ordinary in a one-Starbucks town in the heart of a red state — one that doesn’t even border any blue states. Towns like mine exist all over the United States, and their inhabitants don’t cast votes based on an enlightening article they read in The Atlantic or because they’re devoted to a certain ideology — just ask Mitt Romney or John McCain.
Middle Americans vote for policies that will keep the power plant or the manufacturing plant open. Not because they hang with the pro-plant crowd at the coffee house and they want to fit in, but because they work there. They provide their labor to the plant, and the plant gives them the money they need to feed their family — pretty basic economics. They get a wage, and they stretch it as far as they can without breaking it. They maximize its elasticity by voting for the candidate who will lighten their tax burden, bring down their health care premiums, and keep gas prices low.
They sometimes have bumper stickers on their cars and trucks, but they’re not activists. They don’t go to protests or join resistance movements because their 9-to-5 is spoken for. And they definitely don’t have time to care about endless doom and gloom anti-Trump news cycles that begin when some pundit screams “scandal” into the echo chamber and end when some anonymous source leaks information about a sexier scandal.
These hard-working Americans were the hard-working, flag-waving base of the Democratic Party. Then the party sold them out because Wall Street, K Street, and Sand Hill Road all are all paved with a lot more gold than Main Street.
So middle Americans went from Democratic Party base to basket of deplorables. Why? Because they dared to have different interests from banks and lobbyists. They want to keep their medium-wage jobs, support a family, and live middle-class lives.
They’re deplorable because they don’t want big industries to own all the politicians. They’re deplorable because they don’t want to hand over control of their lives to a group of D.C. swamp monsters. It’s amazing what a few years can do! Bill Clinton was famous for feeling the pain of these middle-Americans, but a couple decades later, Hillary Clinton laughed at their pain and spewed invective at them. It was as though there’s evil in not wanting to bankroll a government that takes the fruits of their labor — money they would stretch to its limits through careful budgeting — and tosses it around like parade candy. Don’t like elites throwing away the money you busted your a** for? Then you’re greedy. Just ask millionaire Bernie Sanders, who spent months traveling around the country shaming anybody with an extra buck.
In 210, 2014, and 2016, middle Americans sent a big message to Washington by voting Democrats out of the House, the Senate, governorships, state legislatures, and the presidency. Democrats should be trying to win these people back.
They should be buying flowers and candy, and Hallmark apology cards for working-class Americans. They should be standing on the lawn of middle America with a boom box blaring a Peter Gabriel song and begging middle America to take them back.
Instead, the Democrats and their media have been trying to impeach Trump since Nov. 9. They were accusing him of violating the emoluments clause before he took office. Then they decided he definitely colluded with Russia even though nobody has produced a single shred of evidence. Now, they want to impeach him over a memo written by someone whom two weeks ago they considered to be the least trustworthy person in America.
They want to punish middle Americans for electing Trump. They want to depose him before he can implement his agenda — or at least wrap him up in distractions.
Meanwhile, President Trump seems to have forgotten why he was sent to the White House.
Instead of pushing his agenda, he’s made his war with the media the centerpiece of his presidency so far. As if fighting with newspapers on Twitter is the secret to making America great again. He should leave that stuff to people who are good at it and focus on the business of the people who elected him, who obviously don’t care what The New York Times or The Washington Post has to say.
Trump supporters don’t worry about the day-to-day minutiae that only exist to feed the pundits. President Trump has to get back to what matters. Congress needs to focus on lowering taxes and health care premiums, and the Democrats need to stop trying to rob working-class Americans of policies that would ease their burden. Their war against Trump, the so-called resistance, is nothing more than a pathway from major political party to crazy fringe movement.
Eddie Zipperer is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College and a regular LifeZette contributor.
This article was used with permission from LifeZette.
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