OPINION:
In times of peace, elections are almost always about the economy. As ex-President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign memorably scolded: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
The only thing that trumps the economy in elections is security. Just ask ex-Never President John Kerry, who supported the War on Terror before he turned against it so that he could run for president in 2004.
This year’s elections should be all about the economy. Inflation, gas prices, stalled wages and broken supply chains.
President Joe Biden angrily yells at voters about how his administration has supposedly tamed inflation with massive new federal spending bills. As he stabs the air and screams incoherently, the DOW drops 1,200 points into the red — over skyrocketing inflation.
No wonder he is so angry.
As miserable as the economy is — and no matter how desperately Democrats and the media lie about the economy — there is an even more fearsome monster stalking Mr. Biden and Democrats this election: Rampaging crime.
The scenes of injustice and mayhem are everywhere.
A young mother and school teacher is murdered on a morning jog. A teenage student is beaten senselessly into the bathroom wall by a savage thug at school. A man in a wheelchair was intentionally run over by a truck. Commuters are shoved to their grisly deaths in front of subway trains.
Mob robberies, armed stick-ups and sucker punches on the sidewalk are too numerous to recount.
These scenes play out on television screens across the country and zip around social media. The trigger fingers of decent, civilized humans twitch as they helplessly watch the unchecked savagery. The Greek term “thumos” comes to mind, which is the simmering rage inside a decent, civilized human when he witnesses such moral atrocities committed against the weak and defenseless.
And just as the spiraling economy can be pinned directly to the policies of Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats, it is the policies of Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats that triggered this explosion in crime.
Their celebration of rioting and lawlessness, their encouragement of mob violence and their open vows to “defund the police” and empty prisons have borne their poisoned fruit. Their decades-long assault on Americans’ Second Amendment rights come into particularly painful focus at times like these.
Mr. Biden and all the Democrats who push this misery and bloodshed on American citizens are protected by an armory of guns. But you, the innocent American taxpayer, are not allowed to protect yourself. Or your family. Or your neighbors.
The good news is there is a politician in America who is running against the insane, murderous policies of Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats. The bad news is that it’s one of the Democrats who is part of Mr. Biden’s insane, murderous policy machine in Congress.
Democrat Congresswoman Val Demings is running for U.S. Senate in Florida against Senator Marco Rubio. Even though Mrs. Demings has been in lockstep with Mr. Biden and Democrats in Congress, she is running against the Biden Democrat crime machine.
“In the Senate, I’ll protect Florida from bad ideas like defunding the police,” Mrs. Demings pledges in a campaign ad.
According to The Washington Times politics reporter Susan Ferrechio, Mrs. Demings has spent millions of dollars campaigning against her party’s “defund the police” platform and is consistently within 2-3 points of Mr. Rubio.
“It’s going to be an extremely tight race,” one pollster told The Times.
“I think Republicans should be concerned about that race,” warned American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp.
What is particularly remarkable about Mrs. Demings is that she has been part of the political apparatus in Washington to defund the police — even though she was a police chief in Orlando before becoming a politician in Washington. Left unsaid is how Mrs. Demings plans to “protect Florida from bad ideas like defunding the police” in the U.S. Senate after failing to protect Florida from such bad ideas from her own party while in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In any event, it shows just how powerful the issue of crime will be in this next election.
Hopefully, Republican candidates will wake up to this reality and start holding Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats accountable for all the violence and crime.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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