The Good News December 15, 2023December 14, 2023 I hate ads where the voice-over is ominous. It may have begun way back in 1974 with the tag line for a movie called It’s Alive. (“There’s only one thing wrong with the Davis baby — IT’S ALIVE!”) With its follow-up tag line: “Save your screams until you see its face.” (This was one ugly baby. It killed seven people by the time it was three days old.) Okay, okay — here’s the trailer. And here’s a 20-second promo. But all that stuff was meant to be funny. This one —It’s America Or Trump — is not. (“There’s only one thing wrong with the Trump candidacy: he really is an authoritarian bent on retribution.”) So even if, like me, you would have omitted the line about “500,000 graves” and bristle at its tone — be alarmed. Because as noted yesterday, they have a plan. The good news is that we’re gonna win. For one thing, we simply have to — just as we had to elect Georgia’s first-ever Jewish senator and its first-ever Black senator in 2020, implausible as that was. (Thank you, Stacey Abrams, et al.) Defeating Trump, by contrast, is anything but implausible. We did it in 2020 . . . and that was before he had been adjudicated a rapist; before he had incited an attack on the Capitol and watched for hours without rising to its defense; before he had become the first ever president to be impeached twice, and before a majority of senators (but not the required two-thirds) had voted to convict. Before his Justices had overturned Roe v. Wade. Before he had been indicted four times for crimes ranging from stealing nuclear secrets to conspiring to overturn a free and fair election. It doesn’t hurt, either, that the stock market is at record levels, unemployment at record lows, wages up, mortgage rates down, gas down, eggs down, infrastructure projects beginning to kick in . . . it’s still really tough out there for average folks (through no fault of Joe Biden) but he and his team have the economy firing on all cylinders, with brighter days ahead. Virtually all Democrats — and patriotic Republicans as extreme-right as Liz Cheney — recognize that democracy itself is at stake. Yes, there are tens of millions of Trump loyalists who don’t see it that way — or who do see it that way but like it. But at the end of the day, there will be enough of us not only to win the popular vote, as we have in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections, but to win the Electoral College as well. In case you can help, you know the drill. BONUS Guess whose book Amazon had on sale yesterday for a fifth the price (adjusted for inflation) at which it was first offered 45 years ago. What a deal!