Most bets are on Donald Trump, despite fierce campaigning by his top challengers, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has visited all 99 Iowa counties and secured the Iowa governor’s endorsement. DeSantis is seen as needing to score second place in Iowa to continue his bid, as Haley and Trump are polling ahead of him in New Hampshire.
Countless are the reasons that Trump, who has declared himself the “revenge” candidate, should be swept into history’s dustbin and left to spend his golden years as a professional defendant. If he continues to insist that the 2020 election was stolen from him, a noxious and provable lie, imagine what he’d do with a 2024 loss.
In addition to risking a repeat of Jan. 6, 2021, a Trump loss would leave us with the elderly Joe Biden in the presidency and the painful probability that he won’t live to complete his second term. And you know what that means. The single strongest argument against Biden’s reelection is Vice President Harris.
I can’t stress enough how irresponsible it would be to make a Harris presidency possible. Just listen to her speeches. Her rhetorical flourishes can be dumbfounding, as when she says, “When we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community.”
Then there’s the laugh, maniacal and mystifying. What is she laughing at? Nothing funny, it so often seems. I’m sure the vice president is lovely in other contexts, but as president, she would frighten the world.
Biden has different issues. Never mind the verbal pratfalls for which he has long been infamous; it’s his physical ones that are most worrisome. Falling is the No. 1 cause of fatal injuries in older people, and at times, it seems Biden is tilting too far for comfort. No one wants to hear personal criticism of our aged president, so we’ll leave it at: Go home, Joe.
Biden was surely the better choice in 2020 — far preferable to a guy accused of paying a porn star for sex and silence while his wife was taking care of an infant, a constitutional heathen who encouraged a siege of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters and believers in the “big lie.” Trump, don’t forget, was impeached by the House of Representatives for “inciting violence against the Government of the United States.”
This glowering, pouty-frowned schlump belongs nowhere near the White House. Trump is an unfit candidate. Full stop.
Thus, we are left with Haley and DeSantis. My view is that Haley is far and above the best pick for the jobs of chief executive and commander in chief. Like DeSantis, she has been a governor — South Carolina, where she was popular enough to be reelected. She left that job to become Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, where she was a natural. Articulate, knowledgeable and a quick study, she entered and left the position as a polished pro.
Critics point to Haley’s ambition and strategically timed policy positions, such as the decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds following the murders of nine African American parishioners in a historic Charleston church. If it was the right thing to do, why didn’t she do it before a racist lunatic mowed down innocent people in prayer? The answer is that politics is about compromises, adjustments and unfolding circumstances. When South Carolina was ready to purge the flag, Haley was ready.
DeSantis is plainly smart, too — a graduate of Harvard Law and Yale University. A JAG officer in the Navy, DeSantis was an adviser to a Navy SEAL commander and received both a Bronze Star and Iraq Campaign Medal.
For all this, however, he seems a man unfamiliar with his own skin. He lacks what Haley has in abundance: charisma. In addition to her proven competence as an executive and her superior performance in debate after debate, she is also warm, approachable and likable. A mother of two, she’s the wife of a deployed military officer. Most impressive, she’s a dark-skinned, second-generation Sikh American who grew up in Bamberg, S.C. (population 3,607), with a father who wore a dastar (Sikh turban).
As someone who spent my childhood summers racing up and down the scorching sidewalks of nearby Barnwell, S.C., I can tell you: A person who can make it out of Bamberg to govern and perform on the world stage can do anything, including lead the United States.
Do the right thing for your country, Iowa, and vote for Haley.
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