Why Trump’s ‘Contract’ is a gift to millions of common sense Americans

Donald Trump is again gaining on Hillary Clinton. Is it because of ObamaCare? Is it because of WikiLeaks? Or could it be because frustrated voters demand change, and that Clinton is the poster child for the status quo? Trump is not the perfect messenger, to be sure, but he is embracing a perfect message: it’s time to shake up the establishment, or, as he says, to “drain the swamp.” It is time for a new Contract with the American Voter, and he is offering just that.

As he often does, Trump stomped on his own headlines when he presented his Contract in Gettysburg last week. He included an off-script tirade against the women who have accused him of sexual improprieties.

Predictably, the mainstream media focused on Trump’s threats to sue his female accusers instead of the content of his speech, which was a shame.  Nonetheless, as he has continued to campaign on some of the promises contained in that program, voters are paying attention. Simply put, he is saying what the majority of Americans wants to hear, and Hillary is not. She sounds out of touch with the country, because she is.

While Hillary pushes to ban the sale of assault weapons, for instance, support for such a measure has sunk to an all-time low. In a recent Gallup survey, only 36 percent of the respondents said they approved of making such weapons illegal, while 61 percent did not approve. While Hillary demonizes our police as biased and calls for more federal oversight, approval of our cops has soared to its highest level in 50 years, with 76 percent of the country saying they have “great deal of respect” for the police.

By contrast, whether it is calling for term limits on members of Congress, or freezing the size of the federal workforce, Trump is laying out ideas that voters applaud.

He proposes “a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations should be eliminated.” For anyone who has tried to start up a new business, struggling through the often conflicting web of rules and requirements mandated by Washington bureaucrats is often the hardest part of the job. There’s a reason why for the first time in 35 years, business deaths outnumber births. Obama himself called for clearing the thicket of federal regulations — even as he crushed one industry after another under a veritable tsunami of new rules.

Trump is calling for a 5-year ban on government officials becoming lobbyists, a lifetime ban on White House workers lobbying on behalf of a foreign government and a “complete” ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for candidates in American elections.

Voters understand how incestuous our capital is – how exiled pols feed off the bounteous flow from corporate lobbyists as they await their next at-bats. It is an insidious ecosystem that benefits only the participants, skews policy and can only be overturned by an outsider.

By highlighting corruption issues, Trump reminds voters that Hillary is entangled in endless controversies, almost all of which have to do with the questionable means by which the Clintons have personally amassed hundreds of millions of dollars.

Americans will not expect Hillary to drain the swamp; she feeds off the swamp.

Trump also promised to protect American workers, by renegotiating our trade deals, by holding China and other trading partners to account, by encouraging domestic energy production and by redirecting taxpayer money from overseas climate control ventures into domestic infrastructure projects.

He vowed to undo the “unconstitutional” executive actions taken by President Obama, suspend immigration from “terror-prone regions” and replace Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court.

He also promised to launch tax reform aimed at growing the economy, to employ private-public partnerships in rebuilding our infrastructure, send education dollars and policy-making back to communities, where they belong, and repeal and replace ObamaCare. The list of common-sense proposals goes on to include securing our borders and tamping down crime.

Trump’s Contract was a gift to the millions of Americans alarmed that the Obama White House is dishonest and corrupt and that the Clinton White House will be even worse.

It was a gift to those worried that our economy is incapable of providing opportunity, and that, thanks to failing  schools and crumbling infrastructure, our country is becoming uncompetitive.

Trump’s message is a clarion call for those worried that liberal nostrums will allow crime to again threaten our neighborhoods.

People sense that nothing can be fixed until everything is fixed, that incrementalism is not enough.

There are few days left before the election. It looks close, though Hillary still has the advantage.

The real question before voters is whether they will be bold enough to elect a candidate who wants to change the trajectory of the country, to push back against the failed policies that have crushed our entrepreneurs and degraded our schools, to clean out the corrupt stables of Washington and to give power back to the people.

Yes, Trump is a populist – a term used derisively by the liberal elites. That means “a member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people.” Isn’t that what we want?

Published here.