Not that all my best friends were Indian when I was residing in the United States, but I have other reasonable justifications to urge everyone to vote for Vivek Ramaswamy:
First, the following reasons are why I would vote for the pharmaceutical-industry billionaire and political newcomer if he was on the GOP ticket next year:
– He is the only candidate that is a genuine, veritable and true-blue (any synonyms of “authentic” I missed?) politician who would understand the ailments of American society.
– He is the only GOP hopeful seemingly to denunciate stakeholder capitalism and its big tech censorship of private citizens.
– So far, he is the only candidate on the Democratic or Republican side condemning critical race theory (CRT). He knows exactly what the “wokeness” and CRT are: modern secular religions.
If I could, I’d urge all voters in the GOP primaries to vote for Ramaswamy. He’d be the only Republican candidate who could reclaim the votes President Joe Biden had stolen because of former President Donald Trump's candidacy. (Please note: I don’t say that Biden had stolen the entire election! He might have had, but he didn’t have to thanks to Trump.)
Last week, during the first GOP primary debate, Vivek Ramaswamy brought up the real issues that a conservative party should attach importance to. He said the United States is becoming a fatherless society.
Ramaswamy was absolutely the winner of the night. He was up against seven career politicians whom he asked questions and who even praised Ramaswamy for his emphasis on the value of traditional family values: “So part of the problem is we have a federal government that pays single women more not to have a man in the house than to have a man in the house contributing to an epidemic of fatherlessness and I think that goes hand in glove with the education crisis as well, because we have to remember, education starts with the family, and the nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.”
Twenty-five percent of kids in America don’t have a father figure in their lives. I mean “a dad in the house”: He either ran away or was sent away or he was never known in person. Actually, Ramaswamy won the night and the hearts of all conservatives in the U.S. and all over the world when he said: “God is real. There are two genders. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.”
The career politicians had to defend their failed policies against Ramaswamy, a first-timer and an outsider, but they were crushed by him in his rebuttals. As several social media users said Ramaswamy’s speech was a big blow for the D.C. establishment.
Ramaswamy, particularly, trampled over former Vice President Mike Pence. During the heated exchange Pence, as if he was allowed by Trump to poke his nose in any government business, haughtily lectured Ramaswamy about the authority of the president:
“Vivek, I got news for you: I've been in the hallway. I've been in the West Wing. The president of the United States has to confront every crisis facing America.”
When Ramaswamy responded that what the former vice president was defending was “the source of those toxic regulations, acting like a wet blanket on the economy,” saying, “So, I'm not sure exactly I understood Mike Pence's comment, but I'll let you all parse that out.”
The "white man,” with his nose in the air, played to the “color card” which I, for one, was very familiar with: “Then I will explain what I said and go slower this time so that Ramaswamy can understand.”
In other words, Mr. Pence thinks that Ramaswamy is a “colored” person (Ramaswamy was born on Aug. 9, 1985, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Hindu Tamil immigrant parents) and he is a foreigner: You have to speak slower so that he can understand you. Oh, I don’t know how many times those “white” people treated me and many non-native (read: non-blue-eye, non-blonde hair) people to that “slow speaking” insult! (The second most common contemptible insult of such people would be asking you “Where are you from?” Very slowly, of course.)
At the end of the exchange, Ramaswamy crushed Mr. White Man: “You are reciting a memorized, pre-prepared slogan. The reality is you have a bunch of people, professional politicians, super-PAC puppets following slogans handed over to them by their 400-page super PACs last week.”
Having said all this, I also know that conservative or not, the “political elite” are not going to support him. U.S. politics had jumped over the first hurdle when a “Black” president was elected. (Even though, Mr. Barrack Obama was not “Black enough” in the true sense of the word in U.S. politics. He didn't have the typical background of African Americans; his mother was white, his father was African, and he spent most of his life in a white household.)
The second hurdle is a female president, which, thanks to Kamala Harris, who is also the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president, has made a run at. But not achieved completely, yet.
A Hindu-Tamil Brahman president! That would be too much for the blue-blooded conservatives in Ohio!
We could see it in the media's treatment of Ramaswamy’s clear victory as if it never happened or it was somehow flawed. The Washington Post declared Trump the winner of the night, who even snubbed the debate. The Post was kind enough to put Ramaswamy in the third place: “In Trump’s absence, second-place Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seemed destined for most of the attacks. Instead, it was Ramaswamy, the momentum candidate in the race who has risen to third place.”
The New York Times was not brave enough “to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.”
“But it was not Mr. Trump’s chief rival in the polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who emerged at the epicenter of the first Trump-free showdown on Wednesday, but instead the political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy, whose unlikely rise has revealed the remarkable degree to which the former president has remade the party.”
Yet, the NYT team had to admit that “it was the Ramaswamy show” with so very many qualifications to downsize it.
Of all the people, “the” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of the greatest basketball players who ever played and as well as an award-winning writer, gave the lowest score to Ramaswamy, saying many of his suggestions “aren’t ideas, they’re political prank.” Kareem shared his highest point between Nikki Halley and Chris Christie, but summarily dismissed Ms. Halley, saying, “Will Republicans ever vote for a woman as president (let alone a woman of color)? Maybe someday. But not today.”
The conservatives’ conservative, the National Review Online (NRO), gives credit where it is due, but not fully. It says it was Ramaswamy’s night, “not necessarily in a way that advances his presidential ambitions.”
The NRO columnist Noah Rothman summarizes the first GOP debate as a give-and-take between Ramaswamy and the other seven participants and concludes: “But it all combined to make Ramaswamy into the night’s star, for good or ill. And for a while, it will be good. At least, from Ramaswamy’s perspective. The debate will boost his name recognition and fundraising, and it will probably contribute to a brief boost in the polls.”
So, once again, my money is going to be wasted – if deposited at all.
