John Quincy Adams Redux—RFK’s Route To Rescuing American Democracy, Part 2
Forcing the 2024 election into the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 200 years could be achieved in theory by a shift of merely 1.1 million votes in five states or just 0.7% of the total 158.4 million votes cast in 2020, as we showed in Part 1. But, alas, that assumes the outcomes in the other 45 states plus DC would be the same.
Ironically, the potential fly in the ointment for RFK is not so much that some 2020 red states would go blue for Joe Biden, but that three purplish states–Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania— which Biden won by a hair in 2020 could flip back to Trump, who won them in 2016. Along with the potential Arizona and Georgia shift to Trump described in Part 1, grabbing either Pennsylvania or Michigan would put the Donald back above the 270 vote Electoral College threshold—even if New Hampshire, Nevada and New Mexico went for RFK, also per the Part 1 thought experiment.
The question recurs, therefore, as to what planks in RFK’s platform could chisel away at Trump’s support among conservative GOP voters in these three states, thereby keeping them in the Biden column at a minimum (and better, of course, giving RFK a plurality). And on that score, we’d suggest:
Sweeping fiscal retrenchment and a plan for slashing defense spending and balancing the Federal budget.
Clearing the Border of the current scary chaos via a Guest Worker program administered from US consulates in Mexico, Central America and elsewhere, not via the current insanity of forcing migrants to cross the border in order to get arrested and into the asylum processing cue.
Ending the Forever Wars and Washington’s disastrous global hegemony with an opposite policy of Fortress America. The latter could be funded at what we have called the Eisenhower Minimum of $400 billion or the current dollar purchasing power of the defense budget at the peak of the Cold War, which Ike thought was more than adequate when he warned about the military-industrial complex in 1961.
So let’s start with the Fortress America concept, which is the heart of the matter. It implies a phased-in $500 billion per year cut in national security spending, which is the key to restoring fiscal balance and is also the logical alternative to America’s far-flung Empire abroad.
In the first place, “Fortress America” is a far better concept and slogan than Trump’s “America First”, which the Donald has already discredited by festooning it with digressions into nationalism, protectionism and nativism. Even then, the term was unfortunately already tarnished by the false case against those who rallied to the “America First” banner in the late 1930s out of justifiable reluctance to repeat the bloody folly of WWI.
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