That was a horrible political panel Saturday at this newspaper's annual Senior Expo.
All four panelists answered moderator Rex Nelson's question the same. They predicted that, as matters stand today, and with the strong caveat that much can happen between now and then, President Trump will win next year's presidential race.
Someone asked me afterward: Was that any way to scare seniors?
The heck of it, you see, was that I was one of the panelists.
But the question wasn't whether I thought it would be tragic if the madman got four more years. It would be, of course. The question was what I believed would happen. One must separate heart and mind, though conservatives don't seem to do it much.
I admitted to fatalistic thinking. I reasoned that I had no faith in any of the likely Democratic nominees--including the likeliest, Joe Biden, whose energy and discipline for the task I question.
I didn't yet see any reason to expect an outcome different from four years ago. People disapproved of Trump then and voted for him anyway. They'll do it again if a Democratic alternative doesn't inspire or comfort them.
Democrats win presidencies with fresh and youthful vigor. They win with compelling candidates who emerge from varying degrees of insurgence or generational change--the new frontier of a young John F. Kennedy, the post-Watergate morality of peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, the "new Democrat" message of Bill Clinton and the historic "hope and change" of Barack Obama.
Democrats didn't win with Hillary Clinton's default nomination and I doubt they will win with a Biden candidacy that is about nothing other than his name identification and good will supposedly serving the Democratic imperative that Trump--with that infantile temperament and despotic tendency--simply cannot be permitted a second term.
A candidacy needs to be more than a tactic. Joe's campaign is entirely a tactic.
As a blank tactical slate, Biden would easily become the receptacle for every general-election policy liability that Democrats espouse, his protests notwithstanding. He'd be the man coming to get your guns like Beto O'Rouke, and your health insurance like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and your car like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Every time this Democratic field debates, Trump gets votes.
The other supposedly left-of-center panelist, Clinton School dean Skip Rutherford, cited the electoral map in seeing a possible reprise of a popular-vote victory for the Democrat but an electoral college one for Trump.
It doesn't matter that more Americans will vote for a Democrat over Trump. It only matters which voters and where.
The deciding voters will probably again be working-class white independents in the upper Midwest. They could well be persuaded again that a poorly behaving Trump fighting a risky lone-wolf trade war is less perilous for them than a Democrat likely to embrace job-killing climate-control policies, even if that Democrat is lovable old Joe from Scranton, Pa.
The better chance for a different outcome next year in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is the level of Democratic energy turning out minority voters, women and young people in higher levels than bothered to turn out for Hillary Clinton.
I don't see Biden rousing those voters. But what might rouse them is absolute fear of Trump's second term.
I say this seriously: If about a hundred thousand liberals from California and New York, where they aren't needed, had moved in the last four years to Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and dispersed smartly, Trump would be toast.
For the record: Conservative panelist Sylvester Smith said Trump would win because Biden ought to be at the Senior Expo having his memory checked.
Smith and Republican state Sen. Missy Irvin, the fourth panelist, talked about Trump as if he were a sane man doing a good job.
It was a weird vibe, and I chose not to engage.
If you're still choosing at this point to pretend that Trump isn't a madman who diminishes you and your party and country, then there's not much that can be done to help you.
Just for fun, Nelson also asked us to look three years into the future and predict the next elected governor of Arkansas.
I said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and people applauded, and I said I rejected the applause, though it wasn't mine to reject, but Sarah's.
Smith, now a consultant but formerly an official of Mike Huckabee's gubernatorial administration, said he had an idea Sanders would choose not to run for governor, but to pursue the course of making big money.
Smith and Irvin extolled Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin and his "network," suggesting that the in-state GOP establishment is lined up for him. That won't matter if the Trumpian celebrity that is Sanders runs. Trump trumps in Arkansas.
But Smith may have been on to something in speculating that she very well won't end up running. I'm just saying that's the only thing that would stop her.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/17/2019