The title is a play on America. It is a play on the reflective act a vote can have. I am telling an audience of presumably moralistic patriotic Americans to vote their conscience, but to vote American. It's just like an old-school Republican (or even the despot in Republican clothing Trump) would tell you to buy American. That is however, at the end of the day, said only to serve their own hyper-capitalist purposes, which, try as they might to mire it in the 'ol trickle down sophistries, serves only to detract from any sense of a viable democracy. Vote for America is telling the purpose, the kernel of truth, from which some 60 million voters' eyes were strayed from November 8, 2016. It is the real America, not the one left in carnage. It is the America last seen under Obama's true, yet measured, tutelege. It is, ideally, the America of FDR when issues were managed responsibly by a president (and first lady) who cared what happened, when Americans who went to a necessary winnable war could expect to be honored whether they lived or died, whether they were captured, disabled, or went missing.
He'd be unlikely to say it himself out of a humility his opponent lacks. Joe Biden is America, emblematic of the America most of this nation grew up knowing. Donald trump would not hesitate to say it, but it is a falsehood I don't think he could even say. It is a threshold of hubris he has not crossed. Who can in good conscience deny that he is not a destructively eccentric president. The evidence is copiously apparent. And that is a fact that is not debatable. The book, Vote for America, despite its many truth about Trump, its consistent failure to put him in any light that can be construed as good, is not partisan. It is honest, simply implying that one's vote should not be taken for granted, that its power collectively is paramount to the workings of a democracy.
First of all, if a Republican like H.W. Bush were president I don't the need to write a book like this would have presented itself. But also the senior Bush was the last Republican president whose ideas or designs for government weren't so far removed from any democratic sense that they were dangerous to America as a concept. Can we be honest, Trump tipped that scale in spades. Banning a nation from immigration based on religion, reversing policies just because they were put in place by a much, much, MUCH better black president, putting children in cages, not rushing to defend an American citizen gruesomely murdered by a country because of what they could do for him, saying white supremacists have any capacity for good people, calling the troops (for whom you lack respect) to dishonor their oath and attack protesters, are grossly incongruent to any Republican to set foot in the White House. In this case, it is beyond partisan and bipartisan. Anyone, even the MAGots and evangelicals after the kool-aide wears off, will agree that Trump shatters the metrics any president is held to, rendering him invalid to even be a partisan of any kind. In other words, the sheer magnitude of Trump's weakness and inefficacies as a president, if not just the preposterousness of someone of his inexperience and unfit demeanor approaching such a daunting job, simply nullifies any viability one way or the other. He, quite succinctly, is not even in the game.
A vote for America is that as opposed to a vote for a burning dumpster fire. It stands in opposition to a vote for more carnage, for a gentler, kinder nation, for a four year period in which the number of deaths on its president's watch don't exceed those of the sum total of all wars. An America opposed to that in which a president incurs incidental deaths on the southern border do to his malfeasance and outright cruelty. My book offers reflection. It offers the whys and hows, the nows of voting. It explores why there has never been anywhere near the total voting age population voting, why congress has fallen prey to the greed motivated lifers who crawled out of the swamp, how they hold onto their jobs like grim death, and it traces the electoral history for clues to why Americans vote how they vote when they bother to vote.
I care what happens to America. I also would like to think that at some esoteric level those red capped MAGAA mad-hatters, who incidentally have begun to stutter, do a well. This book lays out the land, how it evolved politically, how it was made vulnerable to rigging, how we can counter that rigging, and the reality of giving Donald Trump a second term. A is often the case when America, far too often in my book, I wrote Vote for America: A Common Guide to Electorates with “no apparent motives.”