by Robert Curry
The candidates who most excited the punditocracy have quit the race. Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty observes that “Elizabeth Warren departs the race without finishing above third place in a single state. Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand quit well before the voting.”
These media candidates, of course, were also the most amusing candidates. But the circus has left town; things just got serious. The race for the party’s nomination is now down to a Marxist hardliner who has always eschewed party membership and Joe Biden, the party hack who is the pick of the Democratic Party’s powers-that-be. Interesting.
As of today, those in the know tell us that Biden is going to come out on top.
And that means 2020 will be, in essence, a re-run of 2016.
Back in July of last year, I asked: “Is Common Sense Making a Comeback?” In that piece, I noted that Trump had run as “a common-sense conservative.” My question was: Did America, by electing Trump, take a step in the direction of returning to common sense in American political life?
That raises the question of the meaning of the 2016 election. Was the election decided by the vote for common sense conservatism or by the vote against the brazen corruption of the Clintons? If the election was decided by voters recoiling from the nauseating corruption of the Clintons, then the true test of common sense may await us in 2020.
For a replay of common sense versus political corruption, the Democrats would probably need to nominate former Vice President Joe Biden. At this point, it seems that only Biden’s political corruption approaches the corruption of the Clintons, though, as with the Clintons, the media could be counted on to conduct a cover-up and distraction campaign to protect him.
In 2016, Trump ran against someone who should have been headed to the Big House instead of running for the White House. You or I already would have been in the Big House if we had committed a tiny fraction of the rule-breaking Hillary Clinton has racked up. But in America today, members of the deep state get a pass when they break the rules; you and me, not so much.
The Democrats should have been forced to find another candidate to run against Trump in 2016 because their candidate should have been in jail. A candidate, even a Democrat, running for the Oval Office from federal prison is an innovation in American politics that America is probably not yet ready to experience.
Unfortunately for those of us drawn to the idea of a contest between common sense and the nonsense offered by the strange new Democrat Party, so unlike the party of JFK or even of Walter Mondale, it now appears a contest between common sense and its opposite is not in the offing for 2020. As in 2016, Trump is once again likely to be running against a Democrat who is the very embodiment of political corruption, even the most outstanding current example we have of American political corruption, aside from the Clintons of course. Once again, the Democratic propaganda directorate – a.k.a., the mainstream media – will do whatever it takes to shield the voters from the truth about Biden’s corruption and about Biden’s infirmity, just as they did for Hillary.
And once again, Trump’s victory would leave the same question left by the results in 2016: did the voters choose common sense over nonsense or did they simply recoil from Biden’s manifest corruption?
Still, two victories in a row by a self-declared common-sense conservative would be interesting. It would raise the possibility that common sense is making a comeback in America. We’ll see.
– – –
Robert Curry serves on the board of directors of the Claremont Institute and is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World. Both are from Encounter Books.
