At the beginning of 2020, President Trump presided over the finest economy in generations, and a Castro-praising socialist seemed poised to win the Democratic presidential nomination. But in just 10 weeks, Joe Biden surprisingly vanquished Bernie Sanders, and the economy came to a man-made halt to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic. Meanwhile, the consequences of record national debt and deficits have suddenly become serious, and the chosen Democratic challenger to our philandering president faces an explosive sexual assault claim of his own.
I’m not much of a betting woman, but I’d lay down good money that there’s no coincidence to the timing of Justin Amash’s decision to start an exploratory committee to run for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. Although presidential buzz has followed Amash since his high-profile divorce with the GOP last summer, the idiosyncratically earnest Amash publicly wavered on whether he’d enter the presidential fray. He smartly sat out a comically performative Republican primary, and given previous nominee Gary Johnson’s decision to sit out the Libertarian race, Amash had time to decide on whether to embark on an increasingly ugly congressional race or a functionally impossible presidential race.
Amash is no neophyte, and more importantly, he’s no washed-up also-ran clinging to relevance. At age 40, he’s just a decade into a congressional career and clearly anticipates a longer political one. He wouldn’t throw away his professional capital to become nothing more than a protest vote and a punchline of a joke about Orange Man Bad.
I believe that Amash is seeing Biden’s rapid deterioration alongside the Republican Party’s embrace of massive deficit spending. The longer Biden spends hunkering down in a Wilmington basement as his sexual assault accuser Tara Reade gains contemporaneously corroborating evidence, the more it looks like he has something to hide. And the further Trump transforms the party of fiscal responsibility and federalism into the petty party of crying at journos and lauding multitrillion dollar federal jobs packages, the more obvious the case for Amash’s candidacy becomes.
Whichever of the two parties you’re in, your betters have paved the road for a moral and honest third-party candidate to peel off your voters, and Amash was just the one smart and worthy enough to take it.
