By Larry Wiwi, FC resident
One the most interesting personal learnings for me as a political junkie over the last decade or so is the discovery that so many voters seem to need to personally like the person they vote for, and since he announced his candidacy in 2015, Donald Trump has made this obvious to all. Trump was not in my personal top three when the 2016 primaries began, and his personality and tactics often rubbed me wrong. In fact I was still lukewarm on him in the 2016 election, but by then the choice was obvious and I was happy to give him my vote.
If you ignore the invented, impeachment related reporting and focus on everything else levied as criticism of Trump, you find much of it, perhaps even most of it is criticizing his style, his personality. You see this especially among the never-Trumper Republicans – the hapless Mitt Romney who has become a Democrat and doesn’t know it yet and the same can be said for John Kasich who has allowed his personal hatred for Donald Trump to cloud what was once a sound conservative mind.
The never-Trumper who personally breaks my heart the most is George Will who was once a conservative stalwart who taught me much of conservative thought over decades of reading his columns, each bursting with principle-based analysis. Unfortunately, like Kasich, George allowed his personal dislike of Trump’s demeanor to poison his mind – hate will do that to you.
The editors at National Review, themselves a version of never-Trumpers have developed a fine art of grudgingly giving Trump credit for achieving things they have wanted for decades, but always being sure to take a swipe at him personally.
The nation and by extension the world would be far better off if voters based their decision on the principles, policies and results track record of candidates and forget the rest as long as the rest still falls within the wide guardrails of acceptable behavior. For those of you old enough to remember Nixon, you will recall that he was a man easy to dislike, but despite his missteps relative to Watergate, he was the world class gold standard in foreign policy exactly when we needed him at the height of the Cold War.
Similarly, Trump has proven to be exactly the disruptive leadership style needed to break up the old Washington business-as-usual swamp that had been doing so much damage to Americans for so long.
Forget the personality, vote the principles, policy and results.
Larry Wiwi, FC resident