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Jay Ambrose is an opinion columnist for Tribune News Service.
Pundits like myself sometimes count on wisdom in telling readers who will get elected in a presidential race while forgetting there are 1,001 events that could change everything between now and the time people start voting. Therefore, be skeptical when you’re told the candidates in 2024 will be the GOP’s Donald Trump and the Democrats’ Joe Biden.
I can’t help imagining the first debate. Wearing a MAGA hat, with the FBI watching, Trump decides to leave his red pogo stick behind but still bounces all over braggadocio and nonsense in discussing issues he does not recognize as serious. Biden brings a teleprompter and a teleprompter prompter to help him out if he gets confused by the wording.
Given what’s going on now, my own sense is that we’ll soon enough have deficiency-bred outrages on both sides that are as evident as an airplane flipping over backwards while even true believers wearing seat belts are flung into the air.
My further insight is that the actual Democratic candidate in 2024 will be Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, something of a Hollywood star in looks and personality even though he is something nearer an incapacitated stuntman when it comes to governing.
He as much as announced his candidacy for president when he ran a $100,000 ad that got more than 3 million views on Twitter in just a couple of days. It attacked Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, due to be the Republican candidate for president, according to the imagination I referred to earlier. DeSantis grew to fame with TV appearances during the COVID outbreak, wanting to keep schools open, for instance, and becoming nationally popular as he discussed still other issues. Newsom’s answer was to shut just about everything down and require masks that he once infamously rejected for himself.
He aimed to puncture the admiration for DeSantis by asking Floridians to come to California where people still believe “in freedom to choose, freedom from hate and freedom to love.” His reference was partly to abortion that California allows and Florida doesn’t and what he skipped of course is whether an unborn baby should have the freedom to keep living. He was also referring to Florida forbidding teachers from teaching gender complexities to students from kindergarten to the third grade, a subject almost as baffling for children as regulated teachers still struggling to teach arithmetic and reading.
What Newsom didn’t mention in inviting Floridians to California is that they are needed because 100,000 are annually fleeing what is now the poorest state in the union with the second highest cost of living and grotesquely ambitious taxes shredding businesses and incomes.
Yes, more millionaires hang out in beautiful California than in any other state. The seeming contradiction is that half of the nation’s homeless live there, too, as rich San Francisco considers it somehow humane to allow sidewalks to become feces-imbedded bedchambers without beds. The virtual freedom to loot has caused looting to go up. The electricity system frequently allows lights to go off, keeping citizens in the dark as they vote for incompetents responsible for all the above. Or maybe miswrought ideology is the cause.
It is not as if all the above is solely Newsom’s fault but consider the horror of California wildfires and then consider research showing how he failed to follow through on projects that he endorsed, once vowing he had engaged in making 90,000 acres safer when it was just 12,000. He also cut millions of dollars from fire prevention as some of the worst fires the state had seen did their devastating thing.
Unlike most other politicians, DeSantis is not perfect and Florida has its problems, too, but he is by and large a capable champion of good causes now at war with progressive repugnance concerning everything that made America great, including the idea that it is great. DeSantis will be elected president unless what really happens is Biden beating Trump again or vice versa or who knows where the real truths resides.
What’s more important than predictions is looking hard at possible candidates.
