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President excels making common connection

ERIE, Pa. — Here and there this campaign season one sees an unusual lawn sign.

It appears to be not from a candidate’s campaign but from persons acting independently.

It urges voting for a particular presidential candidate.

The candidate is President Trump.

Yet none of these are unusual.

What’s unusual is the reason.

This is a family publication, so we need to clean this up a bit: The lawn sign urges re-electing the president and adds, “No More (Bovine Manure).”

On the one hand, the sentiment doesn’t ring of history’s great political orators. On the other hand, one common denominator among many Trump supporters is being tired of the same old, same old. Doesn’t the sentiment sum it up?

Such sentiment, expressed differently, has been prevalent at Trump rallies across the country in 2020.

In some places, the president’s opponents have banned rallies but not protests. So the Trump campaign has called rallies in such places “peaceful protests” instead.

Wherever the rallies take place — including in Erie, two weeks before Election Day — the president holds audiences’ attention, even when he speaks for 90 or so minutes, which he regularly does.

Has he always stayed on message at rallies or elsewhere? No one has to be a regular reader of this column to understand the answer is “no” or to understand the challenge this presents.

Yet as he did in the weeks leading up to Election Day 2016, the president has largely stayed on message and largely avoided unforced communication errors in the months leading up to Election Day 2020.

In talking about fracking, for example, the president has said he’s for it. Whatever your view is, you know where he stands.

Not so with Joe Biden, his Democrat opponent, who during the primaries unequivocally said he was against it and now denies saying that.

As for the Trump tax cuts, Biden once said he’d repeal them.

Now he denies that too. Trump explains that taxes Biden promises to raise will kill jobs.

As for packing the Supreme Court, which means adding more justices, Biden has waffled on whether the public should know his position, been averse to taking one, and expressed fear that the press will report his position.

Well, the press should report his position, because it’s newsworthy.

Meanwhile, the president has endured false statements and false accusations about him and his administration that, taken together, have come with the force of a fire hose.

One falsehood is that Russians fabricated what the New York Post has just revealed about Biden. So here comes another Russia hoax.

Another falsehood occurred at the beginning of the current pandemic when the president curtailed travel from China, thereby saving we’ll-never-know-for-sure-how-many American lives, and Biden called the president racist.

Yes, racist.

The president’s decision, of course, had zero to do with race. Either (1) Biden knows that, and he’s not being candid, or (2) he doesn’t get it in the first place, which is worse.

And, as readers of this column will recall, this falsehood comes from the same person — Biden — who said in 2020 to blacks who aren’t voting for him, “You ain’t black.”

Nevertheless, the president keeps moving forward with a common touch that seems unusual for a billionaire with New York City roots.

He’s used this touch to reach out to people while transcending opponents, many of whom demanded that he accept the result of the 2016 election when they thought he’d lose, never accepted the result when he won, and have started the same pattern in 2020.

Watch their reactions to the 2020 result.

Their not accepting it won’t be a surprise.

Dr. Randy Elf’s June 2020 column on Biden’s “You Ain’t Black” declaration is at https://www.post-journal.com/life/viewpoints/2020/06/cavalier-is-not-the-same-as-incorrect.

COPYRIGHT ç 2020 BY RANDY ELF

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