An Open Letter to All Democratic Presidential Candidates

Here’s the deal.

Your job is to roundly defeat the current occupant of the Oval Office. Right now, that’s all it is.

If you’re talking about anything else, you’re wasting your time and my time.

If you haven’t calculated what making him go away is going to take, start calculating and tell us what your solution is.

If your answer to each of the following questions is not an emphatic “YES!”, please drop out of the race and make room for whoever IS saying “YES.” You have an enormous amount of damage to repair and that will be your main job, just as big as the huge damage that President Obama faced the very day he took office.

So let’s begin. Do you have a plan for:

• Restoring and enhancing the Affordable Care Act so that as many people as possible are without medical cost worries?
• Reversing all of the current occupant’s immigration policies?
• Re-instituting DACA?
• Restraining the terrible excesses of ICE, making our sanctuary cities unnecessary?
• Removing all of the destructive trolls he has placed in our government?
• Restoring the Justice Department to independence and trustworthiness?
• Restoring our respect for governments other than ours?
• Restoring our status in the eyes of the rest of the world?
• Restoring the State Department?
• Restoring respect within and for the FBI, the CIA and other essential agencies?
• Rejoining the Paris Climate Accords?
• Restoring the nuclear limitation pact with Iran?
• Restoring the power of the EPA?
• Leaving the scientists who work for the government alone to do their work?
• Diligently and intelligently combating interference in our elections from hostile countries, no matter who they are?
• Ending voting restrictions in all jurisdictions?
• Ending our alliances with criminal governments such as Saudi Arabia?
• De-emphasizing our hugely outsized spending on our military?
• Reversing the many backward and destructive actions of the Department of Education?
• Aggressively combating the anti-Semitism, anti-Muslimism, racism and hate of the “other” so happily encouraged by the current occupant?
• Aggressively limiting the sales of guns, licensing all gun owners, and eliminating the interstate trafficking in illegal guns?

That’s just a beginning, but you get the idea. At the beginning of your administration I do NOT care about “Medicare for All” or “Free College for Everyone” or any such schemes. Why? Such legislation, if ever enacted, will take years if not decades in our society.

No. I want to hear your plan for fixing what’s broken. A whole lot is broken. I want to hear you acknowledge this. I want to hear you shove it in the current occupant’s face. I want you to hammer him on it and tell him and the world what damage he’s done and how you’re going to bring in a team to put things back together, even if it’s in new ways.

If you’re not prepared to step up to these requirements, thank you for your service. Please exit.