Jumping Ahead to January 20, 2025: Beware the President of the United States
Politics is nothing if not cyclical- especially after two-term presidencies.
In our own lifetime, we have seen a succession of presidents elected as polar opposites to their immediate predecessors:
- Kennedy elected following two terms of Eisenhower;
- Nixon elected following two terms of Kennedy/Johnson;
- Carter elected following two terms of Nixon (and his successor, Ford);
- Reagan elected following Carter’s single term;
- Clinton elected following two terms of Reagan and one term of Bush-41;
- Bush-43 elected following two terms of Clinton;
- Obama elected following two terms of Bush-43;
- Trump elected following two terms of Obama.
While President Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020 cannot be ascertained with any assurance, suffice to say that none of the “cast of thousands” of Democrat hopefuls have the goods to wage a successful campaign against “the Donald.”
Not that the media- given their abject failure to prevent his election in 2016- won’t go all out against the President when he seeks re-election to the nation’s highest office in two years. Twentieth and twenty-first century historical trends will almost guarantee his re-election the next time we endure a presidential campaign. Therefore, Trump’s re-election will assure that he will be succeeded by his own polar opposite- and no one in politics today is as diametrically opposed to Donald Trump as is the freshman Congresswoman from New York’s Fourteenth District than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Two weeks prior to the 2024 Presidential election Ocasio-Cortez will celebrate her thirty-fifth birthday, thus meeting the Constitutional age requirement by a mere fortnight. All of Hollywood, the mainstream media, and politicos of all stripes will actively and clandestinely support her candidacy because she will still be young, still be vivacious and, most importantly, still check off the criteria of being a Hispanic woman who breaks with the succession of forty-four men who have held that office.
Think it’s impossible? Think, again.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the political world when she successfully unseated Joseph Crowley (D-NY), a ten-term Congressman who rose through the ranks of his party to become Chair of the House Democrat Caucus in his final term. Her popularity in social media, along with the inordinate amount of attention paid to her grass-roots campaign to wrest away the nomination of such a powerful incumbent, resulted in her 57% landslide victory in New York’s Fourteenth District primary. In that particular district, which encompasses the eastern half of the Bronx and part of north-central Queens, and where half of the resident population is of Latino and Hispanic heritage, winning the Democrat nomination to that seat is tantamount to winning the general election in the fall. In essence, her election to Congress was then guaranteed, and there was little surprise that she managed to win 78% of the vote in that fall’s general election.
Despite her many gaffes and the absurdity of the radical socialist positions she takes on a host of issues, ranging from taxation, education, immigration, the environment, income equality and healthcare- just to name a few, no first term Representative has ever garnered anywhere near as much media attention as has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her doe-eyed countenance and her toothy smile is irresistible to photographers and television cameras, alike, and her fellow Democrats in the House queued up just to have their picture taken with her when she assumed office on January 3rd, 2019. Despite her participation in a climate change sit-in protest outside the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on that day, she nevertheless broke her campaign promise to oppose Speaker Pelosi’s run for the speakership and was politically savvy enough to then vote for Pelosi’s return to lead the House for a second time.
Her radical stances and her self-described “Democrat-Socialist” identification has all but marginalized Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who essentially coined the term in his doomed 2016 run against Hillary Clinton. The mere fact that she won in the very same election which saw the defeat of that other “darling” of Democrat-Socialism, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (D-TX), gives her a decided advantage over the Bobby Kennedy-wannabe. While his use of the “Beto” nickname is a fallacious attempt to portray himself as Hispanic (he actually is of Irish decent), her ethnic roots are the “real deal” in a party where ethnicity and gender (forgive the term) trumps all else.
Rest assured that, given the inordinately perverse amount of attention paid to her thus far, and kid-glove handling by the major media who sees her as the sine qua non rising star of Democrat and liberal politics, there is nothing holding her back from climbing the ladder of her party to win the 2024 nomination. By then, she will have tempered her penchant to put her foot in her own mouth and she will have acquired just enough discretion to stave off any Democrat challengers who would seek to disrupt her own presidential ambitions. Anyone who believes that the media was “all in” for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election (and they were) hasn’t seen anything comparable to the coverage she will receive six years hence.
Ironically, that same year of 2024 will coincide with the time we will be eligible to begin receiving full Social Security benefits (assuming they still exist) and it will be the measly pittance of our own Individual Retirement Account (IRA) that President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will seize in order to redistribute- all in the dubious name of “fairness” and “income equality.”
So much for a life of hard work and financial forbearance, sorry to say.
-Drew Nickell, 12 January 2019
© 2019 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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