Democrats:
Don’t read this
As ever-present reminders of the success of our ongoing war with Iran edge just a tenth of a no-longer-minted cent away from a frightening number, we aren’t looking to 4.00, as we do at commencement time, as a sign of perfection.
Rather, it’s a sign of failure. A war that started out with free passage of oil out of the Gulf of Hormuz has ended in supposedly overwhelming victory that actually has turned into monumental defeat.
Our pocketbooks and wallets aren’t the only things about to be made a lot slimmer by a series of ill-conceived and unilateral blunders coming from a president who seems to believe not in a bully pulpit but in simple bullying.
He’s faced his last election — or, at least, the Constitution says he has. The rest of us have many elections to come, and now is the time for all good Republicans to come to the aid of their once proud but now disgraced party.
Many people hereabout voted for Donald Trump in 2024 not because they liked him but because they feared what an unchecked Democratic Party under Kamala Harris might do.
Two years of Trump’s autocratic rule are about to hand the nation over to the same forces that key voters tried to prevent from assuming power at the start of his term.
The latest sign of grave difficulty is polling in the U.S. Senate race in Kansas. While some of the polls come from opposition candidates and, as a result, must be viewed with skepticism, the bottom line is that Senator Roger Marshall is in trouble for re-election.
Marshall, who rarely lets an hour go by without issuing some pro-Trump brown-nosing news release as if he were angling for a cabinet appointment, is about to learn that going to bed with a controversial politician means you may suddenly wake up and find yourself beside him.
In one recent poll, his likely Democratic opponent trails him narrowly — by a number that’s well within the statistic margin of error for the survey.
When polltakers explain each candidate’s stance on issues and ask again who the respondents support, Marshall’s opponent actually takes the lead, though again within the margin of error.
That particular finding isn’t especially concerning. Politicians have for years used polling not to measure opinions but to shape them by doing such things as picking issues in such a way to make one candidate sound good and the other bad.
It’s what they call a “push poll,” and it’s extremely common. But rarely do we sign in a state like Kansas such a clear repudiation of what a Republican candidate stands for unless the candidate is Sam Brownback, whose voodoo economics nigh-on destroyed the state’s economy.
For the sake of our democracy, Republicans have to do better. It’s time for the Republican Party to reassert principles it was founded on — freedom, economic responsibility, and even a social conscience, albeit one that doesn’t break the federal bank.
The GOP is the party of Lincoln, of Teddy Roosevelt, and more to the point in Marion County of our one-time and current neighbors to the north — Dwight Eisenhower and Nancy Kassebaum.
These were leaders that both we and the rest of the world could be proud, not afraid of — neither embarrassed nor harassed by them.
As filing deadline and primary elections near, good Republicans need to stop fearing that the radical minority Donald Trump has appealed to will continue to hold the party hostage. Volunteering to run, even for just precinct committeeman, will hold the potential — to borrow a phrase — of making the Republican Party great again.
— ERIC MEYER