"I was a Republican governor of Pa. I'm voting for Joe Biden."

[BumRushDaShow]

I was a Republican governor of Pa. I’m voting for Joe Biden. | Opinion

Posted: September 27, 2020 - 5:00 AM
Tom Ridge, For The Inquirer


I will cast my vote for Joe Biden on Nov. 3. It will be my first vote for a Democratic candidate for president of the United States. But it is not the first time I have said “no” to Donald Trump. I urge my fellow Pennsylvanians to join me. I actually consider it a point of personal pride that I’m recognized for being among the first Republicans to reject Donald Trump. It was way back in December 2015. I told NBC’s Chuck Todd that day that I could never support Trump. I said then that he was an embarrassment to the Republican Party and our country. I said he belittles, demeans, and ridicules people who disagree with him, and that I’ve never thought that loud, obnoxious, and simpleminded solutions to complex problems are the kind of qualities we want in a president. I believe that earned me my first of several Trump tweets of indignation.

So here we are in 2020. And do we ever have complex problems that demand thoughtful, intelligent leadership. We are getting none of it. I cannot help but compare our current situation dealing with a global health pandemic to my time leading the Department of Homeland Security following the 9/11 terror attacks. There are many similarities to our national response. Those similarities, however, do not include presidential leadership.

[snip]

Donald Trump has proven over these last four years he is incapable of such leadership. It is not within him. He lacks the empathy, integrity, intellect and maturity to lead. He sows division along political, racial and religious lines. And he routinely dismisses the opinions of experts who know far more about the subject at hand than he does – intelligence, military, and public health. Our country has paid dearly in lives lost, social unrest, economic hardship and our standing in the world.

[snip]

Vice President Biden and I both know that supporting his candidacy now certainly won’t dissuade me from speaking out later when I disagree with him. But we surely will do so with civility and respect, not with childish name-calling and twitter tirades. Joe Biden has the experience and empathy necessary to help us navigate not only the pandemic, but also other issues that have fractured our nation, including social injustice, income inequality and immigration reform.

Read more: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/tom-ridge-trump-biden-election-2020-vote-20200927.html

I don't normally post in this forum but I saw this first thing this morning in the Philly Inquirer.

Ridge, like Dick Thornburgh (one of Raygun's Attorney Generals), is a "moderate Republican" of the NE-GOP style (fiscal conservative but generally liberal on social issues, although going with "benign neglect" as opposed to the more recent intrusive and in-your-face "activist" loons).

As a note about PA and what happened in our 2014 gubernatorial election - it brought a PA GOP governor's (Tom Corbett) normally-certain re-election-for-a-2nd term hopes to an end, with the election of a literal "unknown" Democrat, who had never dabbled in "elective" politics before (he had only been an appointee in former Gov. Ed Rendell's administration as a Secretary of Revenue for less than 2 years). The "tradition" of incumbent governors (of either party) always being re-elected for 2nd terms, goes back to 1968, when the state first allowed governors to serve more than a single term, opening the door for up to 2 consecutive terms. That tradition was broken in 2014.

Corbett's loss was partly because of his pre-gubenatorial involvement in the Sandusky mess, but I think it was also because he had started going "teabagger loon", egged on by the ass who was the PA GOP House Majority Leader when Corbett was governor (and who later became the PA State House Speaker) - Mike Turzai (who finally stepped down this past June, earlier than his intention to leave at the end of this year).

Many of the eastern-PA suburbanites are/were "moderate" Republicans and the question will be whether these people really listen to their own moderate leaders like Ridge or if they drank the koolaid and follow teabaggers Corbett and Toomey. I think much of that comes down to whether the traditional "status quo" party likes this kind of "status quo" and wants to continue to either "blame the libs" (who have not been in power at the top of the ticket the past almost 4 years) and sit in silence while the U.S. completely loses all respect around the world, or whether they are ready to move on.

The big "unknown factor" is going to be those who were actually "first time voters" who had never been considered "likely voters" in any of the 2016 polls (having drank the koolaid), and whether they turn out in the same numbers in 2020 (many probably will... if they survived a COVID rally).

[DarthDem]

1. Great Writeups

By both Ridge and you! I think you really captured it. Thanks.

[BumRushDaShow]

3. Thank you! Tom Wolf (D) is PA's last great "firewall"

and he has wielded his veto pen a number of times against the the GOP-majority PA General Assembly to boot.

The election of Corbett here in 2010 - a Census year - meant the implementation of extreme gerrymandering, both at the state legislative level and the federal congressional levels, that we are only now slowly getting fixed thanks to the 2018 election and eliminating the super-majorities in our state assembly.

And it was also thanks to the re-election of Wolf in 2018, that we will have a Democrat in charge during the Census/re-redistricting process, and it was his efforts that helped to change the previously-gerrymandered congressional delegation from 13 (R) - 5 (D) to 9 (R) - (9D).

[DarthDem]

5. Zactly

And there's an excellent chance to flip the state House this year, yes?

[BumRushDaShow]

6. We're hoping. We need 9 seats

and Democrats are targeting something like 40 districts in hopes to get that!

[DarthDem]

9. Nice!

I have some ties to PA so I'm pulling so hard for this. Having Wolf in there and controlling the Pa. Supreme Court has really given me some great feelings.

[BumRushDaShow]

10. Agree! Expecially that 5 (D) - 2 (R) State Supreme Court, which has been a life saver!

(that's how we finally got our Congressional seats un-gerrymandered).

[SharonClark]

2. Thanks for posting your own analysis along with an already interesting article.

Posts like this make us all better informed.

[BumRushDaShow]

4. And thank you for reading!

We have so much at stake and are being bombarded by polls, so it helps me to try to figure out what PA is really going to do this November, with all the dynamics of the populace here.

I know I have traveled around the state over the years and many times its remarkable to me to see different locales (urban, suburban, exburban, and rural) and their different perspectives and realize that those people are PA residents too.

[Sneederbunk]

7. Never thought pre-cult Republicans could be so appealing.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. This is how far this country and the GOP have fallen.

I always called his type the "annoying Republicans" because they obsessed over Raygun and often engaged in a discourse of underhanded insults. However despite their stoking of the bigots at election time, they usually dropped them by the wayside once they got elected.

Now the GOP membership has not only descended from the "underhanded" to the "overt" by their childish name-calling, but they have publicly-acknowledged being bigots, and proud of it, to the point where every Raygun policy that they used to promote, has been thrown under the bus in order to appease the very worst scum of the earth.