Thomas Sowell sends a Heads-Up About Just Laying Back while Kamala Shakes her Booty

By Thomas Sowell

Aug. 22, 2024 4:04 pm ET

Mr. Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He’s 94. One of the main anchors in modern Conservatism. You need to know this man. I’ve followed him since college, in the 1960s.

The Gathering Storm

If the Republicans lose this year’s election—against an administration whose policies have been rejected by the public in poll after poll—they will deserve to lose.

But do 330 million Americans deserve to see their lives ruined by another four years of the Democrats’ economic disasters and unchecked violence by both domestic and imported criminals?

Does America deserve more tragic military fiascoes like that in Afghanistan? Or like allowing a spy balloon from China to photograph our military installations from coast to coast, before finally being shot down, after it was too late?

And these are the people who are telling Israel how to fight a war.

Against this background, why is this election even close? Some Republicans may say that it is because the media are on the side of the Democrats and suppress or distort the facts accordingly. Others may say that the universities have become indoctrination centers, promoting the kind of ideologies that favor the Democrats’ agenda.

But, even if we concede all that, the fact is that a similar situation existed back in the days when Ronald Reagan won two consecutive presidential elections by landslides. How did he do it?

He did it by addressing the voting public as if they were adults who could understand an issue—if you explained it to them in plain English, instead of in political jargon or snappy quips.

There are some Republicans today who seem to understand that. But they are not running in this year’s presidential election. Perhaps they may run in 2028. But there is such a thing as a country declining to the point of no return.

Four more years of disastrous Biden-Harris policies, at home and abroad, can take us past that fatal point.

Many Republicans seem confident that they will win this year’s election. But just a couple of years ago, they were equally confident that they would win control of both houses of Congress in a “red wave.”

The public’s positive reactions to Vice President Kamala Harris’s first statements after becoming the Democrats’ nominee seem to be played down by Republicans—as if it were a sort of honeymoon response that will automatically evaporate as the truth comes out.

Election officials in some states will begin mailing out ballots less than a month from now. If the Republicans do not discredit what she claims within that month, the votes she gets then will be fixed—even if Republicans completely demolish her claims later on.

On Election Day, even if most voters would prefer Donald Trump, the votes of those who voted early, and later regretted it after the facts came out, will still be votes for Kamala Harris.

The time to refute what Ms. Harris says is when she says it, whatever the issue. Waiting to refute what she says, until after millions of early voters have already voted, makes no sense. Nor is merely denouncing or ridiculing what she said the same as refuting it.

Mr. Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.