Michelle Obama is the only one who can beat Donald Trump in 2020 – if only she would run
- Yonden Lhatoo looks at an unimpressive field of Democratic presidential hopefuls to argue there is no chance of unseating the incumbent, unless they bring out a former first lady with formidable credentials
Another day, another Democratic would-be presidential candidate.
Seriously, what’s up with everyone and their mum clambering over each other to secure the nomination to take on US President Donald Trump in the 2020 election?
You can bet many, if not most, Americans have no idea who some of these people are, considering that last year, just before the midterm elections, about a third of registered voters did not even know the name of their party’s candidate for Congress.
From unrecognisable faces with unusual names like Pete Buttigieg and John Hickenlooper to better-known politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, the battle field is swarming with aspirants who – let’s face it – don’t stand a chance against the unstoppable force and immovable object that is Trump right now.
Senator Warren from Massachusetts has locked horns in public with Trump before to her detriment. He regularly ridicules her dodgy Native American heritage claims, having mockingly nicknamed her “Pocahontas”, and while Warren doesn’t stoop to his level of racist taunts, she somehow comes off the worse for it as some kind of pearl-clutching victim.
Trump’s devoted fan base loves this stuff. He will eat her every day for breakfast if the Democrats can’t find someone better to challenge him.
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Harris, a first-term senator from California, is being held up by some as the great coloured hope to unseat Trump. Misguided nostalgics still hung up on the last presidency have even taken to calling her the “female Barack Obama”.
Wishful thinking. Michael Moore, the liberal filmmaker who bucked the global narrative to predict Trump would win the 2016 election, may be spot on again in his assessment of Harris’ chances.
“Love her. No, not going to happen,” he says. “We cannot run a politician. We will lose. We have to run a beloved American ... It’s got to be like a Michelle Obama or Sully Sullenberger.”
I’m not sure how far a hero pilot like Sullenberger would go, but Michelle Obama is the screamingly obvious nuclear option for the Democrats, among the rest of the wet firecrackers in comparison, to take Trump out once and for all.
As Trump has proved by example, being a celebrity means everything in America, and the former first lady is as big as they come, judging by the response to her book promotion campaign.
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She’s not only the woman whom Americans admire the most – more than Oprah Winfrey, according to the latest Gallup poll – but she also brings no political baggage to the job, other than if her detractors want to highlight the fact that for all the reverence her husband continues to enjoy, he didn’t really achieve much during his eight years in the White House.
She’s smart, educated and liberal, and comes across as caring and gracious, with the right kind of soft power to unite the ideologically fractured Democratic voter base. Plus being black and a woman could make all the difference in the current sociopolitical climate.
The only problem? She’s not running – yet.
Michelle Obama has made it abundantly clear she’s not interested in politics, and her husband has publicly declared: “Let me tell you, there are three things that are certain in life: death; taxes; and Michelle is not running for president.”
But we still have nearly two years to go before judgment day, and that’s a long time in politics.
Otherwise it’s Trump all the way, with the latest Gallup poll seeing his approval rating surge to 44 per cent after he ended the government shutdown that he himself triggered. His Rasmussen rating was an even more impressive 52 per cent.
Maybe it’s time to accept that Trump really is the president Americans want – and deserve?
Yonden Lhatoo is the chief news editor at the Post
