The most apt object defining Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democratic Party circa 2020 is ready-made, widely accessible, and the subject of endless conversation in the now seven-month-old era of COVID-19. But what it symbolizes in the midst of a bitter election year serves the broader purpose of revealing the party’s true campaign strategy. It is the mask.
The Mask
Based on his public utterances on the subject, if he had his way and was unconstrained by the U.S. Constitution, the Democratic presidential nominee would order a national mandate requiring everyone to wear the mask. It has become nothing less than the symbol of state power, pressed to great political advantage by a party more than willing to exploit the widespread pain of a virulent pandemic to advance its thirst for expanded state control. But wait, that’s not all. They can do all that while simultaneously receiving the electoral benefit of nailing the singular blame for the more than 210,000 coronavirus victims to the White House door like the 95 theses of Martin Luther.
Where would the Democrats be if they could not employ the mask to instill a radiating fear into an already anxious populace? Where would they be if they could not employ the Covid-necessitated mask to justify a basement, Hidin’ Biden, run-out-the-clock strategy distancing their candidate far from the madding crowd of voters? And just where would they be if the pandemic had not changed the election-year conversation away from widespread insurrection in cities they have controlled for decades? The pandemic has been the gift that keeps on giving to Democrats, allowing them to mask their true beliefs on state-controlled health care, abolishing fossil fuels, raising taxes, re-regulating a deregulating economy, packing the court, and a host of other issues where the historically moderate face of their hapless presidential nominee (now able to recall Mitt Romney only as “that senator who was a Mormon”) is used as — what else — a mask for the actual leftist powerbrokers pulling the puppet strings and holding sway behind the curtain.
The mask allows Harris to position herself as a centrist by standing on a soapbox and hysterically calling Trump’s response to the pandemic “the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country,” when her actual voting record has been rated the most liberal in the entire U.S. Senate — further left even than the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.
Their fabricated outrage at the president has allowed the Democrats to mask the truth that their plan for the pandemic is, as Mike Pence stated in the vice presidential debate, little more than plagiarism of the Trump response. They can hardly explain how they would have operated differently had Biden instead of Trump been forced to make critical, life-altering decisions on a daily basis, but their vitriol masks the reality that things would surely have been worse under the former vice president simply by virtue of his opposition to Trump’s early travel bans from both China and Europe.
The pandemic has allowed Biden to mask the substantial enrichment of his family’s coffers immediately following his state visits to Ukraine and China when he served as vice president. It has provided the media wing of the Democratic Party the opening to ignore his role in spying on the Trump campaign by the Obama Justice Department, his string of head-shaking remarks about race, and a history of plagiarism damaging enough to force him out of a previous presidential race 32 years ago. And it has permitted them to mask Biden’s sudden epiphany about America being systematically racist and his about-face on fracking and other issues when his statements during the primary season, including support for taxpayer-funded health care for illegals, represented open compliance with the dictates of the radical base of his party.
In fact, no matter the outcome of the election, the preponderance of residual images of Biden’s presidential campaign that enter the history books will undoubtedly, and appropriately, show the Democratic nominee wearing his omnipresent mask.
Say what you will about President Trump, but few are mystified about where he stands on any and all issues. His outspoken views on everything have undoubtedly gotten him in hot water, but, far from masking his own beliefs, he has for years unmasked the very people and ideology that now use the mask to hide their core beliefs from the voters.
On Nov. 3 (and before), will voters across the land be casting their ballots on what they are told by Biden and the Democrats with the mask on, or what they see when the mask is removed?
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Read more from Tim Donner.
