At last! Like a poli-sci superhero rushing in to save America's imperiled democracy from an Election Day doomsday, the quiet-spoken former U.S. intelligence chief and conservative Indiana senator Dan Coats just gifted us with the presidential leadership we so desperately needed.
Coats not only shattered the shameful silence of fellow Republicans who are afraid to oppose President Donald Trump's words and deeds, but he did it loudly and boldly using only the power of printed words. At mid-morning Thursday, The New York Times soundlessly slipped onto its website a warning-call commentary by Coats that was perhaps the most stunning rebuke of Trump's self-serving words and deeds aimed at convincing Americans they can't trust results of the Nov. 3 national presidential election - apparently so Trump can then challenge any election in which he proves to be the loser.
In his commentary, Coats loudly and boldly summoned patriots in both parties and no party-at-all to join in an unprecedented, above-politics plan to save our democracy from relentless assaults of saboteurs half a world away and hiding in plain sight in our midst.
Coats wrote:
"Our democracy's enemies, foreign and domestic, want us to concede in advance that our voting systems are faulty or fraudulent; that sinister conspiracies have distorted the political will of the people; that our public discourse has been perverted by the news media and social networks riddled with prejudice, lies and ill will; that judicial institutions, law enforcement and even national security have been twisted, misused and misdirected to create anxiety and conflict, not justice and social peace...
"... If those are the results of this tumultuous election year, we are lost, no matter which candidate wins. No American, and certainly no American leader, should want such an outcome... An electoral victory on these terms would be no victory at all."
Coats didn't link his criticisms with his ex-boss, Trump - but he didn't have to. That very morning, the president did it for him, by tweeting:
"Because of the new and unprecedented massive amount of unsolicited ballots which will be sent to 'voters', or wherever, this year, the Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED, which is what some want. Another election disaster yesterday. Stop Ballot Madness!"
(Trump's tweet was so wrong that Twitter labeled the president's words as "a potentially misleading statement regarding the process of mail-in voting.")
Coats wrote: "The most urgent task American leaders face is to ensure that the election's results are accepted as legitimate... The most important part of an effective response is to finally, at long last, forge a genuinely bipartisan effort to save our democracy, rejecting the vicious partisanship that has disabled and destabilized government for too long."
Coats proposed a solution that may sound at first like just another ho-hum Wash Commish can-kick - but it isn't that at all. For he is proposing that Washington's political glitterati strip themselves of all politics - right down to the starkers - and then all fight on the same side to defeat America's attacking election saboteurs to save the world's greatest democracy from those who want to wreck it to achieve their political or personal goals.
"I propose that Congress creates a new mechanism to help accomplish this purpose. It should create a supremely high-level bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election." Coats said. He envisions a panel composed former governors, senators, representatives, former Supreme Court justices, and social media business leaders. Coats wants the commission to monitor all election systems and assure us that no one has tampered with our votes. And mainly, do it "without political prejudice and without regard to political interests of either party."
The 16-year Indiana senator also called on his former congressional colleagues to empower this commission by a unanimous vote! (Yes, it's hard to imagine this Congress saying something nice about motherhood by a unanimous vote.) And yes, he asked both parties' presidential candidates to pledge to abide by the commission's findings.
In his final paragraph, the former director of national intelligence did mention a few politically prominent names, as he concluded:
"If we fail to take every conceivable effort to ensure the integrity of our election, the winners will not be Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Republicans or Democrats. The only winners will be Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei. No one who supports a healthy democracy could want that."
Dan Coats, a quiet-speaking political veteran, is a top-decibel patriot. He is the conservative Republican president we should've had, could've had, but never did and never will. In these fragile, frightening days of 2020, Dan Coats' bold plan to save our democracy will be America's ultimate test of whether patriotism can ever again Trump politics.
Tribune Content Agency