A man was President for 4 years against all the odds. He came from outside the political establishment. The American people got excited and they chose him over the ultimate establishment personality—Hillary Clinton. The entire nation went into shock mode. Disbelief.
That’s the way elections can go, sometimes.
Unpredictable.
Many things drive what voters want, how they want it, who they want it from and when they want it. This is why if you were to place a real goat against a real person, the human will never score 100 percent of the votes. You will be surprised.
This phenomenon is responsible for what we see every four years in American elections. They are always tight until someone wins. How do they win? They do not win the way people win elections all over the world by popular vote. No.
They run a system called the Electoral College where a certain number of new votes are allotted to States based on some form of proportional distribution that gives anyone who’s trying to understand it — a headache.
Elections in America, even though you have it on the same day, each State runs its own elections. In fact, in some States, the Counties run the elections, but somehow, because of the general integrity of the overall system, no one has ever questioned the outcome until some fellow came along.
He made clear from the beginning that the only outcome that would be acceptable to him was one where he was winner.
Everyone thought he was kidding.
Hillary appeared to be doing well until a certain tall fellow called Comey came along with an email probe a few weeks to the election, having been goaded by CNN and others who led the charge against Hillary about emails on a personal server. You would have thought the woman shot up an entire school with an AR 16, the way the Press hounded her.
In the end, she lost, conceded and went home to write a book titled: What happened.
We know a little bit of what happened.
She was too confident that she was running against a 7-time bankruptcy filer who had been married three times, had no respect for women, had a racist background, and boasted about what he could do to women and get away with—just because he considered himself a star.
Now, having won, he proceeded to make a big joke of the office. He failed woefully at managing the COVID pandemic, and the people threw him out in 2020. They were disgusted with his leadership. He spent his time fighting everything and everyone.
In the end, the people who had hired him four years earlier decided to fire him. He did not like it. Court after court told him he had no case, that he lost fair and square, and that there was no fraud anywhere. He carried on nevertheless.
And then, the dam burst on January 6th, 2020. He nurtured an insurrection, he assembled others like him, not just quite as rich or powerful. He promised to march with them to Congress to stop the certification. Instead, he turned around, ordered a burger and a Diet Coke and sat in front of a large screen TV to watch his country burn. Someday, someone will play a tape of him hailing them on like it were a game of football—- quite reminiscent of another fellow who played the fiddle while his country burned to the ground.
Indeed, some mothers do have them.
It’s 2024.
It’s Harris versus Trump.
She’s fresh. She’s exciting. She’s brilliant. She’s beautiful. She’s witty.
What’s there not to like about Kamala Harris?
Why are the polls still tight?
Why’s she not way ahead?
No one knows, and no one can explain it. It’s almost exactly 30 days to go. We should not be having this conversation, but we are.
Here are some red lights.
The economy.
The war in Gaza.
The war in Lebanon.
The war in Ukraine.
The soon to be war in Iran.
Longshoremen strike at the Ports.
All these six issues carry points, heavy as concrete, enough to weigh down even the best of candidates.
Yogi Berra, the all time Baseball star and the ultimate witty talker could not have put it better.
It just might be De Ja Vu all over again.
Like 2016–like 2024?
Michael O. Ovienmhada.