Flowers: Delco voters gave big blue finger to Trump Tuesday
The day after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, I remember walking through the streets of Philadelphia and looking at people who resembled extras from an episode of “Night of the Living Dead.” They lurched along on the sidewalk, barely making eye contact, and when I did manage to catch a glimpse of a face, the eyes were red and empty. It was eerie, and not entirely unexpected, given the fact that the City of Brotherly Love was also the City of #NeverTrump. To many, including a few people who should have known better like some judges and lawyers of my acquaintance, the political system had failed them.
“God damn the electoral system!” muttered one man in line at the Wawa, looking down at his wing tips. “That asshole lost the popular vote. God damn!” It was no use explaining to this well-groomed professional that he should address his grievance to the Founding Fathers. Like some sort of philosophical Ebola virus, liberals and progressives across the region were infected with hatred of the “other,” even though the signs they would soon erect on their manicured lawns assured us that hate had no home there.
It only got worse in the days leading up the inauguration, climaxing in that Pussy Hat March that will go down in history as the moment that liberal women and the men who wanted to date them had a collective moment of PMS-Psychotic Mama Syndrome. I vowed to myself that I would never act like that.
It only took three years for me to break my promise. On Tuesday evening, as I watched the Democrats take every seat on County Council, infiltrate the District Attorney’s Office and pump sewage into the streets as the blue wave rushed through Delco, I thought back to those shell-shocked progressives in the postTrump days and I felt a strange sort of empathy. Now I understood why they were so desperately disoriented and seized with an apocalyptic sense of doom. I knew how they felt because that is exactly how I felt-how I feel-about what happened this week.
If you are happy with the bloodbath executed against the GOP on Tuesday evening, you can stop reading now and go hug one of your “Hate Has No Home Here” signs (although I have another suggestion as to what you might want to do with it, and Phil Heron will not let me print it.) But if you are interested in my thoughts about the election, keep me company until the last paragraph.
Last week, I wrote a column endorsing Katayoun Copeland for a full term as district attorney. You can check that out for all of the reasons I believe her to have been the best candidate, but my fundamental point was that Kat had her priorities straight: providing justice for the “people” of Delaware County. By people, I meant the men, women and children who are victimized by the subhuman strata of society who think it’s OK to whine about how horrible life has been and how unfair the criminal justice system is, and who actually expect sympathy for preying on us. It’s the whole “I’m depraved because I’m deprived, Officer Krupke” syndrome. Kat Copeland didn’t play into those politically correct games, placing the rights of the accused above the welfare of the abused. I have always said that the job of a prosecutor is not to worry about the rights of the defendant, above and beyond what is required by due process and the Constitution. That’s why we have defense attorneys, zealous advocates for those charged with crimes. A prosecutor’s duty is to be fair, forthright and to follow the obligations established by our legislators in statute, but this whole idea that they need to be social engineers to coddle and accommodate the most violent among us “because they’ve been disadvantaged, yadda, yadda” is anathema to me.
I don’t know Jack Stollsteimer, and I doubt I will have much of an opportunity to acquaint myself with his office, but I do know that his campaign received a huge influx of money from George Soros, who believes that a prosecutor should do the social engineering and the coddling and accommodating. So for that reason alone, I am devastated that the voters of Delaware County chose his voice to represent them.
As far as the council seats, I didn’t follow the race closely enough until the end, when it was impossible to avoid the cloying advertisements from the troika of Democratic females touting their progressive ideals and innovative platform. I happen to think that change is a good thing, and I would even agree that having new voices in the mix (after generations of GOP dominance) is beneficial and helps eliminate the stagnancy that comes from municipal oligarchies.
But the New Democrats are not the kind of people who want to cooperate. They are not inclusive, despite the fact that progressives are all about inclusiveness, tolerance and diversity. It would appear that the only thing that these recently elected Democrats are intolerant of is a divergent philosophy of how to govern. Conservatives in general and Republicans in particular were regularly vilified in the campaign ads of this crew, and there was the not-too-subtle suggestion that if you disagreed with them, you supported Trump, ergo, you were in league with the Devil.
Some of the rhetoric was laughable, and I made sure to avoid the social media presence of the swimmers in the blue wave, because I was at risk of pulling an eye muscle due to all of the rolling I was doing over the last few months. I had to keep pinching myself, reminding myself that this was Delaware County and not San Francisco.
But you see, that is the problem. Delco is now Frisco, one with a colder climate, fewer hybrid cars, a less iconic trolley (sorry, Media) and better food. The people who did not grow up here but emigrated from other places decided to turn this town into the thing they fled, a pseudo-Philadelphia where taxes are prohibitive, crime is more widespread (because we have to empathize with the hard luck stories of the defendants,) and people hate Donald Trump.
And that, my dear Delco neighbors, is the real reason I now understand the suicidal ideations of the #NeverTrumpers three years ago. I simply flipped the script, and realized that the droves of voters who came out carrying their lattes in Wallingford and sporting their Fitbits in Media and munching on their vegan muffins in Haverford and using their appropriate pronouns in Rose Valley and sporting their “I Support Planned Parenthood” buttons in Swarthmore as they all went to the polls did so not because they really cared about supporting Democrats.
They did it to flip a giant blue finger at the president, and all of the people who voted for him, even when the majority of people in Delaware County did not vote for him. This was revenge voting, pure and simple, and it worked.
Of course, they should all remember something extremely important as they smile and get ready to implement their progressive agendas in the next few months. This was a local election, a blue wave to be sure, but a small-scale disturbance.
The national tsunami has not yet been triggered. And the #Resistance works in both directions.
Stay tuned.