OPINION:
For years now, Georgia voters have been inspired to political action with calls of “Make America Great Again.” Today, those same, beleaguered voters are asked to return to the dirty polls in an election do-over with a decidedly less inspiring plea.
Stop the madness! Vote for gridlock! Cast your vote so nothing gets done in Washington!
It is a harder sell.
Asking people to do something good and exciting is always easier and more uplifting than asking them not to let something bad happen.
As political slogans go, “Make America Great Again” is far better than “Don’t let them flush America down the toilet by giving them both chambers of Congress.”
Therein lies the difference between great political leaders like President Trump or Ronald Reagan and dull schoolmarms without vision like Jimmy Carter.
Ronald Reagan implored: See the shining city on the hill!
Jimmy Carter said: Turn off the lights, lower the thermostat, put on a sweater and shut up. Also, snap out of your doldrums, you whiney losers.
Like the mayonnaise in the chicken salad at a church picnic in the hot Georgia sun, peddling “malaise” doesn’t travel so far in electoral politics.
What about Mr. Trump, you might ask. Didn’t he peddle a little of his own rancid “malaise” in his juggernaut 2016 campaign?
“When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo?” he bellowed. “It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time!”
Yes, that was some serious malaise, but it was different. Mr. Trump’s malaise illuminated a villain — a villain that only Mr. Trump promised to vanquish. And he had just the plan to vanquish that villain!
And vanquish he did.
No American politician in either party going back a half-century or more has done more than President Trump to excoriate terrible “free” trade deals hammered out by feckless politicians in Washington. No politician has done more to confront our toughest trade partners over all their cheating and stealing.
So, yes, Mr. Trump offered some malaise. But — like the smart salesman he is — he only offered it because he had a solution. He was selling ice cream in the desert.
Insufferable political preachers like “Jimmah” Carter had nothing to offer but the scold. That and endless lines snaking through the neighborhoods into your local gas station.
Now we are told that the once-reliably Republican state of Georgia has gone wobbly. The “demographics,” all the experts tell us, have changed.
The “demographics?” Seriously? Only in Washington is racial profiling not only accepted, but expected and enthusiastically encouraged.
As with many things, this is why politicians in Washington spend so much time denouncing racial profiling in all the lower forms of American human existence. They don’t like the competition.
Among the many wonderful things about Mr. Trump is that he does not see voters based on the color of their skin or their sex or any of the other categories of “demographics” that all the political experts are so deathlessly obsessed with around here.
Mr. Trump understands we are all one demographic. We are Americans. We all like ice cream. And we all want to lick our ice cream cones while watching Chevrolets roll through the streets of Tokyo.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor of The Washington Times. He can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com or @charleshurt3 on Parler.
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