2022 is a political dream come true

 

                                                                                                                                              Dec. 21, 2021 

[In the holiday and year end spirit, if you click on the links, a few of them reveal musical treats.]

Democrats, I’m pulling out every cliché, song, and line to inspire you. 

The elections of 2022, less than a year away, provide all the opportunity to take over the Senate with room to spare. 

There are 34 U.S. Senate seats up for election in 2022—14 seats held by Democrats and 20 held by Republicans. More GOP seats than Dem seats at stake. Not a bad starting point. 

I’m going to dispense with the palpable negatives in this one paragraph because I don’t want to dilute the inspirational message below. Sure, President Biden’s favorability of 42% or so is alarmingly low. Inflation is through the roof. The omicron variant has a stranglehold on the markets worldwide. You’d hardly know the economy otherwise is recovering. Covid has run amok again, thanks to omicron and Republican-induced vaccine resistance. The political right knows how to take advantage of big and little lies relentlessly. The Democratic Party can’t hold its own. West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, a Democrat, shows all signs of being smugly content to make Biden’s first term a legislative failure. Historically, the political party of first term presidents gets whooped in the first off-year elections. Four incumbent Democratic Senators - Raphael Warnock in Georgia, Mark Kelly in Arizona, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire - are considered vulnerable in the 2022 elections by many pundits. If they lose, that would eliminate the razor thin and compromised Democratic majority, and leave the Republicans with a four-vote unified majority. That’s plenty to kill the spirit. 

Democratic Party, you cannot let that happen. The American public and the world deserve better, need better, and ultimately must demand better. To rally the masses, I’m pulling out one cliché, song, and line after another. 

Accentuate the positive

Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don’t mess with Mr. In-between. 

There are ten states with potential flips to Democrats, according to the Dream Team of Jack Doppelt and his motivational delusions. 

1. Pennsylvania 

Incumbent Republican Pat Toomey is retiring. The Dems have a number of attractive candidates in the offing. The GOP has Dr. Mehmet Oz, frequent guest on Oprah before he started his own show. As an influencer doc, he’s promoted hydroxychloroquine to fight covid and dietary supplements and foods that falsely promise weight loss. The Trump-endorsed candidate withdrew after his estranged wife, accused him of abuse. Biden carried the state in 2020. Oz is polling well and we know celebrities have the name

Wizard

recognition to win. So..we’re off to see the wizard, the woeful wizard who’s Oz, we hear he is a whiz of a wiz if ever a wiz there was, because, because, because, because, because of the woeful things he says. 

2. Wisconsin 

Incumbent Republican Ron Johnson is a doofus of the highest order. In 2016, he was reelected with 50.17% of the vote, so he’s vulnerable. He rejects climate change, says he doesn’t when backed into a corner, also says that scientists who attribute global warming to human activity are "crazy" and that climate change is "bullshit." He touts debunked covid remedies, like mouthwash, and favors a move that would allow the

Duh Duh Ron Ron

Republican-controlled state legislature to take over the administration of Wisconsin elections. Most glaring and pronounced, he sticks with the redrock belief that Trump won Wisconsin and the election. Because the state legislature is GOP-controlled and passes voter suppression bills, Wisconsin is often mischaracterized as a red state. Johnson is the only statewide-elected Republican in Wisconsin. He’s served two terms (beating Russ Feingold both times) and is being coy about if he’ll run again. Someone told me that his name was Ron, duh duh Ron Ron, Duh duh Ron Ron. That’s Crystals clear. At last count, there were more than a dozen Democrats raising money for the race. Count them. See the money trickle away. Dems, keep your eyes on the prize, and remember the only thing the Dems do wrong is stayin’ in the wilderness too long. 

Keep your eyes on the prize

3. North Carolina 

Incumbent Republican Richard Burr is retiring. The Dems appear to have their act together. This week, one of the prospective candidates withdrew, leaving a clear path for Cheri Beasley, a former state Supreme Court Justice. The GOP is divided between two candidates, one supported by Trump. I view the recurring scenario of a Trump candidate vs. an outlier within the GOP as the under-recognized wild card for 2022. How will they avoid a brawl when a mean-spirited puppeteer, who neither forgives nor forgets, is pulling strings and dangling his pride? How will the GOP recover after the primary? Beasley is African American in a state whose population is about ¼ African American. Over the past ten years, by census data, the state’s population grew by 17%; the black population by even more. In 2020, the turnout for Black votes overall was 68%, according to the state’s Board of Elections. That can go up. As it was, nearly 20% of the 2020 vote was African American. In my mind, I'm countin’ Carolina. Can't you see the sunshine? Now can't you just feel the moonshine? 

Countin' Carolina

4. Ohio 

Incumbent Republican Rob Portman is retiring and Trump needs to be heard. Another arena for the under-recognized wild card. Ohio is textbook. A conservative organization, Club for Growth, has been running ads attacking one of the GOP Senate candidates, J.D. Vance, by using footage of him from 2016, when he described himself as a “Never Trump guy” and called Trump an “idiot,” “noxious” and “offensive,” according to Politico. Trump, got that? Club for Growth is running the ad because it’s backing a different conservative. Vance is running as a pro-Trumper, and the ads make Vance look hypocritical. Trouble is for Trump, it makes him look bad too. That is not ok. Trump wants the ad killed. Friction afoot in Ohio. The candidate for the Dems will likely be Tim Ryan, a Congressman who represents a working-class district in northeast Ohio and has been re-elected nine times. Here too, it looks like a Democratic Party, once the primary is over, can be unified and in a position to support a respected lawmaker. Then again, Trump won Ohio in both 2016 and 2020 by 8 points. That’s a lot. However, there’s Sherrod Brown, the other Ohio Senator who’s a Democrat. He was re-elected by 6 points in 2018. I call that a historical draw. Time to drum up some Ohio state fight. Come, on Ohio. Smash Thru to Victory, Dems. We'll cheer you as you go. Our honor defend for we'll fight to the end for old Ohio. 

Ohio fight song

5. Florida 

Incumbent Republican Marco Rubio is a formidable sleeze. GOP Governor Ron DeSantos is igniting the political right and toting Rubio with him. As in 22 other states, the GOP has a trifecta, controlling the governor’s office and both houses of the state legislature, and they know how to use it. In 2016, Rubio announced he wouldn’t run for a second Senate term. He ran for President and dropped out when Trump beat his butt in the primary in Rubio’s home state. Rubio got 27% of the vote. What to do? Change his mind and run for Senate re-election. He won. Rubio and DeSantos are both mentioned as presidential material for 2024. But first, 2022…by two years. Both Rubio and DeSantos are running for re-election at the same time. Who’s to say if potentially divided loyalties, efforts and fundraising will affect the GOP or the Dems more. The punditry is primed to paint the state red. Rubio has sharpened his campaign message to the old and tired, running against Biden and his “Build Back Socialist agenda." Rubio's likely opponent is US Rep. Val Demings, who served as one of the seven managers in the Senate impeachment trial of Trump, though there are about ten other Dems in the hunt. Rubio is targeting Demings…and Biden, as his Facebook page makes clear. 

X A champion of Biden’s Build Back Socialist agenda 

X Called plans to defund the police ‘very thoughtful’ 

X Described a violent riot as a ‘beautiful sight' 

X Supports illegal immigrants voting in our elections 

The Real @ValDemings is too radical for Florida. 

https://floridianpress.com/.../rubio-says-floridians.../ 

Florida, is this really how you roll? Is this is how you do when the world turns ugly, proud to be young, stick to your guns, love who you love? 

This is how we roll

Each of the five races is a statewide, or local, example, and should stand alone, if there’s guiding truth in the overused line commonly attributed to Tip O’ Neill, former Massachusetts Democrat and Speaker of the House, that “all politics is local.” 

If that were the case, there wouldn’t be so much handwringing about Biden, and Rubio wouldn’t be milking it. But of course, it’s not the whole story.

Biden and the Dems need to message much more effectively so that when the clock turns into election year 2022 in a few weeks, each of the Democrats seeking Senatorial office have legs to stand on. 

Biden can start today by deploying some ju jitsu-like moves to turn Trump’s aggressive, out of control, actions against himself and the political right. 

Oh, ho, ho, ho, Biden, time for some kung fu fighting. Bring it as fast as lightning. Trump is saying he’s

Kung fu fighting

vaccinated and boosted so he can take credit for creating the vaccine. Thank him for providing a good example to his resistant followers. If they follow his lead to vaccinate and get boosted, no need for mandates. Bow to your adversary. [Ed. note: As it turned out, that's just what Biden did in his talk, though in an understated way.]

Other underplayed messaging includes:

• Biden’s successes in recalibrating the judiciary to appoint lifetime judges to a federal bench that has become, along with the Supreme Court, the province of the far right. It may yet return some legitimacy to the American judicial system. Biden’s gotten more judicial nominees confirmed through the Senate than any president at this point in his first term in decades. Almost half of the 61 judges he’s nominated to the lower courts have been confirmed, according to Five Thirty Eight. 

• Biden is addressing climate change. It matters. If the Republicans persist in opposing and blocking efforts to save the planet and states from steroidal natural disasters, it needs to be on their heads, in every state where people have experienced the heartbreak and trauma of forest fires, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. And don’t neglect the families of workers in the coal industry, in Manchin’s West Virginia and in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Illinois and North Dakota, who suffer in the short run from environmental efforts that redirect resources. Direct job training and hirings in higher paying industries where people live have to be front and center and available in 2022. That’s where subsidies should go to build back better. 

• For those clamoring about the debt as a reason to oppose Biden’s Build Back Better proposal, a big leap for mankind would be to reduce military spending. The House and Senate have passed a $768 billion defense bill, awaiting Biden’s signature. It will increase the Pentagon’s budget by $24 billion more than what Biden himself asked Congress for. You can and should reduce the amount to what you requested. Better yet, less. The military budget is out of (your) control. Nobel laureates have called for cuts of 2% a year for the next five years in all military budgets worldwide. It’s not just the deadly drone airstrikes, as the New York Times recently revealed, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and what it’s left in its wake for the Afghan people under Taliban rule, and the purposeful lies justifying the Iraqi War, if that weren’t enough, that leads to the obvious, though ignored, conclusion that the bloated funding is compromising, not ensuring, national security and has been for years. Yeah, some folks inherit star-spangled eyes. They send you down to war and when you ask 'em, "How much should we give?" They only answer, "More, more, more." When you announce the reduced budget, be clear that none of the reductions are coming out of funding for bases anywhere within U.S. borders. That's where members of Congress have constituents and where constituents have jobs. And those are just starters. Get crackin.’ 

If only these five statewide Senate wins come to pass, we won’t need no stinkin’ Manchin, and there’s more.

Don't need no stinkin'...

The second installment of five is right here.

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