“Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?”
For those of us of a certain age, we knew that question well.
For those of you younger than we, that was the question that ended Jimmy Carter's presidency, and brought us the past 45 years of antagonism against workers, consumers, and, pretty much the entire bottom 99.9%
You might not be thrilled with where American society has gone for the past 45 years.
But, that's why we made the shift away from the "we're all in this together" society to the "greed is good" society. THAT VERY QUESTION.
And so it was that it stood out when Katie Britt asked "are you better off than you were 3 years ago?". Stood out like a giant rhinoceros on a quiet beach.
Had she said "4", that would be a transparent play for the Reagan voters to come back to the fold.
It is an acknowledgement that 4 years ago, THINGS SUCKED. 2020 was a bad year, soup to nuts.
I MEAN SUCKED.
People died. People died a lot. You couldn't buy toilet paper. You couldn't leave your house. Small businesses died by the millions. The economy sucked. The stock market sucked. THINGS SUCKED. Kinda the LAST THING that "people who want Trump to be President again" want people to remember was just HOW BAD THINGS GOT IN 2020.
It is far better to get people's notoriously short memories just to let 2020 to die, to paint the past with rosy brushes, and wax nostalgic about the good old days, ignoring the fact that those particular good old days were really the worst days that we, as a country, have seen since, I don't even know. I mean, if we were England, it would be the Blitz. But there is no one left alive when the ravages that 2020 visited upon our country day after day, week after week, month after month, actually happened.
If you’re a Republican, if you want Trump back in office, why not just gloss over that? Why not just say “things suck now” without invoking images that are THERE TO BE INVOKED in every last one of your voters on just HOW BAD THINGS SUCKED 4 years ago?
I mean, it's kinda giving Biden a campaign commercial.
We can leave our homes! We can hang out with our friends! We can go to a game, or a movie, or a theatre or a bar or a restaurant! The jobs are back! The stock market is back! New businesses are opening! You can buy toilet paper! People aren't dying by the millions! We have vaccines and people aren't being told to inject themselves with bleach or drugs used to deworm farm animals! Kids are back in school! Science is real! We beat a pandemic! And, yeah, we Built Back Better!
Every step of the way, Biden was the guy at the wheel.
Biden beat back that pandemic.
Biden beat back brought us back.
And, frankly, the brush you can paint our society with today is a lot rosier than the dark, dank, and drear brush that our 2020 portrait was.
But, itz REALLY HARD to argue that *4* years ago was better than today, when all you need to do is look at the DJIA graph for the past 5 years and spot what *today* 4 years ago -- I mean to the day -- looked like.
It's REALLY F***IN STARK.
ESPECIALLY to the Party that lives and dies by the stock market!!
And, go ahead. Look at the full thing in context, and look at before-and-after November 2020. Or January 6 2021. Or January 20 or 21 2021. I don’t care. Pick a date you like that you can compare before-and-after of the Biden presidency.
Now, which side of that graph do you really want to be on?
EVEN if you are a Greed Is Go[o]d Republican... don't YOU want Biden for 4 more years????