Updated Thoughts on the Presidential Election

Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump

Since I last shared my views on the upcoming election (https://pen4rent.com/a-plague-on-both-their-houses and https://pen4rent.com/biden-gets-it-half-or-more-wrong-again), there has been a seismic shift in the Democratic Party’s candidate for president (from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris). Moreover, mail-in ballots for the election have already been sent to voters in several states. While my thoughts on the nominees are hardly likely to influence many readers, I cannot resist the temptation to share them now, as voting begins.

So here goes — and I’ll keep it brief.

Most critically, as a traditional conservative on most (but not all) issues, I want to see Trump defeated and, in the words of pundit George Will, removed from public life.

I agree with the stance of Wyoming’s former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney* (and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney) that conservatives can live with four more years of policies they oppose, but America cannot risk putting our nation’s future back in the hands of the serial liar who attempted to violently overturn the legitimate result of our last presidential election and has even entertained the idea of shredding the Constitution, the bedrock of our republic.

Former Representative Liz Cheney

All other considerations pale in comparison to the need to keep the Trump cancer from again lodging in the White House, from which he would wreak untold further damage to our nation.

If any conservative-leaning readers prefer to cast a write-in vote for someone other than Trump or Harris (about whom Will writes, “Disbelieve almost everything she has said for weeks in disavowing almost everything she said for years while reciting progressivism’s catechism. … The pull of her party’s progressive base, whose Bay Area faction incubated her political persona, means that she would be a progressive president.”) I hope such readers will think twice, hold their noses and vote for Harris.

If you live in a toss-up “battleground state,” every vote for Harris is a brick in the wall against the possibility that Trump wins an Electoral College majority and brings his wrecking ball back to the White House.

In states where a Harris victory is a foregone conclusion, a write-in vote for “neither of the above” can do no harm and may even give a little extra heft to arguments favoring the need to reform the current primary-election nominating system that tends to reward the desires of the more extreme wing in each party, often leaving in the dust more moderate, centrist candidates who better reflect the instincts and needs of the public at large.

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* Cheney served as vice chair (and, in my view, heroine) of the congressional committee that investigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-inspired mob on Jan. 6, 2021. If she is remembered for little else, this quote encapsulates her unshakable stand for principle: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”