On every election night since 2000, I’ve stayed up until I knew, well, something.
In 2000, Bush vs. Gore, a Mercury retrograde screwed things up. I’ve written about that before. But the Merc retro had some help from the awful butterfly ballots in Palm Beach County, where I live, and that election ended up in the supreme court. We all know how that one turned out.
In 2004, Bush vs. Kerry, I went to our voting station and voted for Kerry. The voting machines were made by Diebold. Google it. There’s plenty of info about who and what. At any rate, I punched the square for Kerry. Bush’s name came up.I hit cancel, tried twice more. Same thing. I voted for Kerry, Bush’s name came up. Finally, in the fourth try, my vote worked.
I think that’s when I knew Bush would win a second term. Nonetheless, I watched the returns until early in the morning for that election. But one really beautiful event during that election cycle gave me hope. And that was a speech by then Senator Obama at the Democratic National Convention. I thought, He’s it. 2008.
And during that campaign season, Rob and I drove down to Boca or Fort Lauderdale, can’t remember which city, and waited three hours to hear Obama and Biden speak. I came out of there certain that Obama would be the next president.
On election night 2008, I started sobbing when Obama took Florida by a 2.8 percent margin, the first time since 1996 that a Democrat had taken Florida. Even the polls had indicated that McCain would take the state, Obama nabbed it with 51 percent of the vote and became the 44th president.
No, he wasn’t perfect. He should have pushed for indictments for Cheney, Wolfowitz, people in Bush’s swamps. In Flint, Michigan, during its water crisis, he shouldn’t have sipped from a glass of water that supposedly came from a Flint faucet but actually came from Air Force.
On election night in 2012, I sobbed again when Obama won a second term.
Then we come to 2016. I stayed up until two, I think, and went to bed sobbing because trump had won the electoral college.
Now here we are. November 2020. Trump vs. Biden. This is NOT 2016. We’ve had trump for nearly 4 years now, and know these things about him:
His lying is constant. Believe nothing of what he says. Where’s his health care plan that 4 years ago he said he would have in two weeks?
He’s the emperor with no clothes. Here’s what I’m going to do for you, he announced in 2016. And in 2020, the people reply: Yeah? Where is it? Well, hey, the boy is too busy tweeting.
We’re going to see a red wave like you’ve never seen before, he proclaims. Uh-huh, in which universe?
We’re rounding the curve on the pandemic, we’ve done a great job, the pandemic is over.
Oh, over? Even though we now have an average of about 70,000 new cases a day? How do you figure that one, trump? Because you announce the pandemic is over, is the virus going to flee?
Do you really believe you control the virus?
Huh?
Do you?
On election night 2020, I’ll be up until Biden wins Florida or Pennsylvania or Michigan or some other outlier. And I hope to be cheering and doing a happy dance because it means we’ll have a national plan for dealing with this virus. Because it means the president won’t be on the national platform 24/7 creating some new drama. Because it means civility is returning to politics and perhaps our country has started to heal.
Trump isn’t without purpose. He has exposed the racial, cultural, and monetary divides in this country. He has exposed where the constitution is really weak and needs to be amended. He has shown us why the Senate Majority Leader should be obligated to bring every bill the House passes to the floor of the senate for a vote. He has shown us why the supremes need to have term limits. Trump has shown us the ugliest, most vile parts of the collective American psyche and folks, it’s really dark.
But I think trump is also an American example of how a coup might happen. The stunt with the Bible, for instance, was one such signal about autocracy. The other was his photo op of removing his mask after his release from Walter Reed, hen he’d wanted to wear a Superman shirt.And behind that shirt is William Barr, his attorney general, his private lawyer dude.
A lotta people have gulped the trump Kool-Aid.
Yeah, he’s great at media opportunities.
And fails at everything else.
