In 2016 Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by 12 points. Kamala Harris is currently two points behind Trump
By Tom Arms
Three days, to coin a phrase, is a long time in today’s Tik Tok politics. This time last week wounded and bandaged Donald Trump was basking in what the New York Times called his “mythical status.” He appeared unbeatable. Liberal democrats around the world were in despair.
Then 81-year-old stumbling, crumbling President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he was dropping out of the White House race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.
She in turn surprised pundits with a rousing Milwaukee speech and 40,000 Americans registered to vote in one day this week—a 700 percent increase on the daily average. What looked like a Republican walk-over has been transformed in an instant to a to-close-to-call fight to the finish.
Up until this week the age factor had been the major political issue, especially after Biden’s painful to watch performance in his debate with Trump. But at 78 Trump is no spring chicken and is often guilty of stumbling over thoughts and words. The dementia shoe is now on the Republican foot.
Age, however, will only be one of several issues in the roughly 100 days before the election. More than ever, the contest is now between the American left and right. There is no doubt about Trump’s far-right credentials. The Republican hierarchy tried to push him as a unity candidate at the convention His acceptance speech at the party convention started along those lines. But he quickly lapsed into his rambling, mean-spirited right-wing attack on opponents real and imagined.
One of the reasons Harris’ 2020 bid for the White House foundered so quickly is that she was perceived as a far-left candidate. If she is going to be successful in 2024 she has to shed that image and capture the center ground of American politics.
Not helping her are the problems on America’s southern border. Immigration is a major political issue and early on his administration President Biden handed Harris the poisoned chalice of managing America’s southern border. She failed. In 2023 a record 2.3 million people crossed from Mexico into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
President Biden is dropping out of the White House race and is going to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris
But against Kamala’s failure is Donald Trump’s over-reactive proposal to use the military to round up and deport up to 20 million immigrants.
To date Trump’s 34 felony convictions and three other indictments appear to have been more of a help than a political hindrance as he has successfully portrayed himself as a martyr. A bullet to the ear also helped. But if Trump agrees to meet Kamala in debate—as he should– than the Vice President’s experience as a prosecutor could negate his successes in the legal arena.
Abortion is an issue working in Kamala Harris’s favor. She has been the point person in the Biden Administration arguing in favor of abortion and that appears to be a popular position. Two years after The Supreme Court repealed Roe V. Wade a Pew Research poll reported that 63 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal. A poll taken before the repeal of Roe v. Wade revealed that 25 percent of American women had had an abortion.
Trump has back-pedaled from his former strict anti-abortion days to argue that the decision should be left to the individual states. But running mate J.D. Vance is less circumspect and has said he wants “minimum national standards” for abortion. Perhaps more interesting is Vance’s assertions that women should remain in abusive relationships and that childless couples have relinquished their stake in America’s future.
Neither of these comments will endear the Trump/Vance ticket to women voters. And, of course, Kamala Harris is a woman. She has no biological children although she does have two step children. Harris also has a Black father and South Asian mother. Her ethnicity and gender is both a positive and negative.
For a start, half of Americans are women and more women than men—70 percent—are registered to vote. This compares to 66 percent for men. On the race issue, there are 45 million people who identify as African-Americans and 5.4 million who claim a South Asian ethnicity.
Set against that is a recognized misogynistic streak among African-American men and a strong conservative element in the 62.5 million strong Hispanic community. Finally, let’s not forget the 186 million Whites who increasingly fear that they are losing their cultural identity to the people whom Trump wants to deport.
Sitting alongside America’s culture and gender wars is the economy. Since 2020 average wages for US workers have risen 25.7 percent compared to an inflation increase of 20.9 percent. Unfortunately for the Biden Administration, Republicans have persuaded American voters to focus more on the inflation than the growth figure. A key task for Harris will be shifting the economic perceptions.
Foreign policy plays a bigger role in this election than most past presidential contests. The Trump/Vance ticket is opposed to helping Ukraine in its fight against Ukraine. This position does not appear to be in line with the thinking of most American voters, 55 percent of them support military aid to Ukraine. The same number—55 percent—disapprove of Israeli actions in Gaza while the Republican hierarchy went out of its way to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress.
On one foreign policy issue Americans are united. 81 percent have an unfavorable view of China. But they are divided on what to do about it. 71 percent of Republicans support Trump’s proposal of 100 percent tariffs on most Chinese goods and 70 percent support the Biden Administration’s proposal of 10-25 percent tariffs.
American presidential elections are famous for starting almost as soon as the previous one ended. In that respect Trump has a definite advantage. But generally speaking the 24/7 high octane campaign does not start until the day after Labor Day which this year is September 5. In 2016 Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by 12 points. Harris is currently two points behind Trump.
World Review
The world was presented with two alternative approaches to the Gaza War this week. The first was brokered by China. The second was outlined by Benjamin Netanyahu in an address to a Joint Session of the US Congress.
The first was supported by the feuding leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, 12 other Palestinian factions and a big chunk of the Global South. The second was received with a standing ovation by America’s Republican lawmakers but boycotted by dozens of Democrat Congressmen.
The Chinese-brokered deal is aimed at ending the schism between Fatah which rules the West Bank as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas which has governed Gaza since ejecting Fatah in 2007. The bitter split between the two has been one of the chief obstacles to implementing the much sought after two-state solution.
On Tuesday the Palestinian factions agreed to form an interim reconciliation government. They also agreed to jointly demand a ceasefire; a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the West Bank; elections and they established the bones of a reconstruction program for Gaza.
On Thursday, Netanyahu denied that Israel was blocking aid to Gaza; claimed that only a few civilians had died; called for the total destruction of Hamas; made no reference to the two-state solution and insisted that a post-war Gaza should be a “demilitarized and de-radicalized” enclave under Israeli military control.
Among those boycotting Netanyahu’s address was former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. She described his speech as “by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”
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Another visitor to Beijing this week was Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba. It was the first visit to China by a Ukrainian official since the Russian invasion, and indicates a Ukrainian shift in emphasis from the military to the diplomatic.
The Ukrainians see the Chinese as the only third party power with any leverage over Vladimir Putin. Kuleba told his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi that Ukraine was ready to negotiate in good faith, but he added: “No such readiness is currently observed on the Russian side.” Wang agreed that that the “conditions and timing are not yet ripe.”
Vladimir Putin, for his part, is sticking to his demands that Ukraine handover the four regions his troops have occupied in eastern Ukraine; promise not to join NATO and agree to demilitarization.
There are currently an estimated 600,000 Russian troops in Ukraine with another 600,000 expected to be deployed this year. Despite the huge numbers, the Russian gains have been limited. But President Volodomyr Zelensky is concerned about the continuing Russian build up and the threat of diminishing support by the US.
The Ukrainian and Palestinian visits have wider implications for global diplomacy. They both represent Chinese efforts to insert them into traditional American spheres of influence. Chinese foreign policy is largely guided by the impulse to disrupt and undermine American diplomacy whenever and wherever possible and to offer China as an alternative diplomatic partner to the US.
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Every morning the many parks and open spaces in China’s cities are filled with neat little rows of elderly Chinese practising the balancing and stretching exercises of Tai chi or Oigong.
There are so many that the casual visitor might conclude that China is filled with old people. They would not be too far wrong and this is becoming a growing problem for the country’s communist rulers.
When Mao Zedong took power in 1949 China’s fertility rate was 6.11 children per woman. This was balanced by life expectancy of only 44 years. As social conditions gradually improved so did people’s life expectancy. The population started to spiral out of control. So, in 1979 the authorities introduced the one-child policy.
Well, every decision has a consequence, and the result of the one-child policy was an unaffordable rise in the elderly as a proportion of the population. Today more than 20 percent of the Chinese are aged 60 and over. By 2050 the figure will be a staggering 40 percent. China has the fastest aging population of any country anywhere.
This has enormous social and economic consequences for the world’s second most powerful country. How can the country’s health services cope? Where will the government find the money to pay the state pensions? Where will the authorities find the workers to support the retirees?
Because Chinese is a newly developed country it was unable in the past to invest in pensions and health infrastructure to support their future aging population. Pensions are therefore financed not by past contributions, but by people in the existing workforce. At the moment there are eight Chinese workers for each retiree.
How is the government dealing with the problem? For a start it abandoned the one-child policy in 2016 and replaced it with a two-child policy. In 2021 this was in turn superseded by a three-child policy.
That will potentially mean more workers in the future, but not nearly enough. The age problem is exacerbated by China’s extremely low pension age. Blue collar men retire at 55 and women at 50. White collar male workers retire at 60 and women at 55. This was fine when the average life expectancy was 44. But it is now 78 and within a few years it will reach 80.
This week the government published a report proposing a gradual increase in the retirement age over the next four years. No specific ages were mentioned, but it is understood that the authorities are aiming for an across-the-board retirement age of 65.
This has predictably led to general outcry. Young people are concerned that keeping people in the workforce longer damages their promotion prospects. And the elderly are angry at the prospect of having to work longer for their pensions.
But if nothing is done to deal with the growing and inescapable problem of the elderly then the Chinese Communist Party’s political, economic and social plans could be dashed against the walls of a thousand old people’s homes.
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Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and the author of “America Made in Britain” and “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War.”
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