On Tuesday, May 19, the U.S. House passed H.R. 2616, the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,” by a vote of 217-198. The bill would hand the Trump administration enormous leverage to strip federal funding from any school that “teaches or advances concepts” related to transgender people, codifying into federal law the anti-trans definitions from Trump’s executive order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.” It would also require public schools to forcibly out transgender students to their parents before using their pronouns or chosen names. The bill is significant on its own terms for the harm it would inflict on transgender youth if it became law. But what made Tuesday’s vote especially notable was the eight Democrats who joined every Republican to pass it—the largest Democratic defection on any standalone anti-trans bill of this Congress.
That’s an interesting theory. But how does it explain Obama’s (or other presidents’) two terms?
Harris couldn’t say she was drastically different because she was part of that previous administration.
Look at their opponents and their campaign. Let’s take Obama, because he’s the liberal darling despite running roughly the same platform as Ronald Reagan;
Mitt Romney did not run on a platform of change, in fact he was against an opponent who made ‘Change’ their whole political identity. Romney ran on a campaign of ‘Return to normal,’ which was just Bush in the mind of political base. Romney didn’t identify any of the proletariat’s problems, didn’t promise a change from Obama or Bush, didn’t identify how exactly he would improve things.
He ran a campaign essentially saying ‘change is bad, this change was bad, I strapped my dog to the top of my car while it had the shits and continued driving for at least 500 miles, I promise to return to the policies that caused you to lose your house.’
This, unsurprisingly, lost him the vote. This is also why Obama ‘didn’t break the brains of the right’ or ‘cause the racists to come out of the woodwork.’ Those are mischaracterizations of the right’s response to Obama based on the extremely loud minority that are Fox News viewers. If either case were true, Romney would have won.
But Romney didn’t, Trump eventually did. The only effective difference in their campaign was that Trump promised change and was believable as an agent of change.