“Make America normal again” — that’s how a Los Angeles Times column described the main thrust of Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden’s campaign pitch.
While the column presents Biden’s MAN-ic theme as a comforting proposition, Americans should want nothing to do with Creepy Joe’s version of “normal.”
Is Biden going to bring back the “new normal” of anemic economic growth, persistently high unemployment, and the erosion of the American manufacturing base that we experienced the last time he was in the White House? You know, the one where some jobs “are just not going to come back” and we just have to accept that China makes all our stuff?
If that’s what Biden has in store for us, then it’s better if we don’t go back to a “normal” America. I prefer greatness, thank you very much — and as President Trump has shown, achieving greatness requires a complete rejection of the Obama-Biden version of “normal.”
By taking the exact opposite approach of Biden, Trump has brought GDP growth back above 3 percent, pushed the unemployment rate to a 50-year low, revived our manufacturing sector, and held China to account for its long history of trade abuses.
Perhaps the Times meant that a return to the American social situation of the Obama-Biden years would be “normal.” You know, those “normal” years when Biden and Obama let the courts redefine marriage against the wishes of voters and bent over backwards to let transgender soldiers serve in frontline combat roles.
“Normal” certainly can’t refer to the political tranquility we had before President Trump, which only exists in liberal fantasies.
After the media promised that Obama and Biden would create a “post-racial” America, remember, they instead presided over the most precipitous collapse of race relations since before the Civil Rights Movement. Obama’s comment that Trayvon Martin looked like he could be his son, the ridiculous “Beer Summit,” and pressuring southerners to take down flags — none of that did a thing to stop the emergence of the divisive “Black Lives Matter” movement.
So maybe “normal” means a return to the pre-Obama iteration of Joe Biden, the one who opposed desegregating schools, played a leading role in crafting draconian penalties for drug offenders that devastated an entire generation of African American families, and voted to make sure gay marriage would never be recognized. That would certainly be a bold play, but somehow I doubt that it’s quite the chord that the Biden campaign is looking to strike.
I’ll give the Times the benefit of the doubt and assume the article didn’t mean a return to the “normal” foreign policy of invading Middle Eastern countries on a whim, giving dictators “red lines” and then failing to enforce them, and antagonizing close allies. Alienating our close ally Israel in order to give Iran’s mullahs a sweetheart deal that put them within a stone’s throw of developing a nuclear bomb, similarly, is not the sort of “normal” that should ever evoke nostalgia.
All jokes aside, Doyle McManus’ original L.A. Times column actually defines Biden’s campaign as “normal” in contrast to the utter insanity of his opponents in the Democratic primaries.
What McManus largely ignores, however, is that Biden has done basically nothing to distance himself from the socialists, cranks, and radicals who populate the Democratic field. He hasn’t disavowed any of their cockamamy ideas — not abortion-on-demand right up to the moment of birth, not the Russiagate conspiracy hoax, and not their adamant refusal to do anything to secure the border.
Creepy Joe may want to make America “normal” again, but personally I’d rather be great. Luckily, greatness is becoming the new normal for Americans under President Trump.
Harlan Hill is president of the Logan Circle Group and an advisory board member for the Trump-Pence 2020 re-election campaign.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.